Connecticut School Killings Reignite Debate About Violence In Video Games

Fox News ^ | 12/18/12 | By Jeremy A. Kaplan

[drewh]

The Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre has inspired fresh talk about the affect that violent video games like "Call of Duty" and "Grand Theft Auto" are having on children and young men like Adam Lanza, who was known by his friends to be a gamer.

Summary

The tragedy in CT has re-igniting the debate over the effect games like "Grand Theft Auto" are having on children.

Games are getting increasingly more violent, experts agree -- 8 of the 10 most popular are violent.

Violent games clearly increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, physiological responses, aggressive behavior and more, experts say.

“It’s impossible to say what caused any given person to commit a horrific act like this,” said Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University and one of the country’s leading experts on video game violence. “But we can say whether violent video games increase aggression … and they do.”

Bushman’s latest study, published two weeks ago in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, showed that people who played a violent video game for three consecutive days showed increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations each day they played. While gamers often scoff at such studies, the evidence is overwhelming, Bushman said.

“It’s like smokers saying tobacco isn’t harmful. The scientific evidence is clear,” he told FoxNews.com. “A single cigarette won’t cause lung cancer, but smoking over weeks or months or years greatly increases the risk

[stockpirate]

We should have banned the Three Stooges a long time ago, I still have a compulsion to poke people in the eye or hit them in the head with a hammer, or pull their noses..

The conversation never needed to be on games, it needed to be on crazy people allowed to walk around amoung us talking to the voices in their heads or their dog.

[familyop]

Anyone who murders—FPS games or no FPS games—is evil. If you’re going to ban the games, abolish all laws and policies enforcing murder-propagating social pathologies first (romanticism/feminism, resulting spoiled rottenness and apathy from wrongful child rearing, etc).

[bootless]

All true. I grew up 40 miles away from Newtown, and have a good friend whose wife is the choirmaster at one of the churches in town. A choir member lost a child in the massacre, and another parish member, likewise. This has hit close to home.

We’re reaping the evil in some of the seeds that have been sown.

As far as the violent video games go, there’s a reason why young children shouldn’t play them. The intensity and the physiological/psychological imprints on growing kids’ brains and souls are so damaging, we’re only starting to see how that happens. Anyway, our brains don’t really mature until we’re 25. And when you have lost souls and broken kids added to that ...

God help us.

[Pining_4_TX]

I am not saying the government should get involved. What I am saying is that many people are wallowing in filth and violence and it affects them even if they do not realize it. The Bible says to put no unworthy thing before your eyes, and to think on whatever is good, pure, and true. Instead people are flocking to see the latest Madonna or Lady Gaga or film full of torture and sadism. We are sowing the seeds of our own destruction.

[securityman]

I see you never read a Bible before.

[MtnMan101]

How can you ‘see’ anything with your eyes covered with scales.