Murder

D

donoo

Inactive
Many young men spend thousands of hours playing violent
video games. The purpose of these games is to kill as many of the targets as possible. as fast as they can.
Then they watch violent movies and violent TV.
Many also listen to violent music telling them to kill the cops and.do other unspeakable things .
Paintball games let them sharpen their skills of make-believe murder.

Do you think---------No, it could not be and besides it makes millions of dollars for certain people and that is what counts in the usa!
 
Most never shoot anybody. Maybe we should pretend violence doesn't really occur in the real world? Real violence is in the character of the individual. How many mass murderers never played a video game or listened to violent music? I don't like the video games or violent music myself, but I don't believe it is the cause of street violence. I think that is human nature unchecked.

This is not really a gun topic, so it will probably be closed any second now.
 
Remember all those cowboy movies you used to watch (I assume). Were they violent? Or the cliff-hanger serials from Republic. There was a fist fight in each episode that destroyed the set. I used to get in fights all the time when I was younger but killing people never entered my mind, even though I saw it all the time on the big screen and the little screen. I wonder why not?

It is possible that movies today are more violent than they used to be or bloodier. Every now and then one comes along that raises (or lowers) the bar, so to say.

I don't even really know what street violence is. I can visualize burgularly, car theft, vandalism, gothism, even murder, but I can't visualize street violence. Maybe I don't spend enough time in the street.
 
I use the term street violence somewhat loosely to cover most violent crime not in movies, TV, etc.
 
Many young men spend thousands of hours playing violent
video games. The purpose of these games is to kill as many of the targets as possible. as fast as they can.
Then they watch violent movies and violent TV.
Many also listen to violent music telling them to kill the cops and.do other unspeakable things .
Paintball games let them sharpen their skills of make-believe murder.

Do you think
Click to expand...
Violence has been around since the dawn of man, and socipathic tendancies not far behind. You cannot rid society of either, sadly.
 
Violence has been around since the dawn of man, and socipathic tendancies not far behind. You cannot rid society of either, sadly.
Click to expand...

It's all about the breakdown of the family unit. Do some checking, I think you will find that this nut came from a broken home. Not all broken homes produce sociopathic nuts, but there is a correlation. Gang violence and lone-wolf type violence escalates as more mothers rely on government to help raise their kids rather than husbands.
 
In 1972, the Surgeon General issued the following warning on violent TV programs: "It is clear to me that the causal relationship between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action. … There comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come."" (Steinfeld, 1972).
 
So what's your solution if breakdown of the family is the problem? Make divorce illegal? Isn't that in the defense of marriage act or something?
 
So what's your solution if breakdown of the family is the problem?
Click to expand...
Maybe it is the drift away from religion. Maybe it is liberal education or politics. It is easy to say what the problem is. The solution is the difficult part and with such a diverse society as we have nationwide there is no one solution. My opinion is that our nation has become too large and diverse for one federal government to have adequate effect in most situations. If I understand my history lessons the federal government was supposed to be limited to only a few powers and responsibilities. Family mattters were to be handled on a more local level. I feel that government interferrence may be largely responsible for the social / moral / ethical breakdown of our society.

Still, I have no solution for the problem, but I feel that it would have to start with the individual.

I'll get off my soapbox now.
 
I heard a brief book review on the radio several months ago and the central theme of the book was that the World today is actually safer than in the past. I wish I could remember the book or author, but basically he said there was much more violence in general historically than there is in the modern world.
 
1. The OP lacks coherent prose.

2. This is a debate that is well represented in the professional psychological and criminlogical literature - of which I am quite familar - ahem!

3. The current state of the art is that there are two camps in the peer reviewed journals:

a. Video games, TV, etc. can evoke the laboratory versions of aggression.
b. It is claimed that these studies have ecological validty toward explaining real world aggression.
c. Other studies indicate that claim 'b' is not true and the link has not been established. The conclusions cited are not strongly supported and may have been based on political considerations. This is in peer reviewed journals.

Use google scholars on the topic, see Anderson's group vs. Ferguson.

A study in same vein has indicated that Biblical verses can drive people towards violence. Thus a ban on religion would seem to be appropriate. Please don't debate that here - I'm pointing to the literature. Similarly, exposure to professional sports may do the same (let's ban professional sports).

As far as increasing violence, if looked at on a global level - there is some evidence that it is decreasing as compared to mass killing levels in the past - see Pinker's book.

Thus, I'm tempted to close this as the OP was just close to a troll. However, if it continues - let's not have idle speculation. Just as we know about the debates between clips and magazines, bullets and rounds - folks actually know about this stuff than the superficial level of the OP and follow up comments.

Glenn
 
It is true that we are living in one of the least, if not the least, violent times in history. Per capita, the murder rate is very low and there are fewer genocidal governments than at any point in modern history. The reason we hear about so much violence is due to increased population and the information age. News of a shooting in Chicago can reach London, Tel Aviv, Paris, Beijing, Dubai, all virtually instantly via the World Wide Web. I read about about a car wreck in NYC the other day and I live 900 miles from there. Twenty years ago I'd have never heard about that.
 
Sorry, Charlie. The country is no more diverse than it's ever been. And I don't think anyone suggesting the federal government be more powerful than it is. What happened to the local level? It's still working fine around where I live. True, there's no more poor farm like there used to be but mostly it still works the same way.

Religion is still in good shape. In fact, churches are bigger than ever. People are more religious than ever. They may not be the religion you want them to be but that's one of the risks you have to take.

Maybe families are too small. It used to be that when you had to depend on your family for support, families were bigger.

I don't know if the world is safer now than it used to be but it's certainly a more open world. There's hardly anywhere you can't go, though some places are a little riskier than other. In the early 1960s, the East and the West were looking at one another through the gunsights of a tank. Now a French pop singer my age performs in Red Square and retired Soviet WWII army veterans live in New York. The US is negotiating for a lease for a naval base in Vietnam. The world turns.
 
I know what it is!

It is the internet, TV, radio, and communications systems that is the problem. If I didn't use those I wouldn't know about all the bad stuff I read and hear and the world would be like a better place.

Seriously, though, our near instantaneous knowledge of world events may make the world seem worse now than in the past when news traveled much slower, if at all.

BTW, Blue Train and Ben Towe, excellent comments. Encouraging.
 
We're primates. We're wired for violence to some extent. Civilization is largely a mitigation of those instincts. Some folks choose to reject that conditioning, but there's no concrete evidence that violent video games or other stimulus are responsible for inciting violent tendencies in otherwise normal individuals.

I've played violent video games. I've laughed at Sam Raimi movies. I've shot targets that resemble human beings. Know what? I'm the last person you'll meet to lash out at someone in anger. I often counsel students on the value of human life and the avoidance of violence unless absolutely necessary.

Glenn's the psych expert, and well worth listening to on those matters. My stomping grounds are more on the civil rights aspect of things. We had a case before the Supreme Court just last year on the matter of violent video games, and the decision and supplemental research are well worth reading.

The case was Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association [pdf]. The Court pretty much shredded Jack Thompson and Craig Anderson's arguments that video games contributed to violent behavior.

Now, nothing's 100%. Would I sit a 6-year-old down for a nonstop weekend of Bonestorm, the Disemboweler Parts 1-17, and Naughty Dental School Nurses? No. He'd certainly get some mixed signals.
 
Sure, most people are not hard-wired for committing random violence. The problem is that some are. My point was, that poor family environment coupled with the violent imagery of certain games and/or movies will contribute to a percentage of these folks going "postal". Guns, however, have absolutely noting to do with it. If they didn't have guns, they would use explosives. If they couldn't access explosives, they would use knives, swords, vehicles, poison, etc.
 
Google the comment, and you'll find it spewed on at least 4 forums so far.....interesting that this ID has sat idle for so long, then starts up with this.....
 
My only reference point is from some story out of the VA about video games being used to treat PTSD. I'm pretty sure it was more like " Doom" than the "Prancing Ponies". I dismissed it as more internet jive. When I try to google it, I get encrypted return. I thought the info might apply. Please, could someone google " treat PTSD video games", and give us a link.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top