Arguments About Why Video Games Don't Cause Violence

There have been several mass shootings in recent years and many people are blaming these atrocities on video games. This video games don't cause violence essay is going to dive into the minds of some of the shooters and redeem the reputation of video games. Violent video games don't cause violence because violence predates video games. More likely contenders for what caused these atrocities are low-self esteem, lack of respect, neglect, and abuse.

Let's start at angle number one, looking at any links between video games and crime. To start off we have to look at the history of some of the more violent and controversial video games. If there is indeed a direct causal link between violence shown in video games and users becoming more violent in their daily lives, then we would expect to see increases in violence spurred on by some of the most popular violent video games in history. While there are definitely some very early video games that had violent themes to them if we want to talk about true graphic or realistic violence becoming popular in the mainstream well then we have to look at the early 90s and mortal combat as well wolfenstein 3D and doom. From that point forward we’ve seen plenty of other violent video games get themselves bad press like the Grand Theft Auto series the Call of Duty series Battlefield things like that, but for the most part the availability of violent video games has been pretty constant since the mid 90s. Video games really take off in the mid 90s with platforms like the Playstation and Nintendo 64 really surging to popularityand then it explodes in the 2000s as they really hit their peak and it’s all starting to taper off coming back here in the mid 2010s, as smart phones and mobile gaming have become more popular. It ‘s pretty clear that if the real surge in video games which would include violent video games occured between the mid 90s and 2010. Well if they’er influencing people to commit more violence in real life then crime statisctics should show simmilar growth during thoses same periods, but when you look at the data that’s the opposite of what’s happened the murder rate in the United States hits its peak in 1980. Pacman fever truly setting people's minds into rage mode but starting in the early 90s those rates went way down from 1991 through 2016 homicides in the US have actually gone down by 45.5% and it’s not just homicide we're talking about all major crime categories across the board all of them are down by at least 30% since 1991. The idea that the popularity of video games which again weren’t really all that commonly played until about the 1990s has made the United States a more violent as a whole just doesn’t really show up in these sorts of statistics. Now maybe you think that since young people are the ones to play more video games that youth crime statistic would show the real impact of violent video games on our minds but those stats actually looked pretty darn similar. The number of violent crimes committed by people ages 12-17 have plummeted since those early days in the 90s to a rate of about 1⁄5 of what it was at its peak. So the overall data seems to tell us that crime isn’t getting worse even though someone watching the news would think that’s worse than ever. That's probably less because crime as a whole is getting more and more because incidents of mass shootings have gotten bigger and more prominent and more shocking in the media. Just what constitutes a mass shooting creates a lot of disagreements it is shockingly difficult to define as everyone comes up with their own definitions to kind of forward whatever statistics they're looking to prove but in general I think a pretty common definition is that a mass shooting involves an incident where at least 4 people were killed by a shooter in a public place. In that case from 1982 until 2006 there were approximately 1.6 mass shootings a year, but in the years since

2006 it’s actually more than tripled to 5.4 peer year. To put that in another way from 1949 to 1998 9 mass shootings in the US were at least 10 people were killed, so that winds up to being 1 every 5 years. In the last 20 years there have been 18 shootings where at least 10 people were killed that translates to about 1 per year. Thats 5 years vs per year. By the same token though while the murder rate has indeed gone down the percentage of homicides using guns has been climbing steadily hitting 73% in 2016. So maybe there aren’t causing our society as a whole more violent but they’re causing select individuals to snap and decide to become mass shooters. Everyones brains work totally differently so while 99.9% of people might be completely unaffected by the violence and video games all it takes is that one individual to have a bad reaction to what they’re playing.

The second angle that we need to take a look at is what kind of role has video games have played in the lives of past mass shooters, perhaps most infamously the two Columbine shooters from 1999 they were both fans of the early first-person shooter Doom, the Sandy Hook shooter owned a lot of video games like Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising, Grand Theft Auto and there was a Norwegian shooter which I know we are focused on US shooter but I need to draw from as many data points that I could reasonably research back in 2011 he claimed that playing Call of Duty actually helped his aim and target acquisition both skills that he used now to be sure some mass shooters are fans of very popular video games, but you can’t just take these few examples and create a causal connection there especially since I could show plenty of other tragedies where thoughts shooters didn’t have strong ties to video games in fact of the 18 incidents that I mention earlier that had 10 deaths my research tells me that only 4 of the 18 actually had noteworthy video game habits. There are plenty of explanations for that but it all aligns with a report that the secret service report back in 2002. Which indicated that only 12 % of school shooters expressed any sort of interest in violent video games. Now you could make a case that an interest in violent video games could be a statistical coincidence given that most mass shootings are actually committed by young men and 72% of men under the age of 30 play video games 58% of men from ages 30-49 play video games as well. It’s just not surprising that young men who do evil things also share habits with other young men who don’t do evil things. Other traits that these shooters have breath oxygen eating food wearing clothes but to point that out sounds dumb. I don’t see anyone attacking the denim industry because these shooters tended to wear jeans. It appears that opponents to violent video games confuse correlation with causation. The united states is int unique in its consumption of video games compared to other nations with big gaming cultures though we are unique in how much gun violence we have the numbers back me up on this. While the US is number one on money spent on video games the rest of the top ten include China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, UK, France, Canada, Spain, and Italy. Now China does not release Statistics on Gun violence, but the rest of them do and if you compare homicides and adjust for population size the united states actually has more gun deaths per year than all those other 8 combined.

In conclusion, violent video games are not harmful. When we talk about a subject like this one we have to understand the difference between correlation and causation. We all must understand that violent video games do not cause violence. More likely contenders for what caused these atrocities are low-self esteem, lack of respect, neglect, and abuse.