It's a multifaceted problem that needs solving

[Judy1]

1. ban the production, sale, ownership of assault rifles, and the multi round magazine clips that go with them. The only purpose for such a gun is to kill many people at a time.Period. I don't want to hear any argument in response this statement about how people have to protect themselves in their own homes. If you feel you need protection at home, there are other options that would work better. 67% of the general public would support this.

2. We need better public education on how to determine who is at risk for violent behavior. Education on on mental health should start from day one for parents when bring their baby home from the hospitals. Pediatrictions should take an active role in helping to assess and provide resources for parents of troubled children. This will likely cost money, but until you address mental health in this country we will always have incidents like this..

3. Parent's need to be more responsible in choosing what video games their teenagers play, and what movies they watch. Perhaps a ban or some sort of regulation on how these violent video games are advertised. Maybe if they weren't advertised so broadly, there would be less demand for them. Regardless, parents need to understand the effect these sorts of videos and violent films have on young impressionable minds.

Addressing only one of these three areas of concern is like putting a bandaid on a severed limb and expecting the victim to survive. We have to do better. This has to stop now.

 

[Jen]

I agree with you, Judy, that those three areas are the focus areas to target and fix. I am not one for government to come in and legislate our lives right down to the video games and movies we can see. But parents are obviously lax in their oversight of that sort of thing, so that leads us to look at government to do what parents should be doing without being told they have to do it.

With society the way it is......... parents not doing their job as parents, people thinking they need assault weapons to be cool, etc, etc.......... it's almost as if we've worked ourselves into a state where government has to step in and tell us what to do.

The people who commit these crimes aren't from the underbelly of our society. They come from "good" families. What does it tell us about "good families" when their children are nuts enough to be mass killers and harmers of children?

I don't like the government legislating our stupidity and making rules for every step we take. But we are there where without that we are totally irresponsible. So while I don't like the answers you give since it gives government a lot more control over our lives, that may be our only recourse at this point. I see problems with what you've stated here (the possibility of teachers turning in normal children as being "weird" and parents losing their children when nothing is wrong). But, something has got to be done to stop this stuff from happening.

Just some random thoughts in response to your excellent post.......I know I didn't form a good essay here.......

 

[Bluedog]

1. ban the production, sale, ownership of assault rifles, and the multi round magazine clips that go with them. The only purpose for such a gun is to kill many people at a time.Period. I don't want to hear any argument in response this statement about how people have to protect themselves in their own homes. If you feel you need protection at home, there are other options that would work better. 67% of the general public would support this.

2. We need better public education on how to determine who is at risk for violent behavior. Education on on mental health should start from day one for parents when bring their baby home from the hospitals. Pediatrictions should take an active role in helping to assess and provide resources for parents of troubled children. This will likely cost money, but until you address mental health in this country we will always have incidents like this..

3. Parent's need to be more responsible in choosing what video games their teenagers play, and what movies they watch. Perhaps a ban or some sort of regulation on how these violent video games are advertised. Maybe if they weren't advertised so broadly, there would be less demand for them. Regardless, parents need to understand the effect these sorts of videos and violent films have on young impressionable minds.

Addressing only one of these three areas of concern is like putting a bandaid on a severed limb and expecting the victim to survive. We have to do better. This has to stop now.

Those are very reasonable proposals.

 

[Arkady]

The first two suggestions seem sensible. I'm not sure the third would help -- and conceivably it could make things worse. Consider a few facts:

(1) Our international peers have mostly the same video games as us, yet don't have our violence problems. I play some of the video games online, myself, and am always struck by the number of people from around the world who are playing (during boot up, they show a map of player locations). Japan is huge when it comes to these video games, yet has a murder rate that's 1/14th ours. http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/11/23/modern-warfare-3-selling-great-in-japan And Japan isn't an exception.... most of these ultra-violent videogames are available throughout the world's wealthy nations, and yet they all have considerably less violent crime than us.

(2) Bloody video games really took off starting in the early-to-mid 90s, with games like Mortal Kombat and Doom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) If there were a strong positive relationship between people playing more violent video games and actual real-world violence, we'd expect the violent crime rate to have taken off starting in 1993. The exact opposite is true. The violent crime rate hit an all-time high right before those games became popular, and has been declining ever since. If anything, you could reasonably speculate that violent games are providing a harmless outlet for natural violent impulses, and thus saving a lot of lives. Do we want to experiment with taking away the "safety valve," and thus risking another explosion of real-world violence like we had in the decades before those games were around?

 

[Jen]

Good points, Arkady. I play video games too but mine is cartoony (World of Warcraft) although it is violent. I can't play the ones with real looking people killing other real looking people. I cannot do that at all. I can't even watch those.

I am thinking that in a person who is not mentally sound, something like those realistic video games could desensitize them to killing, but I don't know if that's true.

The first two suggestions seem sensible. I'm not sure the third would help -- and conceivably it could make things worse. Consider a few facts:

(1) Our international peers have mostly the same video games as us, yet don't have our violence problems. I play some of the video games online, myself, and am always struck by the number of people from around the world who are playing (during boot up, they show a map of player locations). Japan is huge when it comes to these video games, yet has a murder rate that's 1/14th ours. http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/11/23/modern-warfare-3-selling-great-in-japan And Japan isn't an exception.... most of these ultra-violent videogames are available throughout the world's wealthy nations, and yet they all have considerably less violent crime than us.

(2) Bloody video games really took off starting in the early-to-mid 90s, with games like Mortal Kombat and Doom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(video_game) If there were a strong positive relationship between people playing more violent video games and actual real-world violence, we'd expect the violent crime rate to have taken off starting in 1993. The exact opposite is true. The violent crime rate hit an all-time high right before those games became popular, and has been declining ever since. If anything, you could reasonably speculate that violent games are providing a harmless outlet for natural violent impulses, and thus saving a lot of lives. Do we want to experiment with taking away the "safety valve," and thus risking another explosion of real-world violence like we had in the decades before those games were around?

 

[Ponzique]

You do well bringing up other methods of controlling the violence than just gun control. The problem being, of course, that so many guns are already in private hands in this country. In many ways that makes us like a country plagued with leftover landmines.

Prevention creates and odd turn however. If we are to focus on preventing violence as opposed to controlling the purchase of new guns then that means things like mental health screenings and monitoring of our public statements. So what would people rather have, their guns controlled or their very personas?

 

[Arkady]

Good points, Arkady. I play video games too but mine is cartoony (World of Warcraft) although it is violent. I can't play the ones with real looking people killing other real looking people. I cannot do that at all. I can't even watch those.

I am thinking that in a person who is not mentally sound, something like those realistic video games could desensitize them to killing, but I don't know if that's true.

I'm open to evidence, but so far, decades of research have yielded no convincing correlations between realistically violent video games and real-world violence.... and, as I said, the overall trends would suggest the exact opposite. So, it's possible that someone who is mentally unsound could, by playing the video games, find a way to "self medicate" -- venting violent impulses that would otherwise build up and explode. Some will explode, anyway, but so far I haven't seen anything to suggest the video games are part of the problem.

Granted, I'm not mentally unsound, but my subjective experience of those games is contrary to the theory that they contribute to real-world violence. I've played most of the notorious ones extensively -- the Grand Theft Auto series and the Call of Duty series, for example. If anything, I come away from those gaming sessions without as much urge towards violence. Watching sports, by comparison, actually gets me more revved up... presumably because I'm watching aggression without participating it in any way, so it can't be a venting mechanism.

Personally, I wonder if maybe religion is part of the problem. We take kids at incredibly impressionable ages and expose them to stories of mass murder (the Noah story, or Jericho, or Passover), and unspeakably grisly images (a man being tortured to death on a cross of wood), and threats of never-ending suffering in a lake of fire, and then we tell them that somehow all this is good and in accordance with the divine plans of an infallible higher being. How can that not screw them up? That would help to explain why the most religious societies tend to be among the most violent, and why the US (which is uncommonly religious for a wealthy nation) tops the violence list for wealthy nations.

 

[Arkady]

You do well bringing up other methods of controlling the violence than just gun control. The problem being, of course, that so many guns are already in private hands in this country. In many ways that makes us like a country plagued with leftover landmines.

Prevention creates and odd turn however. If we are to focus on preventing violence as opposed to controlling the purchase of new guns then that means things like mental health screenings and monitoring of our public statements. So what would people rather have, their guns controlled or their very personas?

The landmine analogy is a great one. But, even a country plagued with leftover landmines can recover slowly, with good policy. Guns, like landmines, aren't eternal. They wear out. Guns can also be seized when used in relation to crimes, and destroyed. And they can be bought up and disposed of voluntarily. Restrict gun sales, manufacture, and imports, and gradually the gun-to-population ratio will fall enough to lower the violent crime rate.

 

[Jen]

The religious aspect is certainly one to look at, though, of our recent mass murderers none are particularly religious as far as any reports have led us to believe. I don't think that the hearing of the stories you mentioned would make anyone behave violently. To kids, they are just stories. And by the time they are understood and related to mass violence, a person should have the critical thinking skills to understand the context. Your religion theory falls flat,although I do think that a religion that believes that everyone not of that religion is an infidel and must convert or die is pushing violence.

I'm open to evidence, but so far, decades of research have yielded no convincing correlations between realistically violent video games and real-world violence.... and, as I said, the overall trends would suggest the exact opposite. So, it's possible that someone who is mentally unsound could, by playing the video games, find a way to "self medicate" -- venting violent impulses that would otherwise build up and explode. Some will explode, anyway, but so far I haven't seen anything to suggest the video games are part of the problem.

Granted, I'm not mentally unsound, but my subjective experience of those games is contrary to the theory that they contribute to real-world violence. I've played most of the notorious ones extensively -- the Grand Theft Auto series and the Call of Duty series, for example. If anything, I come away from those gaming sessions without as much urge towards violence. Watching sports, by comparison, actually gets me more revved up... presumably because I'm watching aggression without participating it in any way, so it can't be a venting mechanism.

Personally, I wonder if maybe religion is part of the problem. We take kids at incredibly impressionable ages and expose them to stories of mass murder (the Noah story, or Jericho, or Passover), and unspeakably grisly images (a man being tortured to death on a cross of wood), and threats of never-ending suffering in a lake of fire, and then we tell them that somehow all this is good and in accordance with the divine plans of an infallible higher being. How can that not screw them up? That would help to explain why the most religious societies tend to be among the most violent, and why the US (which is uncommonly religious for a wealthy nation) tops the violence list for wealthy nations.

 

[MaryAnne]

You do well bringing up other methods of controlling the violence than just gun control. The problem being, of course, that so many guns are already in private hands in this country. In many ways that makes us like a country plagued with leftover landmines.

Prevention creates and odd turn however. If we are to focus on preventing violence as opposed to controlling the purchase of new guns then that means things like mental health screenings and monitoring of our public statements. So what would people rather have, their guns controlled or their very personas?

That was a very good analogy. Stepping on land mines,because you never know when it will explode!

 

[Judy1]

Good points, I assume you are an adult playing those games, which is a lot different than a 12 year old whose not done developing mentally. Yes, other countrys have video games, and I think it would be interesting to see if these games are restricted age-wise at all. If they are, then that might explain why other countries don't have this problem. I would be willing to look at evidence too.

 

[Jen]

We restricted our kids' video games and television shows and movies until we thought they were age/ maturity appropriate. All parents should do that but sadly, many do not.

And as an adult, I restrict myself from gory stuff game or movie-wise. I just can't deal with it.

Good points, I assume you are an adult playing those games, which is a lot different than a 12 year old whose not done developing mentally. Yes, other countrys have video games, and I think it would be interesting to see if these games are restricted age-wise at all. If they are, then that might explain why other countries don't have this problem. I would be willing to look at evidence too.