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Essay On Mass Shootings

916 Words4 Pages

What are your first thoughts when you hear about the latest mass shooting? Is it mental health? Gun control? For a large majority of people, their first thought is violent video games. With video games becoming increasingly violent and realistic, it is assumed that children and teens will begin to imitate the violent behavior that many of their favorite characters exhibit. But this is simply not the case. Similar to how guns don’t kill people, people kill people; video games don’t give birth to murderers. A common misconception about video games is that in playing them, the desire for juveniles to imitate the onscreen actions arises and, therefore, increasing the amount of violent crimes such as murder. And with almost three-quarters of …show more content…

Of the 150 million, 106 million are children and teenagers, which means almost a quarter of all Americans who play video games are juveniles. From 1984 to 2015 there was a total of 71 mass shootings in the United States. Of the involved shooters, only 7 were below the age of 18. And while multiple studies have been conducted to find a connection between mass shootings and video games, the vast majority of the studies are flawed. The studies conducted fail to control for other factors that could play a role in violence such as mental health. A study conducted by Dmitri Williams, an Associate Professor at the university of Southern California did find a relation between violence and video games. However, just as other studies failed to do, Williams study did not include any sort of control for other factors that lead to violence. Another fatal flaw in the conducted studies is that juveniles are only tested for a short amount of time. Juveniles may be exposed to the violent video games for as little as ten minutes, which does not represent how video games are played in real life. Juveniles tested do not experience the narrative elements of video games and are only exposed to violent scenes. In a study conducted by Andrew Przybylski, a Ph.D. in behavioral science, he and his colleagues found that once study conditions matched those experienced in real life, the aggression caused by violent video games practically vanished.

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Sternheimer begins with introducing us to a “first person shooter” game called “Doom”(214). With this multi-billion dollar game industry rising, she points out that there are three school shooting cases that the press emphasizes the shooters being “video-game experts” (215) to the game Doom, only making the “critics’ predictions” (214) about video games come true. Sternheimer begins by explaining how video game violence has become “folk devils” (214). This term allows media and politicians to “channel the blame and fear to remedy what many believe to be a growing problem” (214). Politicians are one of the main factors in targeting video games as the leading cause of violent behavior in teens, according to Sternheimer.

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First, Michael D. Gallagher, the president and CEO of Entertainment Software Association argues that video games don’t cause people to be violent. According to the statistics that the FBI released Gallagher states, “youth violence has declined in recent years as computer and video game popularity soared” (Gallagher 1). Gallagher goes on to quote from the U.S Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, “The state has not produced substantial evidence that violent video games cause psychological or neurological harm to minors” (Gallagher 1). Second, a news editor for the Science & Technology section in www.thelocal.se disputes that video games ‘don’t make kids violent’. According to, the Swedish Media Council who reviewed over a 100 articles on videogames and violence, “there is a clear, statistically significant link between violent computer games and aggressive behavior but, many of the studies used different ways to measure aggression, many of which lack a clear connection to violent behavior ” (News Editor 1).

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A study done by Harvard Health, they display their opinion on violent video games and help to support the fact that violent video games are good for children. In their article they state that in recent years, many researchers have challenged the view that violent video games are harmful. In one paper, Dr. Christopher Ferguson, a psychology teacher at Texas A&M, argues that many studies on the issue of media violence rely on measures to assess aggression that does not connect to real world violence. Most importantly many are observational and don’t 100 % prove their findings. This piece of evidence connects to my claim because it tells us that a real paper done by a real professor at a college shows evidence that kids do not really get affected by violent video games.

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Whether or not someone agrees with the notion that violent video games negatively affect children, experts who research the topic of violence in video games consistently point to the violence in these games as a major risk factor in the degeneration of today's youth who grew up playing these games. That being, though they may not be the root cause of the violence in today's youth, it cannot be denied that the violence in video games plays a major role in the outcomes found all research that involves video game violence. On a final note, the risks to the future of our children as a result of exposure to video game violence cannot be swept aside or overlooked. As such "society should begin a more productive [and proactive] debate about whether [or not] to reduce the high rates of exposure to media violence" (Anderson) because it is up to the older generations to Shepard the younger generations towards the right path, and it is a not a matter that can be sat on for further deliberation since the effects of video game violence can already be seen in today's

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