The debate on video games and their violence goes back many years but unfortunately seems to be brought up only after a significant disaster. Mainly school shootings like Columbine are the beginnings for these attacks on music, television and video games. Mostly if they contained something violent in nature. Now in the case of most of these school shootings the kids played video games, were bullied and even watched very violent shows and movies.
Now many people that I know play games like Assassins Creed, Halo, Doom and even Hitman, even when I was in high school the students played these games and yet we never had a shooting. Everyone seems to believe that these attacks are directly related to some form of violence or other, not that the people committing the crimes are violent people. It goes back to the whole “guns kill people” debate, where they don’t tell you about the lack of gun safety in the home where they get these guns.
I am not the only person that plays these games, games where you can go out and assassinate people randomly and for your own enjoyment. There are millions of us that play these games and were bullied in school, even ignored by our parents and yet we do not go out and shoot people or make bombs. Yet these media outlets enjoy to point fingers at what is easily blamed and not at the real problem. Psychosis and humanity.
Just to be clear I’m not saying that video games are not violent and enjoyed by people with violent tendencies I’m saying that these games are not the reason that people cannot control themselves. Or more to the point choose to do these violent and horrid acts.
Everyone blames these video games for the violence and yet we have had violence for thousands of years. The Crusades, World War 1 & 2, the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Now tell me, what video games were those people playing? Or lets go one farther, serial killers. Jack the Ripper, H. H. Holmes. Did they play video games? I think that would have been a little impossible back in the 1890s and even in 1095 when Pope Urban II proclaimed the first Crusade for the holy land. More people have died because of religion and yet we don’t try to ban that from society yet we try to ban a violent game that multiple people worked on for a living.
As I said earlier this is my opinion but I have surveyed friends and co-workers, even family to find out what they think and the ones who think it’s because of violent games are the ones who cannot get into said games, even though they buy them for others for holidays. And the rest of us are of the same mind, just because something is violent does not mean that it leads to shootings and such. After all there are movies like SAW and the Collector that is extremely violent and there are no people creating traps in which others are being killed.
So in conclusion I submit to you that attacking violent video games and movies is not the answer to tragedies, it is merely a tactic to take the pressure off of finding the true culprit. Whether or not you agree with me is up to you but I hope that I have shed some light on this topic for you. And that I have given you some food for though when this inevitably sparks up again.