HRH The Prince of Wales
: Responsible Business and Enterprise
MáirtÃn Ó Muilleoir
: Obama's Belfast Visit Highlights a City Transformed
Gordon Brown
: Stand With Malala for Education for All
Karren Brady
: What I Hope for My Daughter's Career
Ivan Lewis MP
: The G8 Summit - A Great Moment for Britain, A Great Test for the Prime Minister
22 young Chinese children are alive this morning because their government does not allow hundreds of millions of Chinese men ready access to ultra-efficient, semi-automatic assault weapons.
Early on Friday morning, a few hours before the awful news from Sandy Hook in Connecticut broke, a man in Henan Province in China attacked children entering an elementary school, stabbing 22 of them.
This event was swamped by news of the murder of 20 six- and seven-year-olds and five of their teachers in Newtown by a 20-year-old who was likely as mentally disturbed as the Chinese attacker.
Tens of millions of men across the world enjoy violent fantasies and act out them out every day in graphic video games where their proxies - black, body-armour-clad avatars - mow down enemies and innocents alike with knives, axes and semi-automatic assault weapons - and with apparent abandon and enjoyment.
The Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik was dressed like this when he slaughtered 69 people on Utøya Island. For the year before the mass killing, he locked himself in his bedroom in his mother's house and did nothing except play violent video games including World of Warcraft, eat and sleep - for an entire year.
Even very short exposure to such violent video games has been shown to have effects on the brain, in the form of 'desensitizing' the brain to violent or cruel images such that the emotional and physiological reactions are dulled and that in some cases even pleasure can be triggered by previously horrifying images . Exposure to such games not only dulls emotional responding, an effect which lasts long after the actual video has stopped, it also increases the probability of actual violent behaviour. Exposure to violence in other media and in real life have similar effects and the scientific evidence for such effects is strong.
I have no idea whether or not the Sandy Hook murderer Adam Lanza played these games or was exposed to violent images in other media or real life. He was however certainly acting out in tragic reality a popularly-enacted script of random murder similar to that which millions of men act out every day in fantasy.
I am not arguing that violent video games caused the Sandy Hook massacre - that would be absurd. Hundreds of millions of men have violent fantasies and many nourish them in an increasingly realistic and brutally violent virtual world. Only a handful of such men - an almost infinitely small percentage of the world's male population - end up acting out these common fantasies of revenge and punishment.
Some of these men are mentally disturbed and some, like Anders Breivik - are frighteningly sane. But the percentage is too tiny for us ever to be able to detect and prevent their murderous outbursts - bizarrely suggested as the solution by the otherwise thoughtful New York Times columnist David Brooks.
The Sandy Hook and the Chinese attacks differed in one major way. The violent-fantasy-fuelled Chinese man didn't manage to kill any of his victims - but with stomach-churning efficiency, Adam Lanza killed all of his.
Apart from in a few failed states like Somalia and the Congo, the United States is the only country in the world where military-grade, semi-automatic assault weapons are widely available to that tiny fraction of violent fantasy prone men whose fantasies bleed out into reality.
Mass murdering men will never be eliminated. But the efficiency of their mass-murders will be decimated if they do not have access to semi-automatic assault weapons. 22 elementary school Chinese children are alive this morning because military hardware wasn't made available to the men of their country.
Follow Professor Ian Robertson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@ihrobertson
Obviously the above statement was me being sarcastic. The problem does not lie within games or guns. It has to do with the mental health of a single young adult who was not able to cope with being bullied. If it wasn't obvious, he WAS being bullied. Everyone called him a nerd and even mentioned that he was part of a club that hosted LAN parties. There's no way that he wasn't bullied as a teen.
His mother likely didn't care for him not being presentable to her friends when she hosted her dice games and ended up saying something. When people are bullied their brains release chemicals that can affect his thought process. He would become increasingly violent and eventually kill someone, or in this case multiple people.
If he had someone to talk to, such as a close friend, then he probably would not have done anything. Judging by the comments that people said about him, including his brother, he had no close friends that he would be able to talk to about his troubles. I was bullied in school and without my close friends and my oldest sister than I would have likely killed someone. Rather than talk about getting rid of guns and games, we need to make sure that every kid has someone close that they can talk to.
This is the most telling part of this article, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about (you admit that here) and then carry on talking about it.
I wonder how much effect video games had on the nazis when they managed to murder millions in concentration camps..... oh wait...
I have been in precisely one fight in my entire life, the most violent thought I ever have is how hard I can poke my wife when she's snoring.... I play violent video games, watch actions movies, watch war documentarys and read often violent science fiction.....
Honestly I'm surprised your not here trying to blame Dungeons and Dragons or Water Pistols.
We live in a country (the U.S.A) in which one of our most important industries is military production.
Our president maintains a drone kill list.
We have killed thousands upon thousands of children in the name of spreading democracy around the world, or saving people from dictatorships, or defending ourselves, or getting Bib Laden, or Al Queda, whatever.
And you, professor, decide that your line of reasoning will address violent video games and desensitization? Ask the 16 year old American droned in Yemen about how "realistic" that drone strike was. We don't need video games to be desensitized; we have done it in the physical world in the name of our supposed ideals.
Give me a break. As a parent, I am as traumatized and full of dread as anyone. But the root cause lies not in looking at the entertainment industry in isolation; it lies in considering our culture as a whole. Accept that we are a nation of warriors, and it all becomes more clear.
I also think you need to consider other factors, such as the values and structures these kids had to give outing to there rage. It's not as far a leap from the chaos caused by rioters in London last year is it?
Japan is the only democratic country to have banned guns - On June 8th 2001 37-year-old former janitor Mamoru Takuma entered a school armed with a kitchen knife and began stabbing numerous school children and teachers. He killed eight children, mostly between the ages of seven and eight, and seriously wounded thirteen other children and two teachers. Imagine the carnage if he had had a Samurai sword!
Agreed, you cannot stop all psychos, however you can limit the impact they have. The reality is that a large amount of guns are very easily available to people in the US, so your chances of having another shooting like this increases multiple times over a Japan or the UK. Hence the higher overall murder and gun crime rate per capita in the US.
You cannot do away will all weapons, and there is a mental health aspect to address, however I fail to see how getting rid of semi automatic assault rifles does more harm than good.
The much used argument that there are other factors involved therefore there is no point in limiting access to guns is just silly; reducing any factor is worth it where the lives of our children are the concerned.
BBC did the same thing once and someone phoned in to take them to task over it.