As Parkland, Florida shooting incident dominates the national headlines, America is once again caught in mass hysteria over high school killings that seem to take place on a weekly basis. Statistics show there have been over 18 gun violence incidents on high school grounds in 2018 alone, where students, teachers and ersby were either killed or injured by a gun-wielding minor. d2k2i
The latest in the string of these deadly events, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, took seventeen lives and sent fourteen more people to hospitals. The perpetrator was revealed to be one Nikolas Jacob Cruz who, at the time of the shooting, was just 19 years old. Adam Lanza was 20 when he slaughtered twenty children and six teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. It was one of the worst massacres in the US history that took place in 1999, at Columbine High School in Colorado, when Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, gunned down 13 people before committing suicide in the school’s library. Gun violence is a controversial subject in America, the country with more firearm-related deaths and injuries than any other nation in the world. The phenomenon is not new. However, the most disconcerting fact here is that children are killing children, seemingly without reason, targeting random individuals as opposed to familiar faces in an act of personal vendetta.
Can Video Games Encourage Violent Behavior?
In the wake of Florida shooting, when it once again became clear that this problem is far from resolved, authorities and public figures started gaming industry; shift the blame onto the supposed violent nature of video games and divert attention from the probable reason: the combined effect of dysfunctional society, liberal gun laws and mental illness.
The bottom line of this argument is that video games encourage kids to harm and murder, violent content brought to life in superb-quality graphics of the 21st-century technology, including role-playing games or even games of chance or skill . Furthermore, there is undoubtedly a tendency among older, less technologically savvy scholars, to abandon objective reasoning and readily the notion of ‘’evil PC games”, without any real evidence to substantiate the claim.
Ignoring Real Reasons
When it was revealed that Columbine shooters were fans of Doom, the public entered a lynch mob state of mind and the crux of the adolescent aggression problem was found in the violent nature of saying the health risk they pose is the same as that of smoking.
If we don’t accept the fact this extremely complicated phenomenon is a multi-faceted, compound and intersectional problem, not much of anything can be done to solve it and prevent high school massacres. What about books, movies, TV shows? Each of these entertainment fields offers products that may potentially serve as a catalyst for violent behavior among minors. Should we prohibit all of these and enforce an Orwellian society as the only This can only mean the cause is inherent to this country and should be looked for in the immediate societal setting.
