There are many criticism nowadays about video games. More specifically, how violent video games influence people to become violent themselves. There are arguments about how playing first person shooter games can affect the subconscious of children which influences them to be more violent as they get older. I think this is a ridiculous thought. I myself know many people who have been playing violent video games almost their whole lives, most of which are the first person shooter games. Not a single one of them are violent, in fact they are the least violent people I know. But the most concrete evidence I know of show how video games are one of the last things making people violent, are the school shooters.
The U.S. has endured way too many school shootings. The some of the most famous ones are Columbine and Sandy Hook. After the Sandy Hook shooting people across the country swore up and down it was because the shooter played video games which influenced him to do what he did. However, it was later discovered that he never played the violent video games like everyone thought, he just had a mental illness which influenced him to do what he did. In fact it has been determined that most of the mass shooters played little to no video games. If anything, what influenced children to grow to be violent it is the way they are raised or there is a chemical imbalance causing a mental illness. Most of the mass killings wouldn’t have happened if these people had the proper diagnoses and help.
Banning video games won’t help anything. If anything, it would take away most kids outlet. Video games now a days are becoming more life like than ever. With kids turning to video games more it is giving them an outlet to get some of their emotions out. If kids don’t have that outlet anymore they are going to turn to do these things in real life which create a worse situation than there already is.
Kirsten's Kreations 
In response to your first impression post for chapter 7, I completely agree with what you said. With learning—lasting change as a result of practice, study, or experience— there are 3 ways of learning: classical conditioning, operant condition and social learning theory or what is also called observational learning. The Bobo Experiment is a good way of explaining violence. The Bobo experiment is where a group of students watch a teacher essentially “beat” Bobo, who is a child’s toy and has a low center of gravity so when you hit him, he leans and pops right back up. The teacher hits Bobo with a hammer, kicks him multiple times, beat him on the ground and threw him in the air. The children were exposed to aggressive modeling—learning that occurs through watching and imitating others—increased attraction to guns even though it was never modeled. I found this interested because there are a lot of school shootings nowadays. Does this mean that school shootings are led by this violence?
Violence in video games essentially takes violence to another level where instead of simply viewing and observing the games, you are partaking and creating the violence as you are the player behind the controller etc. You have the role of initiating the violence. The level of cognitive development depends on the age of the consumer. A younger child will have a harder time distinguishing between fantasy and reality and they are more prone to violence. Also it’s proven that continued exposure to violence and more graphic levels of violence makes children less emotionally engaged when they are exposed to it. I do agree with you that video games let kids get their emotions out. All in all, I liked what you had to say and how you said it.
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I also examined this prompt and had a similar opinion about video games. I did not believe they are to blame for violent outbursts, especially recent gun violence. In class, we learned about the experiment by Bandura involving “Bobo the Clown”, which studied the relationship between exposure to violence and violent actions by the viewer. After learning the results of this experiment my opinion on this topic changed slightly. As demonstrated by Bandura, the group that had exposure to the violent video before interacting with Bobo showed more aggressive behavior than the control group that did not have prior exposure to violence. Bandura could conclude from this experiment that watching violent behavior as an “outlet” actually resulted in more violence, opposite to what was previously thought about watching violence as a catharsis for pent up aggression. While I still do not believe video games are to blame or should be banned, I realize that there are many ways to view this issue and a wide array of research that could support both sides.
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