Video Games The Real Cause of Mass School Shootings Essay

Whether violent media content leads to real-life violence is always debatable. And in recent years, school shootings have made video games a new focus of public concern and scientific research. In public opinion, video games cause more aggression in comparison to traditional violent media contents because video games have more features of interactivity, due to the active engagement and participation of players (Hummer and Wang et al. 137). But more and more reports tell us that video games are not the main cause of school shooting issues; rather it is the negligence of parents, schools, and communities. Since children are good at imitating and are in their developmental period, are they affected by violent video games? This†¦show more content†¦Hundreds of studies have been done to determine whether violent video games will really make juveniles more violent. Randomized experiments were used in several studies to examine the short-term effect of violent video games (Anders on and Berkowitz et al. 90). In these studies, children were randomly assigned to play violent or nonviolent video games and then were observed when given an opportunity to be aggressive. The result was that children who played violent video games usually behaved aggressively. Another set of randomized experiments also examined the effects of violent video games on psychology. In these experiments, after two groups of participants played violent or nonviolent video games, they were required to list their thoughts on paper to assess their aggressive cognition. Unfortunately, the results tell us that violent video games appear to make people generate more aggressive thoughts than those who played nonviolent video games (Anderson and Berkowitz et al. 91). And by careful meta-analysis, the conclusion came out that repeated exposure to violence not only decreases individuals’ normal negative emotional responses to violence, but also [makes people] easier to think about engaging in violence and decreasing sympathetic and helping reactions to victims of violence (Anderson and Berkowitz et al. 104). This means they showed a decrease in pro-social behavior, which is a voluntary behaviorShow MoreRelatedExploring the Issue in Gun Control760 Words   |  3 PagesExploring the issues in gun control is the name of the article and it sounds obvious that the article is going to be about the issue behind mass shootings. The article is written by Dan OBrien and Betty Stanton, who are both professional writers with great amount of knowledge about the issues in gun control. Dan OBrien is a currently a Director of Safety and Environmental Health for San Antonio Water System, Certified Safety Professional, a nd Certified in Homeland Security. 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