Newtown: Violence, video games, and mental illness

It’s time to look hard at “America’s culture of violence,” including movies, music, and video games.

“It’s time to talk about guns,” said Nicholas Thompson in NewYorker.com, “but it’s also time to talk about a lot more.” After last week’s unimaginable massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot dead 20 children, Americans must recognize that such violence isn’t the product of weak gun laws. “It’s much deeper than that.” It’s time to look hard at “America’s culture of violence,” including movies, music, and video games. The super-realistic shootings and explosions and fetishistic acts of vengeance that fill popular culture feed the fantasies of troubled loners, and even make blowing people away look like fun. Some of these video games look “just like police and military simulators” I’ve used, said former Army Ranger and police trainer Dave Grossman in Patch.com. Kids who amass points by mowing down waves of attackers learn the same kinds of “conditioned responses, killing skills, and desensitization” we teach to soldiers. If kids playing these games are emotionally disturbed, they can readily take these lessons into the real world, making battlefields of schools and malls.

Video games may feed violent fantasies, said David Kopel in The Wall Street Journal, but so do the news media. Part of what drives many of these atrocities is “the instant celebrity that a mass killer can achieve.” The media frenzy that follows every one of these attacks is not lost on troubled loners, who crave recognition of their suffering and a powerful expression of their rage. By going on a killing spree, they know, they will become famous anti-heroes, with their names and faces immortalized on every TV news program, newspaper, and website. If we want the massacres to stop, said Tim Berry in BusinessInsider.com, then all media outlets should simply agree to “not publish killers’ names or pictures,” the way they don’t publish those of rape victims.

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