Go ahead and start flaming me now.... A post about violent video games and guns
I've brought this up before and every time, oooh baby, do I get flamed. But anyone who spends time with kids knows that the more violence the see, the more they emulate it. We have studies showing that going back for decades. I remember in grad school, reading one study that had kids watch a video of another kid being really cruel to stuffed animals. Hurting them, basically. Then the viewer got to go into a room of stuffed animals and play. And they played very rough and were cruel and violent in behavior towards the stuffed animals.
Simple as that. We learn from watching stuff. We watch our dads shave and learn to shave. We watch our moms drive and learn to drive. It is called modeling and it is the simplest and best way to teach.
The simpler the person's cognition and the lower the IQ, the more modeling becomes the best way to teach. Every special ed teacher in the country uses it every day. Every mom and dad do it every day.
There are people who are highly susceptible to suggestion. Maybe they are low IQ or psychologically more prone to anti-social behavior. But what happens when these people play a shooter game where they just murder and kill person after person? They watch heads blow off, guts fall out, women and children being murdered and killed, and that can be their main form of entertainment for 2 or 3 or 5 hours a day.
Shooting people with guns that never run out. We've turned that premise into one of our top forms of entertainment. And every psychologist, pretty much in the world, will tell you that all the science shows that if you show these highly suggestable people violence over and over and over some of them can't turn the violence off.
Added to that we are a country where every known sociopath with mental illness can pretty much buy a gun that has been constructed to massacre large numbers of people.
Until we stop treating murder as a super-fun game and until we agree that mentally ill people should not be able to buy guns, we are just going to see the killing continue. Because our society is modeling the behavior we are seeing. These killers are learning to shave, to drive, to kill, by watching people shave, people drive and people kill.
(And before you go all whack-a-doo on me, I want you to think of the craziest angry psychotic person you've ever seen and ask yourself, "Would you want that man to have a gun with 100 bullets in the clip to attend the wedding of your daughter, or your family reunion?" Not one person would say yes. Not one. Except for a liar, of course.)
And, as always, I am not talking about everyone...I'm talking about people who are prone to violent behavior. I too have played shooter games (die you cursed zombies, die!!) and I grew up with guns (and still have one) and the video games have not led me to a life of evil murder and killing.
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