As the United States searches for answers to alleviate the suffering citizens receive from sending their children to school everyday, it is quite simple to believe that the very games children are allowed to play are one of the reasons schools and public places are being attacked. The games that majority of children play are games that contain shooting, killing, and other forms of violence. Therefore, it is considered number one on the list of objects to get rid of to demolish the violent acts done by mass shooters. However there has been lots of research done to determine if there really is a correlation between videogames and violence, and the different researches done are not consistent. For this reason, it is to be said that video games is the “fall guy” for various acts of violence such as mass shootings and more.
Many believe that violent video games creates psychopaths. They gain this idea from the constant search for massive shooters and other violent people’s motive for carrying out with their violent acts. Each time someone commits an act of high-level violence , such as public or school shootings, investigators and society is always one the look out to see what motivated them to act that way. Investigators look upon the person's history and tries to find a pattern between their behavior and their at home life. As Christopher Orlet suggests that elements that produce violent people with violent actions are, “abuse, neglect, hopelessness, ignorance, laziness, absentee parents, and the plain, simple thrill of bad behavior.” There are other events or situations that occur in one’s life that molds someone into, “a psychopath” (Orlet). Yes, the exposure to the high-level of violence in majority of today’s video games can cause a tendency of trouble down the line for teens. Research has said to see correlation between video games and delinquency, and the same was said about Rock N’ Roll music and “violent films like Reservoir Dogs and Goodfellas” (Orlet).
In spite of, the true fact that most of the shooters who were involved in massive shootings did play video games, it still does not explain why billions of other video game players do not just go around and kill innocent people. There are tons of people who are also exposed to the same intensity of violence in video games as some massive shooters, but they didn’t decide to go on a shooting spree. Nyphen states that , “mental illness that is determined to be the main cause of their crime.” When trying to figure out why these mass murderers have committed such a crime, there are many different components that unfold. Sometimes science can find the person’s motive or reason for going out and shooting innocent people, but there is always something on top of another. Meaning that there is never just one thing that motivates them but many components of the doing.
More importantly, if video games is supposedly the cause or the catalyst of a lot of the death of many innocent people then why is research not showing this is true. Senator Lieberman asserts that “young men have had an almost hypnotic involvement in ...violent video games, and...become ...mass murderers.” After the Sandy Hook incident and many more politicians are politically forced to act as if they can solve this dreadful issue in America. Society has voted for someone to be able to speak up and dove the everyday problems and make America better. Therefore politicians such as Senator Lieberman felt the need to blame video games, declaring that it is the stumbling block America must evaluate and maybe demolish to end the loss of innocent lives. However, Max Fisher recognizes research done comparing the ten largest video game markets in the world, and the results presented together were shocking . Now before the actual results one would reasonably predict that the countries with the most video game consumption would also be the countries with more violence. Well Netherlands had the highest video game consumption then South Korea was in second place, but neither of this two countries, individually or together, compare to the United States “gun-related murder” count (Fisher). The United States is the second-lowest country of video game consumption out of the ten, and it manages to be the highest gun-related murders than all of the other nine counties combined (Fisher). If what the National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre says is true, that video games “sows violence against its own people," (Zhou), then Max Fisher’s graph would look quite different. Wayne LaPierre would basically agree that the countries that consume the most video games would clearly have the most gun-related murders, right? Since video games is the central cause of all the killings and shooting sprees upon guiltless human beings. Netherlands and South Korea would be the top countries, according to the information by Max Fisher on the graph, that live everyday as if it were their last because the prediction that the more video games the more violence