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Even before all the bodies had been removed from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, people throughout America began looking for answers to why and how this tragedy could have occurred. Video games—notably interactive, "first-person shooter" games like Doom—are being identified by some as a root cause of such violence. Treating Symptoms Instead of Diseases In the 1980s, role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were blamed for all sorts of societal problems in articles, pamphlets, and sermons, most of which were generated by people who clearly knew nothing about the game (one tract even described Dungeons & Dragons as a training manual for murder, rape, Satanism, cannibalism, and a wide variety of other crimes). Every decade has some bogeyman du jour that is labeled as the root of all evils; the 1990s had Beavis and Butthead, and if indicators hold true, the first decade of the new century will have interactive video games. Video games like Doom have replaced Dungeons & Dragons as the easy answer to tough questions. Such games have been around for several years now, and have become increasingly more violent, graphic, and realistic. Nonetheless, millions of people play these games every year without apparent ill effects; indeed, no stories about the ill effects of interactive video games appeared in major U.S. newspapers in the year leading up to the April 23 Littleton shootings. Some of the kids who do play such games go on to perform heinous crimes, but that alone establishes only a circumstantial, not a causal, relationship. Killers might model their actions after those of game characters or draw correlations between the games and reality, but this does not establish cause. Are we to believe that a person disposed to commit murder would refrain from doing so if he or she were unable to find a model after which to pattern his crime? Even a game like Postal, which features unarmed, innocent victims being slaughtered mercilessly, is still just a game. Distasteful? Sure. Something that everyone can enjoy? Of course not. A game that 14-year-olds should be playing? Probably not. Nonetheless, no guns are really being fired, no people are really being killed. A bunch of electrons are moving around on a screen, nothing more or less. Players of video games temporarily enter and vicariously live in a created world. Most of these are only loosely based on the real world, if at all, and players engage in combat with opponents that are usually armed, dangerous, and generally vaguely or completely inhuman. Games like Postal cross a line into the real world, and some people find this disturbing; nonetheless, they are still just games, and are themselves saying something about the world we live in. Was Postal developed out of the blue because its publisher thinks people should go on rampages and then kill themselves? No, it was inspired by real incidents that have involved real U.S. Postal Service employees. The game is simply a symptom of a societal ill and suppressing it does nothing to solve the root problem. Other Symptoms Video games are just one easy answer to difficult questions about our society. Even guns are not the problem, just a symptom. True, without guns crimes like the Littleton massacre could not have occurred, and it is probably prudent to make them inaccessible to children and teenagers. However, the guns themselves are clearly not the problem. In Switzerland, for example, which has a citizen army, almost every home has a rifle in the closet, and yet school yard massacres are unknown to the Swiss. And history offers innumerable examples of armed societies that were not characterized by internal violence. In England during the late Middle Ages, all men and boys were required to train with the longbow, so that armies of skilled archers could quickly be raised in the nation's defense. Even though this weapon played a central role in medieval English society, it did not lead to arbitrary killing. Thus, it would seem that the problem is not the guns themselves, it is whatever induces someone to take up a gun and kill those around them. America's news media is also blamed for encouraging such acts, a classic case of "shooting the messenger." Yes, "copycat" crimes like school house shootings certainly bear a similarity because the perpetrators have the benefit of a model. In the absence of good reporting on these issues, however, horrible incidents would still be perpetrated by the people disposed to perform them; such incidents would simply be unknown to most of us and would be more unique in their particulars. Overall, our society only benefits from a diligent, free press; knowledge is indeed power. Americans should be very leery of those who would abridge the freedoms of the press and deprive them of that power. Attacking symptoms while ignoring root causes is often simply worthless, but can also be dangerous. We do not know today what the possible ill effects of banning or restricting access to video games might be. However, proponents of Prohibition did not realize that banning liquor in the United States would lead to the formation of an organized criminal subculture that preys upon our society to this day. Depriving people of something they like, just because you might not care for it, can have effects that go far beyond mere resentment. Constitutional Issues Americans should be wary of those who are too quick to erode any of the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution; the Founding Fathers certainly knew that there would be people in future generations who would try to abridge the rights of others, and had the wisdom to create a form of government that would make that more difficult. Too often, however, the first responses to a crisis are suggestions for Constitutional amendments or abridgements. While such modifications to Constitutional guarantees sometimes become necessary, rushing toward them while people's minds are clouded with the immediacy of an incident seems a bit suspect. In his article Trained to Kill, Lt. Col. David Grossman states that video games incite violence and train people to perform violent acts, and are thus not protected under the provisions of the First Amendment. If such media really cannot be protected under the First Amendment because they are really firearms simulators, and only time and the courts will be able to say whether this will happen, then it becomes legitimate to ask whether they are instead protected under the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. While this might sound absurd on the surface, is really no more absurd, or unlikely, than the claim that these games are really weapons. And there is no way that debate over this issue can become more sensible if the gun lobby is forced into the position of defending video games. Cultures of Violence America is sometimes referred to as a culture of violence because incidents like Littleton occur, because it produced people like Jeffrey Dahmer, because our inner cities are often ablaze with gunfire. However, this theory is belied by the fact the people are horrified by such products of our culture and solutions to them are sought. It is also belied by the fact that America has been spared many of the atrocities associated with truly violent cultures (the silly rhetoric of special interest groups notwithstanding). A prime example is the culture of Nazi Germany, which exterminated 10 to 12 million Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, communists, and various other "subhumans" and enemies of the regime, and started World War II, the most violent conflict of the 20th century. History is replete with other examples of cultures that really were steeped in violence. In the 13th century, the Mongols invaded Europe, and accounts of how they degraded, tortured, and slew their victims are as disturbing as anything that appears in the news today. Yet, these were people from a completely non-industrialized, non-civilized culture who did not have access to video games or any other form of media. Violent acts that take place in America are magnified in the public consciousness because they are so thoroughly reported on in the news media. But, just as your chance of dying in a plane crash is much less than your chance of being struck by lightning, so too is your chance of having a family member killed in a school shooting. Even while the ostensible dangers of video games are being debated in Congress, many real behavioral danger signs are ignored or downplayed. For example, accounts of absolutely horrible violence against animals regularly turn up in the news media. Penalties for this sort of activity are weak or non-existent, even if an offender is charged; in many states, wantonly killing a domesticated animal for pleasure is punished only be a monetary fine of $50 or less. However, anyone who will slaughter a warm-blooded, living creature for fun will do the same thing to you or someone you love if they can. Legislators, judges, and citizens need to look at this sort of truly depraved behavior and recognize that the perpetrators of it are our most dangerous criminals in a fledgling state; the kid who has just beaten to death your neighbor's cat is the one to watch out for, not the kid who sits in his basement playing Doom. Real Causes So what leads to incidents like the Littleton attack? In world a where evil is no longer acknowledged as an elemental force and where individuals are entitled to blame others for their flaws, there are no real answers, and red herrings like video games have to suffice. In a world where we can acknowledge that some people--a few members of every race, religion, community, or culture--simply have something wrong with their minds or their souls that leads them to commit acts that the vast majority of people never do, we can start to find answers. Some people really are immoral, truly evil, and enjoy harming others and doing things that they believe to be wrong, motivated by the pleasure of committing crime for its own sake. Some people are amoral, devoid of morality, and perform heinous acts because they enjoy them regardless of the suffering they cause. Other people are sociopaths, and are unable to empathize with their victims. Some people are anachronisms, throwbacks who would prefer to live in tribes only with people who share the same appearance, religion, and background, who bristle at living in a nation as diverse as modern America. Would such people still perform the crimes they do if their parents had loved or monitored them more, if they had been denied access to video games or other media, if family, community, and church had been a stronger presence in their lives? Some might not, others certainly would. In any case, if there is to be any hope of preventing incidents like the Littleton killings and of solving the root problems behind them, we as Americans need to have the courage to examine ourselves and our culture. Blaming games rather than trying to understand why some people translate them into reality is just the easy way out, and will ultimately solve nothing. |
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