Games, not guns, cause violence
By Henry W.F. Jones
I return to my childhood to make a point. Gun control is not the answer. I think it is time for parents to step forward and take responsibility.
As a kid, there were few places that I loved more than being around water. All my friends thought the same way. The rivers, creeks, woods and mountain trails were our playground.
Jones grew up in Salem. He is now retired and lives in Norfolk.
December 27, 2012 - 8:12 AM
Actually video games don’t cause violence.
I realize this is an opinion piece but I really wish the RT has the resources to tear down these types of fallacies instead of just printing them as if they were facts. It’s long past time to give up the false equivalence thing in the newspaper. Even the NY Times is beginning to take a stand against blatantly wrong things. See for example:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/did-the-mainstream-press-really-bungle-the-campaigns-single-biggest-story/
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/the-times-should-explain-marginal-tax-rates-repeatedly-if-necessary/
But back to the original point which is violent video games aren’t correlated with an increase in violence.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/12/25/no-video-games-do-not-cause-violence/
…. In fact, during the years in which video games soared in popularity, youth violence has declined to 40-year lows. And while it’s natural, in such an emotional time, for people to search desperately for answers, that often results in misinformation. In 2007, after the Virginia Tech Massacre, pundits such as Dr. Phil immediately blamed video games. Only later did the official investigation reveal that the perpetrator was not a violent game player after all. In the Sandy Hook case, after the shooter was misidentified as Adam Lanza’s brother Ryan, the Facebook page of the video game Mass Effect (which Ryan “liked” on his own Facebook page) was attacked by angry hordes.
The fact that society is actually becoming less violent by nearly every measure is rarely discussed. But the fact is that violent crime has been going down steadily for 20 years, though it’s still much higher in America than in nearly any other Western nation. But it’s crisis time, a time when we exploit tragedy to find simple solutions. As Mencken wrote in the Divine Afflatus, one of my favorite essays of all time, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
Millions upon millions of kids played “Cowboys and Indians” and never grew up to hurt anyone. Millions upon millions of kids have played video games and never grew up to hurt anyone.
Like everything else in our culture (or any other), exposure to violent imagery has a different effect in a disturbed mind, not a sound one. We can all tell the difference in fantasy and reality. We always could.
Parents do need to be more responsible for age appropriate games and supervision as well as communication and knowing when their child might be disturbed and get them help before they are adults and able to harm others easily. Too often they shirk this duty, no doubt about it, but blaming the games, music or movies for violent content is just another cop-out IMO.
HOWEVER, if you are going to go down that road, then we need to acknowledge how the military style weapons that seem to shoot endlessly and effortlessly are so often the choice of the shooters in video games, music, music videos, concerts and movies, which beyond doubt adds to the “gun culture” and machismo for such guns in real life. Ergo their popularity.
I take the point, I just think that the danger is in feeding this stuff to a disturbed mind, not all minds. I most certainly think we need to research the pathology here.
Do you recall the hell Tipper Gore went through in 1985 for wanting warning labels and ratings on this imagery?
That reminds me, we heard the same thing about kids who played Dungeons and Dragons. It was a way for Satan to take over their souls!