Playing for Real: Video games and Violence

 "It is hard to talk about video games and 2012 without addressing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. and the inevitable debate over violent games that emerged from the entirely predictable discovery that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman, played Call of Duty games," writes Chris Suellentrop in The New York Times on December 26, 2012.

Images of real weapons are depicted in video games. Last year, Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 people, said that he "honed his shooting skills by playing many hours of Call of Duty," write Barry Meir and Andrew Martin in The New York Times of December 25, 2012. More disconcerting is that these violent video games provide links to sites where real weapons can be readily purchased. As I mentioned in last week's blog, the purchaser needs nothing more than a credit card to order semiautomatic weapons for overnight delivery.

Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig in their book, Gun Violence: The Real Costs estimate the annual cost of gun violence in America to be $100 billion. All of us share the costs of gun violence. I quote from a synopsis of the book. "Whether waiting in line to pass through airport security or paying taxes for the protection of public officials; whether buying a transparent book bag for our children to meet their school's post-Columbine regulations or subsidizing an urban trauma center, the steps we take are many and the expenditures enormous. Cook and Ludwig reveal that investments in prevention, avoidance, and harm reduction, both public and private, constitute a far greater share of the gun-violence burden than previously recognized. "

The human mind often has difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality. Nancy Lanza, mother to assassin Adam Lanza, believed that Doomsday was around the corner and stocked her home with an armamentarium of weapons. Her son used them to kill her,  twenty children and six more adults on December 14, 2012.

People harbor all kinds of beliefs. We can't condemn them for their ideas nor can we predict who, when, or where they will act on "irrational" beliefs to harm themselves or others.

Each of us experiences moments of confusion conflating reality with fantasy. People have murdered their bed partners claiming they were acting on the basis of a violent "dream."

But we do know that video games include images of "real" weapons and contribute to blurring fantasy and reality and adding fuel to aggressive and violent behavior.

Conclusion: We need to acknowledge the predilection of the human mind to blur fantasy and reality, to address and, hopefully, close the loopholes to easy access and acquisition of firearms and ammunition. Factors like video games and violent movies that have encouraged or taught people about firearms need to be considered for their potential danger to harm innocent people, including us and our children.

Happy New Year to all. Let us hope that 2013 brings solutions to curb  the violence that plagues our nation.

Dear Reader, I welcome your comments.

jsimon145@gmail.com