There is a strong belief that there is a real connection between school shootings and violent video games, but there is not enough research yet to prove there is a connection. There have been many questions raised about whether or not violent video games have an effect on children that play them. There have also been many questions as to whether school shootings that have taken place since the 1990s have been due to these violent video games. We will look at what researchers have found and whether there is a connection or not. We will also look at how we as parents, teachers, counselors, and other members of the school systems can put a stop to this form of violence.
We must understand that researchers have been studying violence caused by violent television shows and movies for 50 years, but video games are a newer phenomenon (American Psychological Association). The main reason that video games cause more aggression than television shows and movies that contain a lot of violence is that these games are hands on and extremely interactive. Violent video games such as Doom, Duke Nukem, Grand Theft Auto, and Spec Op’s not only allow kids to learn how to shoot guns, but also reward them for killing people.
This type of game playing over time allows these kids to perfect the art of shooting and also trains their minds to believe that they will be rewarded for killing another person. The problem with these kids that have learned aggressive means to end a conflict such as the Columbine kids is that the majority of them start to play these games at a very young age. In fact researchers have shown in their studies that many of these kids start to play these games when they brain should be developing alternative means to resolving issues with other people (American Psychological Association).
Now we will look into the reality as seen by a former American soldier. This soldier’s name is Dave Grossman. Grossman is a well-respected and highly educated trainer on the issue of killing. Grossman is a man that has been training police, PTA’s, and other people and organizations for years on killing. He teaches about not only adults killing other people, but more specifically about kids that kill. We will look at what Grossman has to say about the issue of kids killing and how they learn to kill in the first place.
Grossman calls today’s school age killers “unflinching, deadly accurate killers” (Gregory, T, nd, Chicago Tribune). Grossman says that there is a kill switch in not only soldiers in the military, but in kids that play these violent video games. Grossman starts his conversations on violent video games by talking about how addictive these games truly are (Gregory, T, nd, Chicago Tribune). Grossman then goes on to talk about the way that these games condition soldiers and kids alike through repetitive exercises (Gregory, T, nd, Chicago Tribune).
The kids that kill often times play Doom, Quake, Grand Theft Auto, and Duke Nukem for hours every day. This repetitiveness teaches both aggression and has effects on the child’s brain which we will now talk about. Children over a prolonged period of time playing violent video games become desensitized to the violence that they are exposing themselves to through playing these violent video games.
This is the outlining issue more than any other is that these kids are becoming desensitized to real life violence. This means that kids get to the point of not caring about acting violent in real life the same as they would in the video games that they are playing. This is why the kids at a number of school’s such as Jonesboro, and Columbine were able to pull out guns and shoot up their schools. The prolonged playing of violent video games had desensitized these boys to the repercussions of real life violence such as killing their classmates.
