Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Scant ties
By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Topographic Engineering Center, in its website, made this alarming observation: “We’ve been seeing a whole rash of shootings throughout (America) and in Europe that relate back to kids who obsessively play violent video games.
The kids involved as shooters in Columbine were obsessively playing violent video games...Mr. Muhammad, the police tell us, got him to practice on an ultra-violent video game in sniper mode to break down his hesitancy to kill.”
Between 1974 and 2000, a total of 37 incidents of mass shootings happened in the schools of Colorado, Oregon, Kentucky, and Arkansas. In response to the outcry in the aftermath, the US Secret Service and the US Dept of Education began a study.
The Safe School Initiative study, led by Bryan Vossekuil, involved an intensive review of the 37 incidents to look for commonalities and create a profile of potential attackers in order to prevent future tragedies. Vossekuil is a director in the National Violence Prevention and Study Center in Cambridge (Maryland, USA).
The results, published in the U. S. Secret Service website, show that one in eight perpetrators showed some interest in violent video games, 25 percent in violent movies, and 25 percent in violent books.
There was no useful profile, no obvious pattern. Along with male gender, the most common trait was a history of suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts, and of extremely depressed feelings. Instead of games, their interactive medium of choice was pen and paper. The 37 percent expressed violent thoughts and imagery through poems, essays, and journal entries.
Could violent media have played some role? “Of course, this is not proof of lack of harm,” Cheryl K. Olson, a researcher in media violence, noted. “This can’t be ruled out, but evidence is scant.”
The US Army Corps of Engineers admitted that it licensed the popular video game Doom II in 1996, then renamed as Marine Doom, to teach combat concepts. This proves how effective a video game can be as a training tool but not as a killer-maker.
While ultra-violent video games can remove the fear of combat and build fascination in it, evidently it takes a clouded mind to kill a human being. Murder is no accident but a decision no normal people make.
“Murder most foul, as in the best it is;” wrote William Shakespeare in Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 5), “But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.” (For comments and suggestions, email to ztliteratus6046@lycos.com, or text to 0927-979-3519.)
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