Video Games And Gun Violence Essay
Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War are just three of many grossly popular video games today, and they have one main thing in common: violence. Whether one is shooting down Nazi soldiers on the beaches of Normandy or sawing apart Locust drones on the planet Sera with his or her lancer, one is engaging in extremely violent video-game action, and probably having a lot of fun doing so. With the rapid growth of intensely violent games, parents and politicians across the nation have begun to protest against violence in video games and have even gone as far as to say it is the cause of violence in America’s youth. Is this really true? Are video games the problem? Just like the rock and roll movement of the 1950’s being blamed for youth delinquency,
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Jerald Block, a psychiatrist from Portland, Oregon even said that these shooters carried out their massacre because their parents took away their video games. Block said that the two relied heavily on online computer games as a means to express their anger. Eric Kain disagrees with Block, however, in his article “The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence.” He says “that’s clearly an oversimplification. The age and gender of many mass shooters, including Columbine 's, places them right in the target demographic for first-person-shooter video games. And people between ages 18 and 25 also tend to report the highest rates of mental-health issues. Harris and Klebold 's complex mental-health problems have been well documented” (Kain, Works Cited #3). Kain’s argument resonates well with many others. One would agree that people seem to jump to conclusions when faced with horrific tragedies like this. They look at the first convincing piece of evidence without digging deep to really find out what happened. These two boys clearly had serious mental issues, but people were too fixated on the façade of violent video game obsession to find a viable reason why these two chose to do something like this. Mental illness is many times a huge factor when it comes to shootings like
Jerald Block, a psychiatrist from Portland, Oregon even said that these shooters carried out their massacre because their parents took away their video games. Block said that the two relied heavily on online computer games as a means to express their anger. Eric Kain disagrees with Block, however, in his article “The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence.” He says “that’s clearly an oversimplification. The age and gender of many mass shooters, including Columbine 's, places them right in the target demographic for first-person-shooter video games. And people between ages 18 and 25 also tend to report the highest rates of mental-health issues. Harris and Klebold 's complex mental-health problems have been well documented” (Kain, Works Cited #3). Kain’s argument resonates well with many others. One would agree that people seem to jump to conclusions when faced with horrific tragedies like this. They look at the first convincing piece of evidence without digging deep to really find out what happened. These two boys clearly had serious mental issues, but people were too fixated on the façade of violent video game obsession to find a viable reason why these two chose to do something like this. Mental illness is many times a huge factor when it comes to shootings like