On September 13th, a 25-year-old man walked into Dawson College in Montreal and went on a shooting spree that took at least one life and wounded 19 people. News outlets were quick to point out that the gunman, who died in a shootout with police, enjoyed violent video games. Headlines pointed to a link between the rampage and the games the murderer played.
Back in 1989 another 25-year-old, Marc Lepine, killed 14 people in a similar incident at another Montreal college. Unfortunately, there was no large-scale Internet or GTA to blame at the time. If violent games had been available back then, would a violence-obsessed Lepine have played them? Would they have been to blame?
Montreal is the only link in these two cases, but I’d feel like an idiot claiming it meant anything at all. Charles Whitman killed 16 people and wounded 31 at the University of Texas in 1966. The Columbine Massacre that took 13 lives is so named for the school it took place in. As a real-life parent, should I take this as proof that my child should avoid school? It is the one overarching link in all these cases.
How about this for a crazy theory: when young people commit crimes, there is a good chance they will do so in a familiar environment, like a school. And, being young, they just might be players of video games. And being obviously violent people, they might be attracted to violent games. Cause and effect? What video game does Saddam Hussein enjoy?
I grew up in the kind of neighborhood that so-called “murder simulators” like Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto try to simulate. My best friend from elementary school was convicted, before his 21st birthday, of killing a man he claimed was threatening him. My uncle is serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, because prosecutors say he murdered three people, execution-style, in retaliation for a bad drug deal. Their crimes are what some of the more controversial video games dabble in. They are the kinds of horrors the game industry is routinely blamed for causing.
Unfortunately, these men and their victims would never have had a chance to play the latest violent games. The crimes took place in 1991, a year before the first Mortal Kombat ever hit arcades, and seven years before the clumsy top-view Grand Theft Auto. These are men, like millions before them, who did harm to their fellow man because of something about them and their circumstances that entertainment could never have extinguished or encouraged.
I can’t claim to be an expert in psychology, nor in the methods used by scientists who suggest that simulated violence, in games or movies, desensitizes the average viewer to violence. When news entertainers cite these studies, the obvious interpretation is that kids go on murder sprees because their weak young minds can’t tell the difference between game and reality. The problem is that the studies themselves are “simulated”. After being blasted with hours of faux violence, study participants aren’t given a gun and asked to go shoot the next person they see. One study asked players to use a loud horn to show their level of aggression after playing a violent game. Another had participants fill out a questionnaire to see if they had grown less sensitive to the thought of violence. Huh?
