Slashdot Log In
Researcher Finds No Link Between Violent Games and School Shootings
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 22, 2009 01:21 AM
from the and-i'll-stab-anyone-who-disagrees dept.
from the and-i'll-stab-anyone-who-disagrees dept.
GamePolitics writes "A researcher at Texas A&M International University has found no link between playing violent video games and school shootings. Prof. Christopher Ferguson cites 'moral panic' and criticizes politicians, the news media and some social scientists for playing up what he believes is a false connection between video games and school shooting incidents. Quoting: 'Actual causes of violent crime, such as family environment, genetics, poverty, and inequality, are oftentimes difficult, controversial, and intractable problems. By contrast, video games present something of a "straw man" by which politicians can create an appearance of taking action against crime.'"
Related Stories
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Video games don't have a monopoly on violence. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it just video games that are subject to all this scrutiny? Board games cause violence too.
My sister was perfectly capable of flying into a murderous rage if someone else purchased Boardwalk or Park Place in a game of Monopoly when we were kids.
Re:Video games don't have a monopoly on violence. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it just video games that are subject to all this scrutiny?
Video games are subject to this scrutiny for two reasons:
1) There was once a study along time ago showing that kids exposed to aggressive TV acted out aggressively afterward. A host of studies since then have alleged the same effect from video games. Studies have supported and refuted both ideas, and people have also called into question the link between aggressive play behavior and real world aggression. Unfortunately, a lot of the research and reporting on the research on both sides seems to be heavily tainted by preconceived bias.
2) Video games are a form of recreational media enjoyed by a substantial number of youths today, and they are often avoided by excessive moralists, who tend not to "get" what "the kids" are into. We did the same thing with rock & roll, rap music, tabletop gaming, etc.
It's one half politicized science and one half culture war.
Board games cause violence too.
My sister was perfectly capable of flying into a murderous rage if someone else purchased Boardwalk or Park Place in a game of Monopoly when we were kids.
Oh, pfft. You know there's a difference between something that is alleged to provoke violence and something which is just fought over. Let's not be silly.
Parent
Like Dodgeball? (Score:2)
Seems like an obvious candidate to me. I mean, you're taught to *throw* something at someone, with the intention of hitting them "out."
Anyone up for a round of Lawn Darts Dodgeball?
Re: (Score:2)
You may joke, but there were similar scaremongering campains concerning D&D & Warhammer FRP back in the 80s. Before that, it was heavy metal music.
There are some people who can always find something to get outraged about.
Re: (Score:2)
Card games cause violence too. My coworker got me into the Nuclear War Card Game [flyingbuffalo.com] and now I keep a stockpile of ICBMs just in case. Come to think of it, my neighbor has been blocking us in with the way they park their car. *pushes button*
Wrong time to release study. (Score:2)
Recession is on.
Politicians don't have idle time to persecute random innocent everyday activities anymore.
Should have sat on it until the economy was well into recovery territory.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope this is the perfect time. Since we're in a down turn, it's the perfect time to start slapping away at innocent activities in order to protect people as fear sets in.
Sudden (Score:4, Insightful)
Sudden outbreak of ... he'll be completely ignored.
Let's face it, saying "The new shiny thing that you barely know anything about, is the true responsible for all the evils" will always work better for the news than "There's just about the same percentage of bad people as always, nothing to see here, move along."
Re: (Score:2)
No stupid, it's child porn that causes violence (Score:4, Funny)
So we need to stop selling cameras.
What about the easy availability of guns ? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Spot the correlation.
Re:What about the easy availability of guns ? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Considering the three cases you've linked, the death toll at Dunblane was 17. The total death toll of the other two (despite the "impressive" flame-thrower) was 0. It's impossible to say if people would definitely have been killed if the men in those cases had access
They are SUICIDES, not merely mass murders (Score:2)
What most people don't seem to recognise is that these "school shootings" (or flame throwers, or whatever) and similar "going postal" events are NOT intended as mass murders.
They are intended as loud, messy SUICIDES, that "show the world how much it hurt me by hurting it back".
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
In the UK guns are not as easy to get hold of as in the USA. We don't have school shootings. Spot the correlation.
In the US wooden clogs are harder to get ahold of as in Europe in general. We don't have clog beatings. Spot the correlation.
Or you could, you know, define the problem sensibly in terms of violent crime or murders at schools. There are countries with higher rates of gun ownership than the UK, but lower rates of violent crime and school murders. What does that imply about the causality of your correlation?
The truth is if you look objectively you can find things that correlate very strongly with violent crim
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Canada does have guns. They don't have school shootings.
Here in Australia we don't have guns (it's neigh impossible to get anything at all these days, believe me I have tried). Per capita, we've had a shitload of people going on killing sprees with guns.
What's this correlation I'm supposed to see? That gaining your independence from England makes you more likely to be a psychopath? Interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
There was a rather famous one at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal 20 years ago... (rather sad, too, since the gunman
Re: (Score:2)
"Goose-stepping, are you mad.
We've formed an orderly queue and are waiting for it to turn up."
Made me laugh. My co-workers are now even more convinced that I am insane.
With regards to your distinction between Stalinism and Fascism, I've come to believe that there is really little difference aside from aesthetics and what the thugs babble about when beating you to death. My personal preference is for either totalitarian socialism (nationalist and internationalist are both covered) or Marxist-Fascism (makes
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You think that is obvious? You don't think poison or a big bomb might be a lot more effective? I'd argue that largely untrained children with guns are a lot less effective than other techniques they could turn to or at the very least you need to provide some data if you want me to accept this hypothesis.
Since when do we not restrict people having large explosives or biological weapons? Just because the GP didn't mention these weapons, you assume that he wants to restrict guns but not restrict explosives. Talk about a fucking straw man, sheesh.
But I think what the OP says is true. Restrict people from having guns, school attacks will be less deadly.
Okay, you think that. Why do you think that? Do you have any information or is it just based upon emotion? Do you have any actual studies to back up your hypothesis or is it completely untested?
Do people need to make a hypothesis for every claim they make? Come on, man. The GP is obviously just using some common sense. If you got attacked by a mugger, would you rather be mugged by an armed person or not? Don't be stupid.
Bath School Massacre (Score:2)
To date the worst school massacre took place in Michigan in 1927. Although it wasn't a student I guarantee it wasn't video games that pushed him over the edge either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster [wikipedia.org]
What do you think would happen today if someone blew up an entire school wing? They'd have tons of scapegoats instead of focusing on the unique circumstances which made the PERSON who was RESPONSIBLE.
Re: (Score:2)
That doesn't hold a candle to the Chechen school massacre [wikipedia.org].
Link to the paper (Score:2)
Hi,
the article mentions a paper and has a link to it. But the link doesn't work and i can't find the paper by searching for the author on that server.
Has anyone a working link?
Sincerely yours, Martin
Re: (Score:2)
What, again? (Score:2)
Lots of these reports comming out lately.
How about a completely different angle? (Score:4, Insightful)
How many people have been going on killing sprees because they said God told them it was a swell idea? Yet nobody discusses outlawing religion, or keeping it away from the feeble minds of small children.
Re: (Score:2)
psychopaths prone to attraction to violence? (Score:2)
In my opinion, thanks for asking, psychopaths are attracted to violent entertainment, because it is violent and they are psychopaths. For others (normal-ish people) the violence isn't real (because it is a game, after all) and it is fun. Your over or underweight gaming fanatic probably plays vastly more of this stuff than anyone else and killing large swaths of people at school would cut into his gaming time.
Don't Linch Me (Score:2)
(In my apparent desire to be burned at the stake by all other Slashdoters, I would like to make a contradictory statement. It's short, I promise.)
School shootings are the manifestation of some sort of breakdown among a few people because we have a culture of violence. Video games are, without a doubt, part of that culture.
Politicians demonize violent video games and then go attend the latest military parade.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course not... Choir, meet the preacher.
"...And?" Indeed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, something every person who plays games already knows.
Well, I was thinking the same thing, except from the opposite direction. I'm was kind of skeptical about how he might have showed no link given the small sample group of school shooters and the difficulty in finding actual video game links, but there's really nothing of the sort here. He's largely just criticizing the methodology (or complete lack thereof) of most people howling about the link between video games and school shootings.
He's basically doing little more than pointing out the obvious, but not really proving his own point. It's very much a, "Here's some common sense, here's where most of the people talking about the supposed connection betray their ignorance, and here's some outrage and politics too" kind of article. Less science than editorial. (One with a decent point mind you, but let's not pretend this is proof of the opposite. He's just calling "BS.")
Parent
Sometimes that's enough (Score:5, Insightful)
And technically, since we're talking science, that's enough disproof. The burden of proof lies on the one who claims to have a proof. Pointing out the holes in his proof is disproof enough. You don't have to prove the opposite, which sometimes is even impossible or unfeasible.
E.g., if I claim to have proof that extraterrestrials live among us in disguise, it's up to me to prove that, not up to you to prove that all 6 billion humans on Earth were born on Earth. The latter would be unreasonably hard a "proof" to do, and frankly it's not your burden to do. (Much as various nuts and fanatics like to pretend that it's your job to prove them wrong, and they're right if you don't.) But if you can find big enough holes in my data or methodology, that's actually disproof enough.
Ditto for games. It's very hard to prove, especially for someone who's already dead, that games absolutely didn't have an influence on him. You can't resurrect him and haul him to a shrink. Now picture doing that for a few hundreds of people. It's unreasonable, and, again, it's frankly not your burden of proof. The ones who claim that the link between games and violence exist, and even use it as a true premise to base further rationale on (e.g., that therefore this or that legislation is needed), those have to first prove it. If you can poke holes in their proof, that's disproof enough.
So to summarize it, the answer to your "let's not pretend this is proof of the opposite" is: he doesn't have to prove the opposite in the first place.
In the end, probably what we actually need is actually less people getting suck(er)ed into the game of accepting that they have to prove the opposite, and more people who just call BS until the ones making the claim presented a good enough proof. Once you accept the burden of proving the opposite, essentially you've accepted that unless you can do the unreasonable !X proof, the bullshitter is right. That's already playing their game. They just need to be slapped silly with the notion of who has to prove what, and that an unproven claim is null and void and not to be taken any more seriously than opinionated gossip overheard on a plane.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
To give you an example of this consider pharmaceuticals. If I create a new drug that in 99 of my 100 test cases cures cancer should I be allowed to sell it immediately? Or should their be a requirement that I 'prove' it isn't dangerous with further medical trials?
In the above case I have 'proven' to some degree that it works, and there is no proof it is dangerous and "since we're talking sc
I see no fundamental problem there (Score:3, Insightful)
I see no fundamental problem there. Essentially you're legally required to make a claim that your medicine (A) works better than placebo, and (B) you know and disclose the risks and potential side effects. And you're required to prove it.
The requirement part comes from having such bad experiences as someone selling sulpha dilluted in ethylene glycol... which is a very deadly poison, and actually killed everyone who took that medicine. In excruciating pain, over a couple of weeks. So now if you don't or can'
Re: (Score:2)
1. Yes, it is entirely within the society's rights to decide that it requires certain standards of proof that your game doesn't cause people to run amok.
But even there it would first need to figure out such an impartial double-blind test, that's possible to pass. For medicine we have it. I don't think any of the "OMG, games turn people psycho" crowd actually made even a valid correlation, much less a scientific test there.
2. In medicine's case the FDA first had to make its own claim, and prove it, namely th
Re: (Score:2)
The idiot who sold a solution of sulpha in ethylene glycol, essentially made that case and proof for them. Somebody had sold a medicine which didn't just sometimes not work, and didn't just sometimes kill its patients. It killed _every_ single person who took it.
Obligatory Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]
Or from the FDA itself (Score:2)
Or from the FDA itself: http://www.fda.gov/oc/history/elixir.html [fda.gov]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I just read the original researc
effect size (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about that... I play guild wars, and I'm training my calico cat to attack on command... just having a little trouble figuring out how to get us both +1 health regeneration and 33% faster attack speed...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, a logical argument in science does not constitute disproof. While it's fair to say the burden of proof is on the claimant, not being able to prove a claim doesn't prove the inverse.
As GP points out, any kind of statistical correlation with school shootings will be very difficult, due to the rarity of shootings. I think we all know there's no direct effect -- in no case was the shooting an immediate, direct result of the video game. The researcher points out that no studies are able to show a video game-
Re: (Score:2)
Given that, I'll present myself as the hole in the "violent games cause realworld violence" theory.
When I am supremely angry and sincerely wish to kill someone (and we've all been there!) the best thing I can do to cool down is ... fire up DOOM and slaughter a few thousand innocent hellspawn. After a couple hours of that, I'm relaxed and no longer angry. Great therapy!
Of course, the conclusion the moralists would draw is that violent people should go to hell, where they can freely indulge their violent tend
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, they want you to start calling them "court kittens" cause no one wants to hit a kitten.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I could take environmental responsibility when it was things like "reduce, reuse, recycle" but I cant take them seriously any more, they are just a bunch of nut cases these days. Sea Kittens my arse.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
And this is why the "moderate-sounding" outfits like HSUS are so much more dangerous than the lunatic fringes: HSUS has exactly the same goals as PETA, but HSUS has learned diplomacy. So while PETA tries to make kids think of fish as "sea kittens" and everyone laughs at the absurdity, HSUS quietly gets fish farming outlawed.
(Don't think so? Check out the recently passed CA Prop 2, which outlaws modern egg production.)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't worry, you can just blame it on your parents, and they on theirs, and so on. The real culprit is Adam or amoeba, whichever you prefer.
Or you could blame the little psycho who pulled the trigger.
Re: (Score:2)
Please cite an example of a non-Amish male teen that has never played a violent video game
It's not that the crazy ones play violent video games. All young males these days play video games, and the majority of them include violence
(Females being far less likely to 1) play video games or 2) shoot up a school. Maybe we need to ban young males from schools.)