Authors: Glenn Beck
With all of that being said, and with all due respect to Stephen King (he’s a wonderful writer of fiction, after all), his analogy about cigarettes and lung cancer only hurts his argument. While there’s great evidence to suggest that cigarettes are a major contributing factor to lung cancer, smokers who die of lung cancer have a very hard time proving to juries that cigarettes are specifically what killed them. Why? Well, one reason is because
fewer than 10 percent of lifelong smokers will ever get lung cancer. Fewer still will die from it. It’s virtually impossible to take a person with lung cancer and isolate the effects that his smoking had from the effects of everything else he did in his life—even if it’s clear that cigarettes were the primary risk factor.
To make the direct connection—and control for all other variables—researchers would need to design a controlled, double-blind study like the ones used by the Food and Drug Administration in considering new prescription drugs. But, at least here in
America, we don’t commission studies where the primary objective is getting lung cancer. We don’t use “placebo cigarettes” to measure one group against another. As a result, we don’t know, with absolute scientific certainty, that smoking cigarettes directly causes lung cancer.
Yet, even without that absolute certainty, we’ve tightly regulated tobacco companies to the point where massive warnings and disgusting photos of disease-ridden organs are printed directly onto their product as a way to discourage use. Why? Because society has basically accepted that the link between cigarettes and cancer exists, even if researchers aren’t able to design a study that scientifically proves it.
And that brings us back to Stephen King.
Just as with cigarettes and cancer, it will
never
be scientifically possible to prove that consuming violent entertainment results in an increased propensity for violence. We can listen to what the killers themselves say and we can look at the statistics and studies that show the strong correlation, but we will never be able to design a study that would prove it conclusively. Why? Well, think about what that study would have to look like:
1. First, we’d have to select a large group of kids of similar demographics and upbringings.
2. Next, those children would have to live in a lab environment controlled by the researchers for a significant amount of time. Everything these kids do would need to be monitored and controlled: what they eat; what they do for fun; what they learn in school; how their parents raise and discipline them. Remember, the idea is to isolate violent-media consumption as the
only
factor having an impact on their lives.
3. During the study we’d have to force half of the kids to play violent games and watch violent television for three or four
hours a day while the other half read poetry or listened to Michael Bolton songs.
4. For the next forty or fifty years we’d have to individually track each of the kids to see what happens in their lives.
Unfortunately, even that study would fail, because as soon as the kids left the lab they’d be open to all kinds of outside influences. What if a child from the video game group later goes on a killing spree, but we subsequently find out that he’d been on all kinds of prescription drugs? What if a child from the control group kills his classmates but we later find out that he’d been traumatized after the study was done by seeing his father killed in a home invasion? How would these crimes be classified?
The issue is just not as simple as people would like it to be. When the
New York Times
asked Michael Ward, an economist at the University of Texas at Arlington who is studying the issue, whether violent video games increase the likelihood that someone will commit a violent crime later in life, he answered, “I don’t know that a psychological study can ever answer that question definitively.”
And that’s the point: it will never be possible to scientifically prove this correlation. There are just too many variables, too many ways that even the best-designed studies can be corrupted. But that doesn’t mean we simply dismiss the idea or stop looking for answers (even though that’s what many people in the entertainment industry would like). In fact, just the opposite is true—we should be ramping up our efforts to understand this relationship.
Besides, data is only one part of the equation. The other part, common sense, is equally important—and, in this case, even more conclusive. Anyone who is willing to take the time to actually read about the video games our kids are playing (or better yet, to play those games themselves) will probably be shocked. I know I was.
Once I saw these games with my own eyes I was left with no doubt they should be classified as a risk factor. Just as good parents don’t leave their children with unfettered access to pornography, good parents would never let their kid play a game where the goal is to commit increasingly heinous violent acts so you can
move up the ranks of a criminal organization.
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.”
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 happened 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.