Essay On Mass Shootings

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

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.