A Culture of Violence

Eight days ago a disturbed 20-year-old man visited unimaginable horror upon an idyllic town in New England.  Twenty children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut fell victim to this violent attack.

Much attention has been focused on the implements used in such mass murders, especially a semiautomatic rifle chambered in a caliber called .223 Remington, also known as 5.56mm NATO.  The latter designation has drawn particular note, and such a rifle is often described in news reports as a "military style assault weapon."  Those who are careful in their use of terminology point out that the rifles used by the military are designed to be fired in fully automatic mode (squeeze and hold the trigger, and bullets are launched from the muzzle in rapid succession until the magazine is empty), and that only such a "machine gun" is accurately described as an "assault rifle."

When the problem brought into relief by such a terrible incident is captured by the phrase "gun violence," it is easy to understand the focus on the gun.  But when we consider that the number of guns in the United States is nearly as large as the number of people, and the overwhelming majority of these guns are never used in acts of violence, it seems logical to suggest that our focus should be on the behavior rather than the implement.

So, while it has been said many times by people on both sides of the debate about the role of firearms in our society that America has a "gun culture" (see, for example, William R. Tonso's 1990 book The Gun Culture and Its Enemies), I believe it may be more helpful to focus on the fact that America has a culture of violence.

Many social scientists have studied and written about the way violence is portrayed in entertainment media.  The word "glorified" is often used, and much attention is directed to violence in movies, television shows, and - especially - video games.

When I was growing up I wondered about Saturday morning cartoons. Characters in those programs routinely did terrible things to each other.  In the Road Runner cartoons, Wile E. Coyote was endlessly getting blown up or having large, heavy objects fall upon him from great heights.  In Tom & Jerry, literally a running cat-and-mouse game, awful things happened to the cat several times per episode.  Vivid in my memory is a scene in which Tom (the cat) is struck a fearsome blow to the head with a frying pan by Jerry (the mouse) while he is sleeping.  I was especially intrigued by the fact that these cartoon characters nearly always appeared in the very next scene as though nothing had happened to them, and I thought this might mislead young children about the consequences of violent acts.  I have since decided that young children are probably a little better than we give them credit for at distinguishing fantasy from reality, and perhaps when the fantasy is a cartoon it is that much easier.

In television shows and cinema, however, it is all about realism.  Directors and cinematographers are very much intent on the goal of making everything that happens look quite real.  Psychologists have worried about how this may desensitize viewers to violence.  I am quite certain it does exactly that.  The only question is how much, and with what consequences.

Video games bring an entirely new dimension to this discussion.  Their realism is ever greater as the technology advances.  Unlike the violence we see on television shows and in the movies, when we play these video games we are not passive spectators.  We are the actors.

A quick overview of some of the titles may lead one to suspect the violent nature of the content.  With names like Assassin's Creed, Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Sniper Elite, it is easy to imagine what participants in these games may be doing.  Even the television commercials advertising these games can be more than a bit disturbing, and when the voice-over notes that a game is rated "mature," it is easy to understand why.

Have you ever used Google's specialized search functions?  Mostly I use ordinary "search" or "maps."  (Regular readers know that for some of my essays I use Google Images to find appropriate graphics.  I haven't done that for this one, because the subject is so "graphic" when we just read or talk about it that I didn't think it needed any help.)  I am quite fond of Google Scholar, which has become an excellent way to find out what research has been published on a particular subject.

I could tell you that entering the combined search terms "video games" and "violent behavior" yielded 43,000 "hits."  But it drives me bonkers when speakers at a scientific meeting show a slide that depicts such results, because that doesn't tell you how many of the results might just be researchers endlessly citing their own and others' work.  Most important, it doesn't tell you how much good or important or illuminating research has been published.

So it is necessary to do some careful reading of the stuff we get to by clicking on the links.  And thus I'd like you to know about Craig A. Anderson, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University.

A 2004 paper by Anderson in the Journal of Adolescence introduces the subject:

For many in the general public, the problem of video game violence first emerged with school shootings by avid players of such games at West Paducah, Kentucky (December, 1997); Jonesboro, Arkansas (March, 1998); Springfield, Oregon (May, 1998), and Littleton, Colorado (April, 1999).  More recent violent crimes that have been linked to violent video games include a school shooting spree in Santee, California (March, 2001); a violent crime spree in Oakland, California (January, 2003); five homicides in Long Prairie and Minneapolis, Minnesota (May, 2003); beating deaths in Medina, Ohio (November, 2002) and Wyoming, Michigan (November, 2002); school shootings in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania (June, 2003) and Red Lion, Pennsylvania (April, 2003); and the Washington, DC.‘‘Beltway’’ sniper shootings (Fall, 2002).Video game related violent crimes have also been reported in several other industrialized countries, including Germany (April, 2002), and Japan (Sakamoto, 2000).

Anderson has devoted many years to this work.  He has published extensively. For those of you who are interested, I strongly recommend that you Google him and visit his home page.  The more you read, the more you will understand one of his salient conclusions:

...as documented in several articles in this special issue as well as in other recent reports, a lot of youths are playing violent video games for many hours per week.  When large numbers of youths (including young adults) are exposed to many hours of media violence (including violent video games), even a small effect can have extremely large societal consequences.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has a longstanding and well-developed interest in the effects of exposure to violence in entertainment on the development of children and their behavioral health.  Noting that medical professionals have been concerned about portrayals of violence in the media since the 1950s and that the U.S. Surgeon General issued a report on the subject in 1972, the AAP issued a policy statement in 2009 that said, "The evidence is now clear and convincing: media violence is one of the causal factors of real-life violence and aggression."

Some of you are probably thinking that many medical professional organizations are also on record as supporting all manner of gun control legislation.  The AAP, for example, has said a home with children is no place for firearms.  But there are important differences.  There is no evidence that access to guns, or learning how to shoot them for sport, makes people prone to use them to commit violent acts. There are abundant data to the contrary.  For example, people who obtain permits to carry concealed handguns for personal protection almost never use their guns in the commission of crimes.  In this instance of the intersection of public policy with health policy, by contrast, there are many studies all supporting the same conclusion that violence in entertainment has a real and causal link to violent acts in real life.

There is another important difference to keep in mind.  We had a ban on the importation and sale of a vast array of semiautomatic rifles, as well as a ban on high-capacity magazines, on the books for ten years.  The statistics kept by the Department of Justice tell us the result in all its simplicity: there was no effect on violent crime committed with firearms.

In case you have forgotten since you started reading, our nation is awash in guns.  Limiting the sales of certain new ones will be like looking at a backyard swimming pool, recognizing the danger it poses to the toddler who cannot swim, and deciding we must not add more water to the pool.  Unless we intend not only to ban the sale of all new guns but also to confiscate all the old ones, we cannot expect to prevent the commission of violent acts with guns by controlling their availability.  For those who may think confiscation is a fine idea, I will note that self defense is a fundamental, natural, human right.  In human societies, armed self defense must be available, else the slow, the weak, and the infirm will ever be at the mercy of the young, the fast, and the strong who just happen to be amoral.

Yesterday the NRA held a press conference in which the organization suggested that placing well-trained, armed security guards in schools might be a valuable and effective short-term solution.  The NRA was promptly scorned by those who thought - contrary to what anyone who knows anything about the Association's history over the last 50 years would have expected - that the NRA was holding a press conference to announce it would embrace new gun control legislation in a spirit of compromise.

We can enact all sorts of new gun control legislation.  We may do exactly that. We will certainly spend a great deal of time talking about the merits of doing so. But the time and effort we devote to this must not detract from the attention directed toward our culture of violence and how we can go about changing that.