It does not mean, of course, that everyone who plays a game like Grand Theft Auto will become a spree killer, just as 90 percent of lifelong smokers will never get lung cancer. Unfortunately, this has become one of the most effective excuses of those who defend the industry. “I played all of those games and I’ve never killed anyone,” they say.
That, of course, is true: most people who play violent games or watch violent TV don’t commit violent acts. But that’s not the way reasonable people look at an issue. Most people who fly in airplanes never die—but that doesn’t mean we stop trying to improve aviation safety or never explore the causes of the rare accidents that do occur.
Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, is one of our country’s foremost experts on the psychological aspects of killing. I asked Dave for his help with this part of the book because he’s spent virtually his entire career, from being an Army Ranger to teaching psychology at West Point to traveling the country to train local law enforcement, on the subject of “killology”—the science of killing. After years of research and untold hours of field investigations—talking with killers and their friends and families—Grossman believes without a shadow of a doubt that we are literally training our children to be killers in the same way that armies train their soldiers.
Dave has a pretty compelling answer to the argument that most kids don’t turn into killers—one that shows the idiocy of it. He tells people: “I never buckled my seat belt as a kid, and I’m just fine. None of my friends growing up used their seat belts, either, and none of them were killed in car accidents, either. Given all that evidence, why should I buckle my kids up?”
A surgeon general’s report from the 1970s summarizes this point pretty well:
[U]nder certain circumstances television violence can instigate an increase in aggressive acts. The accumulated evidence, however, does not warrant the conclusion that it has . . . an adverse effect on the majority of children . . . . The evidence does indicate that televised violence may lead to increased aggressive behavior in certain subgroups of children, who might constitute a small portion or a substantial proportion of the total population of young television viewers.
To say that violent media consumption is not a risk factor for violent aggression later in life means that you are either ignorant, have a political agenda, or, like Stephen King, are looking for some way to make yourself feel better about your contributions to the crisis.
U.S. Mass Killers and Violent Video Games
Below is a partial list of mass killers who have been influenced by violent video games. Although there are many more reported incidents, only those where the reports came from either the police or the killers themselves are included.
Newtown: According to CBS News, the killer was “motivated by violent video games.” John Miller, a former FBI assistant director, said the gunman had a blacked-out gaming room where he immersed himself in the virtual reality of video games. “The only reality in that room,” Miller told CBS, citing law enforcement sources, “was him and that TV screen with his tactical shooting game.” Other reports have revealed that the killer allegedly spent years creating an incredibly detailed spreadsheet of previous massacres before the attack. According to a law enforcement source who spoke to the New York Daily News, “They [Connecticut State Police] don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet. This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list . . . . It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.
The source, who was speaking after hearing a presentation from a Connecticut State Trooper at a law enforcement conference in March 2013, continued: “The fascination he had with this subject matter, the complete and total concentration . . . . There really was no other subject matter inside his head. Just this: Kill, kill, kill.
“It really was like he was lost in one of his own sick games. That’s what we heard. That he learned something from his game that you learn in [police] school, about how if you’re moving from room to room—the way he was in that school—you have to reload before you get to the next room . . . . They believe he learned the principles of this—the tactical reload—from his game. Reload before you’re completely out. Keep going. When the strap broke on his first weapon, he went to his handgun at the end. Classic police training. Or something you learn playing kill games.”
Columbine: According to Newsweek, “The two [killers] became ‘obsessed’ with the violent videogame Doom—an interactive game in which the players try to rack up the most kills—and played it every afternoon.” One of the killers wrote, “Doom is so burned into my head my thoughts usually have something to do with the game. Whether it be a level or environment or whatever . . . . What I can’t do in my real life, I try to do in Doom, like if I walk by a small building I would re-create it as good as I could and then explore it. Go on the roof, under it, or even shoot at it. The fact is, I love that game and if others tell me ‘hey its just a game’ I say ‘I don’t care.’ ”
Tucson: The man who tried to assassinate Congresswoman Gabby Giffords (and killed six others) is reported to have spent most of his time playing video games. And he posted a series of disturbing comments on gaming sites throughout the year before the massacre. One post read: “I bet your hungry . . . . Because i know how to cut a body open and eat you for more then a week. ;-)”
Paducah, Kentucky: The boy who killed three and wounded five of his fellow students told a psychiatrist that he liked to play Quake and Doom—two violent video games.
Fayette, Alabama: A teenager killed two police officers and a dispatcher after being brought into the station on suspicion that he’d stolen a car. After he was captured he reportedly told police, “Life is like a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.” Many have blamed the boy’s obsession with the game Grand Theft Auto for his actions, as he appeared to have reenacted a scene from the game.
Interstate 40: In Tennessee two stepbrothers took rifles from their home, hid behind trees along the highway, and opened fire, killing one person and seriously wounding another. They told police they were trying to “re-create scenes from the cult game [Grand Theft Auto].”
Bull Run Middle School: A boy came to his school in Prince William County, Virginia, with a knife, butane fuel, a rifle, and one hundred rounds of ammunition. Fortunately, while he was loading his gun in the bathroom, someone recognized the sound and the boy was stopped before anyone was hurt. After searching the boy’s home police found 13 different violent video games. His father said, “He played them too much, I am embarrassed to say.”
Something Is Different
Before we get to the data, let’s first take a closer look at the commonsense side of the equation.
Guns have always been around. In the 1700s, colonial Americans “were the most heavily armed people in the world” but homicides involving guns were “rare.” From the early 1970s through the late ’90s “the number of handguns owned by Americans increased 160 percent . . . . Yet over that period, the murder rate declined 27.7 percent.”
Up until 1968, there was no federal law to prevent any child from walking into a hardware store and buying a high-capacity semi-auto pistol (say, a Browning Hi-Power with a high-capacity magazine, first marketed in 1935), or buying a high-capacity military rifle (maybe a World War II–era M-1 carbine, complete with thirty-round magazines), or buying a semi-automatic shotgun (perhaps a Browning Auto-5, first manufactured in 1905), and buying as much ammunition as they could afford.
Availability of “assault” weapons was not a problem in the 1940s, ’50s, or most of the ’60s . . . yet, for some reason, no juvenile had ever committed a multiple homicide in a school until 1975, when a sixteen-year-old shot and killed a student and teacher in Brampton, Canada (yes, it happen
ed first in Canada). Four years later the United States experienced its first double homicide in a school when another sixteen-year-old killed two and injured nine more at a school across the street from her house in California.
Think about that. Five thousand years of recorded history. Five hundred years of gunpowder combat. One hundred and fifty years of repeating firearms. Yet, despite it all, no one can find a single case, anywhere in the world, where a juvenile committed a multiple homicide in a school prior to 1975.
Common sense tells us that maybe this isn’t about the gun after all. Maybe it’s about the person who’s holding it.
That means we have an issue with our society and with our families and our schools. We have issues with parenting and mentoring and bullying and the way we treat depression and anxiety. We have an issue with kids’ finding pleasure and solace by playing video games in darkened bedrooms and basements instead of running around outside with friends. We have an issue with kids’ spending hours on their phones and computers texting and posting on Facebook instead of having real, personal connections and conversations with others. We have an issue with kids’ having unfettered access to the worst the Internet has to offer instead of the best that our communities can provide.
We have a lot of new issues in America, but access to guns isn’t one of them.
In 1999, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd made a claim about those who talk about entertainment violence that is still heard today. “Blaming Hollywood and the culture, the Republicans’ tired ploy,” she wrote, “is a glib solution anyway. It’s much easier than doing the hard work of financing and mounting a campaign for meaningful gun legislation, which might take years.”
In other words, Dowd believes that those who implicate entertainment violence are only looking for a scapegoat. But, just like Stephen King, she has it completely backward. The truth is that it is those who blame guns who are the ones looking for a scapegoat. It is always much easier to look at “how” violence is carried out (that is, with a gun) than to look at “why” violence is carried out. Yet, in almost all cases besides those involving guns, that’s exactly what we do: We look at why.
After 9/11, for example, people didn’t take to the media to propose banning planes or tall buildings, but there were plenty of people advocating that we had to figure out why these young men became radicalized.
But that’s not the way it seems to work with guns. We spend weeks talking about magazine clips and the definition of the term semi-automatic without ever really stopping to ask a simple question: Why?
A Worldwide Phenomenon
Despite what the media and most gun control advocates would like for you to believe, juvenile massacres are not just a new problem in America—they’re happening around the world, even in places where gun access is significantly more restrictive.
In 2009, in Winnenden, Germany, a seventeen-year-old set a new mark for juvenile mass murderers when he killed fifteen people at his high school and during the subsequent chase and manhunt. The German media reported that he was an avid video game player.
Seven years earlier, in Erfurt, Germany, a nineteen-year-old expelled student murdered sixteen people in his former high school. The media reported that he too had “spent much of his time playing violent computer video games. His favorite was called Counterstrike in which anti-terror units wearing masks battle each other to the death.”
Finland has also experienced this kind of violence. In 1989, a fourteen-year-old murdered two of his fellow students in his school in Rauma. Eight years later, in Tuusula, an eighteen-year-old student murdered eight classmates in his high school. The following year, a twenty-two-year-old student murdered ten people at Seinäjoki University.
Other countries have not been immune, either. In 2002, two people were murdered by a student at Monash University in Australia. Two more were murdered by a seventeen-year-old student in his school in Thailand in 2003. Four people were killed by a fifteen-year-old student in their Argentina high school in 2004, and thirteen were massacred in Brazil in 2011 when a former student returned to his old middle school with two .38-caliber revolvers. The list goes on and on.
Around the world, the generation that gave us these horrible crimes as juveniles in high school, and then as young adults in college, has grown up to give us even more horrific crimes as adults.
In 2011, a thirty-two-year-old man visited the Norwegian island of Utoya. There, in a place where his victims couldn’t escape and not a single person could shoot back, he murdered sixty-nine people and injured at least 110—the vast majority of them teenagers at a summer camp. (He also killed eight people in Oslo earlier that day in a bombing.) This massacre was, far and away, the all-time worst solo act of gun violence in human history. Unsurprisingly, this killer also loved video games. In the year before the massacre, he would play World of Warcraft and Call of Duty extensively, sometimes up to sixteen hours a day.
Denying the Science
The vast majority of studies conclude that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between media violence and real-life violence. This link is undeniable and uncontestable.
—AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS, 1995
Next time you go see a violent movie, take a moment before the previews start to look around the theater. How many young kids do you see? How many parents with toddlers or infants? How many middle school kids who snuck in?
What about television shows—do you let your kids watch prime-time TV? A 1998 study revealed that one-third of all American children ages two to eleven see the first hour of prime-time shows on weekday evenings. I think we can safely assume that percentage has only gotten higher in the fifteen years since.
If you successfully avoid movies and television, what about computers and tablets and phones? According to a report by Common Sense Media, American children under eight years old spend an average of two hours and fourteen minutes a day consuming digital media and television.
One of the most recent studies to be completed on entertainment violence was conducted by researchers at Brock University in Ontario and published in July 2012 in the journal Developmental Psychology. The goal was to determine if there was any correlation between the amount of time spent playing violent video games and the likelihood that a child (in this case 1,500 kids in grades nine through twelve) would exhibit aggressive behavior. Here’s what the researchers found:
Sustained violent video game play was significantly related to steeper increases in adolescents’ trajectory of aggressive behavior over time. Moreover, greater violent video game play predicted higher levels of aggression over time, after controlling for previous levels of aggression, supporting the socialization hypothesis.I In contrast, no support was found for the selection hypothesis. Nonviolent video game play also did not predict higher levels of aggressive behavior over time.
These results should not be a surprise, considering that they virtually mimic what has been found in other longitudinal studies (studies where researchers observe the same variables repeatedly over a long period of time) that were summarized by researchers in the book Media Violence and Children:
• 1963: 875 third graders in upstate New York were observed for twenty-two years and studied at two separate points in time. At the first study point, eleven years in, researchers “realized that TV viewing habits seemed to have played a substantial role in the development of aggression. In other words, the findings showed that exposure to TV violence during early childhood was predictive of higher levels of aggressive behavior at age 19.”
Ten years later, researchers studied the group again and this time found that that “aggressive habits seemed to be learned early in life, and once established, are resistant to change and predictive of serious adult antisocial behavior. If a child’s observation of media violence promotes the learning of aggressive habits, it can have harmful lifelong consequences.” This study also revealed something even more shocking: TV viewing habits as a child was a predictor of violent criminal arrests at
age thirty.
• 1981: Among 141 kindergartners in Connecticut, researchers found “a significant relationship between children’s viewing of TV violence . . . and their aggressive behavior.”
• 1984: Sixty-three kids, ages four to nine, were tracked for five years. Researchers found that “those who watched the most violent programming as preschoolers displayed the most aggression at age nine, even when controlling for initial levels of childhood aggression.”
• 1986: One thousand kids from the United States, Israel, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Australia were followed for three years. The report suggested that “early viewing of TV violence was significantly associated with higher levels of subsequent aggressive behavior, even after controlling for a child’s initial level of aggressiveness.” The only outlier country in this study was Australia.
The Verdict Is In
While nothing will ever be good enough for the Stephen Kings of the world, there have been thousands of studies performed and opinions issued over the last half century, many of which were highlighted in Grossman’s book:
—1969: The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence cited TV violence as a contributing factor to violence in our society.
—1972: The surgeon general issued a report citing a clear link between TV and movie violence, and aggressive behavior.
—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.
—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.”