We all know of these problems that video games can have caused. And we haven’t done anything about it. Because it was [another] family, not mine. But unless we start to learn from some of these societal mistakes, we are going to repeat them.
—Judge James Burge in his ruling during the trial of a sixteen-year-old boy who shot both his parents after they took away his favorite video game, Halo 3
A number of false explanations are floating around that distract us from the root cause of the growing virus of violence. From blaming guns to blaming parents to blaming poverty, to linking violence to the oppression of women, causal theories abound—especially among the community of researchers on the video game industry’s dole. Here are a few of the top excuses, along with the reasons why they simply don’t hold water.
After every massacre the subject of gun control arises. The authors of this book have agreed to remain neutral on the subject of gun control. For our purposes, the key is to not be distracted by the tool that people use to kill, and to focus instead on the act of killing. Many studies indicate that the presence of guns in a society doesn’t make murder any more or less prevalent. A study published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy titled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?”1 indicated that the murder rate in Russia is four times higher than in the United States, but very few murders in Russia involve guns because the Russian government eliminated all private gun ownership during the country’s half-century as a totalitarian state. The authors of the study state that “per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent.”
Plus, in the United States, there’s a simple truth: We have always carried guns. Juveniles have not always committed mass murders.
Until 1968, no federal law prevented any child from walking into a hardware store and buying a high-capacity semiautomatic pistol (say, a Browning Hi-Power, a weapon that was first marketed in 1935 and has a magazine that holds 13 rounds). Nothing prevented children from buying high-capacity military rifles (maybe a World War II–era M1 carbine, complete with 30-round magazines) or semiautomatic shotguns (like a Browning Auto-5, which was first manufactured in 1905). They could legally buy the ammo, too.
Until 1968, any child could order these same rifles, shotguns, and ammo from a Montgomery Ward catalog and the U.S. mail would deliver them to his or her house.2
The authors of the Harvard Journal article make it clear that they did not set out to defend guns in the study, and did their utmost to stay neutral on the topic, but they felt bound to follow the data and report the facts. They conclude:
The burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra. To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world.
The authors also referenced a previous study that produced similar findings:
Over a decade ago, Professor Brandon Centerwall of the University of Washington undertook an extensive, statistically sophisticated study comparing areas in the United States and Canada to determine whether Canada’s more restrictive policies had better contained criminal violence. When he published his results it was with the admonition: “If you are surprised by [our] finding[s], so [are we]. [We] did not begin this research with any intent to ‘exonerate’ handguns, but there it is—a negative finding, to be sure, but a negative finding is nevertheless a positive contribution. It directs us where not to aim public health resources.”3
In other words, the “gun issue” can be a distraction. If you want to save lives, your efforts are better placed in other areas.
Of course we have to keep guns out of the hands of kids, and we are doing that today better than ever. We must continue to make progress on that front. But let’s be clear—guns have always been around, and they have been widely, even legally, available to kids. Despite the access to weapons, however, juvenile school massacres never happened prior to the double homicide, listed previously, in a school in Brampton, Canada, in 1975. The first time that more than two people were murdered in one of these incidents was the triple homicide in Moses Lake, Washington, in 1996. These crimes are also happening worldwide, with the most horrendous juvenile mass murder in history occurring in Germany, which has some of the strictest gun laws in Europe.
We must not be distracted by this tired old excuse. We have to look hard and seek, as we never have before, to truly understand the new factor that is causing these horrific crimes in our juvenile population.
Another explanation posits that the school killers all were taking antidepression medication. I’ve personally received dozens of emails proclaiming this as the sole cause of mass murders in our society. But the experts disagree.
Dr. James McGee, an FBI consultant who compiled the definitive “Classroom Avenger” study of 19 juvenile school killers, had access to privileged data that helped him build a profile of the killers in these cases. He says that only three of the 19 killers he studied were in any way connected to prescription medication.
Why are so many people convinced that antidepressants are indisputably linked to the murder sprees? In many cases, the media contribute to this belief. Reporters declare that the killer was on medication, when the truth is that strict privacy laws regarding medical records ensure that it is impossible for them to know one way or another. It is easy enough for a reporter to quote a neighbor proclaiming that the kid was on medication without any confirmation or evidence. The shock factor compels audiences to stay tuned, so repeating inflammatory statements is always a good business decision for these outlets (though it is questionable in terms of journalistic ethics).4
When I asked Dr. McGee about the link between school murderers and antidepressants, he made an interesting point. He noted that most people who die of heart disease are also taking heart medicine. Similarly, many of the people who die of pneumonia are in the hospital on antibiotics. Does that connection mean that heart disease medicine and antibiotics can reasonably be held responsible for their deaths? Likewise, many people with psychiatric problems have been prescribed psychiatric medication, but the medication did not cause the problem. A kid who murdered his classmates might well have been suffering from depression and, as a result, was on antidepressants when he committed his crimes. That does not mean the medication “caused” the disease.
Dr. McGee’s FBI study of juvenile mass murderers did not find medication to be a factor. The Secret Service conducted its own study and came to the same conclusion.
I don’t disagree that the overmedication of children is a problem. Many people have legitimate concerns about the mental states of people going through withdrawal from antidepressants. But the theory that all the school killers were on medication does more harm than good. In fact, in many of these cases you could make a pretty sound argument that if the killer had been on meds he might not have committed the crimes.
Almost 30 million Americans take antidepressants. The teachers in one school district joked that the only thing that keeps them going is “a Prozac salt-lick in the teachers’ lounge.” Overall, we—and our children—would be worse off without this medication. Our doctors are not stupid; they are doing the best they can with the tools available to them. The same doctors who are holding the murder rate down by saving ever more victims of violent crime are also using every tool available to prevent violence.
Some scientists will tell you that this entire problem is rooted in population density. We are all like rats crammed together in a cage fighting for diminishing resources.
The population density theory neglects the fact that many of the horrific crimes listed in chapter 1 took place in small towns and rural communities, from Jonesboro to Columbine, from Newtown to tiny villages in China. Furthermore, the most horrific gun massacres have occurred in nations like Finland and Norway, two countries with the lowest population densities on the planet.
If you want to talk about “culture shock” and the impact of technology, then you are on the right sociological track. Violent electronic media have affected children in almost every community spanning the globe, but the density of the towns where they live is not a factor.
There’s a reason for the old saying: “Statistics don’t lie. Statisticians do.” To claim that crime is down when defending the pernicious effect of violent video games and other media is to display either a misunderstanding of the facts or a willingness to deceive one’s audience.
We aren’t talking about crime statistics in general. We’re focused on the alarming rise of a specific type of crime—juvenile mass murders. Given the list of mass murders laid out at the beginning of this book, I don’t think anyone can argue that we haven’t seen an explosion of these crimes in recent years. To “cherry pick” some crime data and insist that crime is down in the face of that growing trend is to turn a blind eye to a big problem.
Imagine if we did everything we could to bring down the rate of heart disease—if, through exercise, low-cholesterol diets, cholesterol-reducing medications, and sincere efforts at reducing obesity, we all worked together to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result. And then imagine if the tobacco industry said, “Hey! Heart disease rates are down. How can you say that tobacco causes heart disease when the numbers are clearly declining?”
This is a fairly accurate representation of the logic behind this excuse. We may have made society safer in some areas through incredible effort at enormous cost, and certain lobbyists have picked up on the statistic. But that doesn’t mean we can look the other way in the face of this explosion in juvenile mass murders.
This excuse has some validity. People who argue that gender roles and the oppression of women have an impact on rates of violent crime are right. The cause is not “testosterone poisoning,” as some experts claim. Men are probably not any more inherently evil than women, but boys are more inclined than girls to seek violent visual imagery. No one is sure to what degree this inclination is biological or environmental, but the majority of the obsessed violent video game players are boys. It should be no surprise that the killers are predominantly male as well.
When our children descend to the level of the “law of the jungle,” when we live in a realm of might makes right, then women—our mothers, sisters, daughters, and granddaughters—are likely to suffer. When we see more assaults, abusive parents, broken families, and dysfunctional relationships, quite often the victims are women.
The feminist movement has been vocal in pushing back against the entertainment industry for its sexist depictions of women, but the video game industry is now actively marketing violence to girls, too. Like the tobacco industry marketing to women (remember “You’ve come a long way, baby”?), the video game industry will gladly sell its products to girls. Examples include the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider series of video games and violent role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, in which the participation of girls is actively sought and characters are designed specifically to sell violence to juvenile female consumers. Why would we expect them to give up on 50 percent of the juvenile market? At the end of the day, the media’s portrayal of girls and women certainly has an impact on violence and crime, but it is not the sole reason why kids are killing and hurting one another at alarming rates.
The standard justifications from the video game industry roll up into one giant campaign by lobbyists to distract us once again from the problem at hand. Here are some of these usual suspects.
In statistics, a “correlation” means there’s a relationship between two variables—when one goes up, the other goes up (or down)—but it’s not clear which variable is driving the change. The industry claims that consuming violent media is correlated with violent behavior, but longitudinal studies, experimental studies, and meta-studies have convinced our leading medical associations that a strong causal relationship does exist. Playing violent video games and consuming violent media cause violent behavior in our society. We’ll address this issue in greater depth in chapter 6 when we explore research outlined by no less an authority than U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Of course violence sells! It’s a human fascination.5 Nobody can deny that, but this line of reasoning is drug dealer logic. Does a drug dealer know that he is hurting people? Yes. Does he care? No. In the same vein, the companies behind violent video games know better than anyone that commercials, product placement, and subtle cues will modify our behavior, and yet they go beyond drug dealer logic by deliberately marketing to children regardless of the dangers.
Parents also have to protect their kids from tobacco, alcohol, automobiles, firearms, porn, sex, and drugs. But in all these other areas we have laws to help parents keep their kids safe. Why not in this one area, in which parents are left to fend for themselves without any legal support? Imagine if the gun industry or the tobacco industry tried using the line, “It’s a parent’s responsibility to keep kids safe.” Could a shopkeeper argue, “I know that the kid was eight years old, but he came in my store and bought a gun and a fifth of liquor. It’s the parents’ job to keep him out of here. I was just doing my job when I sold a gun to him.”
I never buckled my seat belt as a kid, and I’m just fine. So why should I buckle my kids up? The fact is that it was only in 1950 that seat belts started to be installed in cars—and not even in all models. Once they became available, our parents were foolish not to buckle our seat belts. It was a risk factor. Parents today are strong advocates for seat belts and car seats because they know that if they don’t use them, their children are more likely to die in a car accident. Why should games be any different? If you know that playing violent video games is a risk factor for your child becoming violent, why wouldn’t you take precautionary measures? Also, don’t forget that for every handful of people who played violent video games as children and never hurt a fly, there is at least one person who did. The problem with these games is that they teach millions of children to derive pleasure from human suffering. These same kids might derive sadistic pleasure from bullying, a growing problem in our schools. Many people would not buckle their babies into their car seats if the law didn’t require them to do so, and the time has come to place similar restraints on the industry that is fighting to continue selling violence to our children.
Escalating rates of violent crime exist worldwide, and it’s not just gun crime. My books On Killing and On Combat have been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and in all these nations I hear from readers and fellow experts that juvenile violent crime is skyrocketing. The statement that it’s not happening in Japan is simply false. Germany and Norway have laws that any anti-gun politician in the United States would consider model legislation, but they didn’t stop the all-time record juvenile mass murder of 15 people by a high school student in Winnenden, Germany, in 2009. Nor did those laws stop a killer from murdering 69 people (and wounding more than 100) in a youth camp on the island of Utoya in Norway in 2011. We have seen horrific massacres in day care centers and kindergartens in Belgium, Japan, and China, with adult attackers using everything from knives to axes, cleavers to hammers.
The suicide rate in Japan is far higher than in the United States, but gun suicides are almost nonexistent. In many of the countries with strict gun control, people find other ways to kill themselves and each other. The authors of the Harvard study on gun control’s effect on murder and suicide rates concluded:
Sweden, with over twice as much gun ownership as neighboring Germany and a third more gun suicide, nevertheless has the lower overall suicide rate. Greece has nearly three times more gun ownership than the Czech Republic and somewhat more gun suicide, yet the overall Czech suicide rate is over 175 percent higher than the Greek rate. Spain has over 12 times more gun ownership than Poland, yet the latter’s overall suicide rate is more than double the former’s. Tragically, Finland has over 14 times more gun ownership than neighboring Estonia, and a great deal more gun-related suicide. Estonia, however, turns out to have a much higher suicide rate than Finland overall.
All over the world, in the absence of firearms, people who are inclined to commit suicide or murder will kill themselves and other people some other way. This is a troubling fact for anyone trying to find a simple solution to the problem of suicide or murder by focusing solely on the tools used to commit the crimes.
If you don’t like a video game, just turn it off. Wouldn’t it be great if the problem were that easy to fix? I consider this to be the most morally bankrupt of all the arguments used to justify selling death and violence to our kids in the form of violent video games. Would the proponents of this argument tell it to the parents of all the victims in Jonesboro, Columbine, and Newtown? The parents of the victims could have all banned violent video games, movies, and television from their homes, and it wouldn’t have done any good when the neighbor’s kid came to massacre their children at school.
There is a powerful message in the idea that removing video games from children’s lives will produce powerful results. As I will demonstrate, it has been irrefutably proven (in controlled, double-blind medical studies) and replicated in entire school districts that when we do “turn it off,” we can essentially cut aggression in half. But if your neighbor opts out of the program, if his or her child ends up a school bully or mass murderer, what can you as an individual do about it? The need for legislation to protect all children—not just the ones with parents willing to hit the Off switch—is palpably clear.
By now you are probably asking two important questions: What is the cause of this virus of violence raging around the world? And what can we do about it?
I’ll address both questions over the course of the book, but, first, let’s identify our prime suspect. Dr. McGee’s study for the FBI found that the one thing the killers did have in common was that they immersed themselves in violent movies and video games. European media reports of their juvenile mass murderers have consistently come to the same conclusion. The violent visual imagery inflicted upon children is the new factor that is associated with the virus of violence infecting our schools, our workplaces, and our homes. Every unbiased observer who has studied the topic agrees that, just as we need to work together to keep guns, drugs, and alcohol out of the hands of our children, we need to limit their access to violent video games.
In our book Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, Gloria DeGaetano and I provided a “Chronology of Findings, Statements, and Actions on Media Violence,” starting with the first Congressional hearings on media violence back in 1952. That’s right—as early as 1952 some of our leading scientists told Congress that violent movies and daily exposure to television were contributing to violent behavior among children in our society. Here are some of the subsequent conclusions:
• In 1969, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence cited TV violence as a contributing factor to violence in our society.
• In 1972, the Surgeon General issued a report citing a clear link between aggressive behavior and violence in TV and movies.
• In 1975, the National Parent Teacher Association (PTA) adopted a resolution demanding that networks and local TV stations reduce the amount of violence in programs and commercials.
• In 1976, the American Medical Association adopted a resolution “to actively oppose TV programs containing violence, as well as products and/or services sponsoring such programs” in “recognition of the fact that TV violence is a risk factor threatening the health and welfare of young Americans, indeed our future society.”
• In 1982, the National Institute of Mental Health found clear consensus on the strong link between TV violence and aggressive behavior.
• In 1984, the U.S. Attorney General’s Task Force on Family Violence reported on overwhelming evidence that TV violence contributes to real violence.
• Also in 1984, a longitudinal study conducted by L. Rowell Huesmann and Leonard D. Eron, which tracked 875 boys and girls for 22 years, concluded that those who watched more violent TV as children were more likely as adults to commit serious crimes and to use violence to punish their own children. In that same year, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Task Force on Children and Television cautioned physicians and parents that TV violence promotes aggression.
• In 1985, the American Psychological Association’s Commission on Violence and Youth cited research showing a clear link between TV violence and real violence.
• In 1989, the National PTA again called upon the TV industry to reduce the amount of violence in its programs.
• In 1990, Congress passed the Television Violence Act, which gave the three major networks an antitrust exemption for three years so they could formulate a joint policy to reduce violence in TV programming. When the networks failed to do so, Congress threatened sterner legislation two years later. Ultimately, Congress determined that no major reduction in the level of violence on television occurred as a result of the act.
• In 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, “The introduction of television in the U.S. in the 1950s caused a subsequent [15 years later] doubling of the homicide rate.” The study continued, “If, hypothetically, TV technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer murders each year in the U.S., 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.”
• In 1994, an American Psychological Association (APA) resolution concluded that 30 years of research on the link between TV violence and real-life violence had been ignored. The APA called for new federal policies to protect society from the effects of media violence.
• Also in 1994, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that, from 1992 to 1994, depictions of serious violence on TV increased 67 percent.
• In 1998, the National TV Violence Study concluded that 60 percent of all TV programs were violent and that “there are substantial risks of harmful effects from viewing violence.”
• Also in 1998, UNESCO reviewed studies of media violence from 25 countries and documented an international concern that violent television and movies were forming a “global aggressive culture.” The organization particularly cited violent TV and movies produced in the United States that were being exported around the world.6
This list alone provides sufficient evidence for making the entertainment industry and its video games our primary suspects, and yet all of these instances are from decades ago. Back then, the viewer had little to do but watch. Violent video games today are different. They require the player’s participation. The enemies are the player’s own, and only the player can stop them. The violence is the player’s and the capacity to kill is the player’s. The games create involved violent participants, not passive ones. Here’s what our top psychologists and researchers say about the impact of the new breed of violent video games:
• In 2005, the American Psychological Association adopted a resolution on violence in video games and interactive media that emphasized, “Violent video games can increase aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, both in the short-and long-term, according to an empirical review of the last 20 years of research.”
• Also in 2005, a study demonstrated that exposure to violent media (including television and video games) may be associated with alterations in brain functioning, including reduced frontal lobe activation and reduced impulse control.7
• In 2008, a longitudinal study in Japan and the United States found that “playing violent video games is a significant risk factor for later physical aggressive behavior and that this violent video game effect on youth generalizes across very different cultures.”8
• In 2009, a national study of eight-to eighteen-year-olds found that 8.5 percent of students in the United States display “pathological addiction” to video games, which can damage a child’s family, work, school, social, and psychological functioning.9
• In 2009, the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement on Media Violence reported that “exposure to violence in media, including television, movies, music, and video games, represents a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents.… Violent video games lead to increases in aggressive behavior and aggressive thinking and decreases in prosocial behavior.” It also stated, “In as little as 3 months, high exposure to violent video games increased physical aggression.”
• In 2011, another longitudinal study found that “youth who became pathological gamers ended up with increased levels of depression, anxiety, and social phobia. Conversely, those who stopped being pathological gamers ended up with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and social phobia.”10
• In 2013, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice published a study showing that both the frequency of video game play and an affinity for violent games among juvenile offenders were strongly associated with delinquent and violent behavior. Within the year prior to the study, the average offender had committed at least eight serious acts of violence, such as gang fighting, hitting a parent, or attacking another person.
• In April 2014, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) released this statement: “What is supported by the vast body of research is the following: Media violence is an important causal risk factor for increased aggression and violence in both the short-and long-term. Moreover, media violence is one of the few known risk factors that parents, caregivers, and society in general can reduce at very little cost.”
• In 2015, the American Psychological Association’s resolution on violent video game effects stated that “scientific research has demonstrated an association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, and aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement.”
• Also in 2015, longitudinal studies on brain research and media violence suggested that “prefrontal mechanisms for controlling emotion and behavior are altered by exposure to violent media. Therefore, long-term increases in aggression and decreases in inhibitory control due to excessive media violence exposure may result from impaired development of prefrontal regions.”11
• And again in 2015, the United Nations released a seventy-page report entitled Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls: A World-Wide Wake-Up Call, which stated that cyber violence against women and girls “is emerging as a global problem with serious implications for societies and economies around the world.” The report highlighted that the widespread representation of violence against women in video games and other media is a part of the problem.
Never heard of these studies and research reports? Through lobbyists, the video game industry has spent millions of dollars on misinformation campaigns and attacks on many of the findings cited above and the researchers behind them. I have personally endured smear campaigns as a result of my endeavors in this field. But unlike the researchers who let their work slip quietly out of focus when the fight begins, I’m a big fan of an old saying: Fighting with an Army Ranger is like wrestling with a pig. Everybody gets dirty, but the pig likes it.
I am happy to take up this fight for the researchers who have proven the scientific link between video game violence and real-life violence. I feel an immense sense of urgency to do so. On June 11, 2016, right as we were finalizing this book, a man murdered 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in the worst mass murder in American history. The killer was an American who claimed affiliation with the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a radical terrorist group. There is some indication that he was also a fan of video games.12 Attorney General Loretta Lynch told CNN that the massacre was both “an act of terror and an act of hate.” Together, we will never forget. We will never give in.
These acts of terror and hate must stop.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has made it explicitly clear: “Although media violence is not the only cause of violence in American society, it is the single most easily remediable contributing factor.” (Emphasis added.) “Remediable” is a word that I do not use lightly. The AAP uses the term here to highlight the extent to which we can intervene. By regulating children’s exposure to media violence and by educating parents, we can have the largest possible impact on violence in our society—and save the most lives.
No two people agree on everything. We can all find something to argue about. But to find consensus, to find one subject that everyone can agree upon, that is a worthy endeavor. No matter where you stand on gun control, no matter what you think we should be doing about poverty in America or prescription drugs in schools, if we recognize that we can find consensus on the issue of media violence, we’ll all become allies in the fight against violence. As we will see later, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer (who occupy opposite ends of the conservative/liberal spectrum) have found complete agreement on this subject. This is where we should be putting our energy. This is where we can take steps that will truly change the world.