Violent Video Games did Not Cause the Columbine High...

â€Å"I feel like getting a baseball bat, breaking it over his head, and then STABBING him with the broken end!!!!† vents Eric Harris about his local weatherman on his web page (Anton 5). Harris, being one of the killers in the Columbine High School shooting, was called a â€Å"die-hard gamer who loved the interactive bloodbath called DOOM† (Anton 2). Doom was thought to be one of the factors in Eric Harris’ violent tragedy. The question is: did playing Doom lead to him being a violent child, or did being a violent child lead him to playing Doom? Proceeding my perusal of articles and research, written by authors with scientific credentials or otherwise, I have concluded that video games are no more to blame for the ebullition found in today’s†¦show more content†¦By conditioning the soldiers, they are able to kill other humans with relative ease. â€Å"Just as the army is conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards† (Grossman 2). Grossman claims that media desensitizes the children to violence, and kids often associate it with pleasurable things, making violence not so bad to them. However, as Michael Zarozinski puts it, â€Å"Any image that you are exposed to repeatedly will desensitize you to it. Simply being desensitized to violence will not lead to violent behavior. It simply makes one think less of violence when it does occur and can lead to people overestimating their chances of involvement in violence† (1). Regar dless, Grossman continues by saying that â€Å"When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do† (4). He claims that by kids playing games, learning to repeatedly point and shoot, these children are being subjected to operant conditioning and will shoot others when cornered. Grossman gives the example of a murder case in South Carolina. A couple of kids were robbing a convenience store, and the defendant shot the clerk reflexively without consciously deciding to. Grossman says this is due to the fact that the kid played too many video games, conditioning himself to shoot instinctively. The obvious flaw in this logic is that the kid must be in a situation where shooting someone is a viable option.Show MoreRelatedDoes Violent Video Games Cause Violent Behavior?1274 Words   |  6 Pages Does Violent Video Games Cause Agressive Behavior in Teens? 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