Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (17 page)

Investigators were stunned by the lethal accuracy in which the boy had carried out the massacre. Of the approximately eight shots he’d taken, he had registered eight hits. That’s pretty remarkable for two reasons: First, the FBI reports that, in shoot-out scenarios, experienced officers
register a hit with only 20 percent of their shots from seven yards. Second, before stealing the gun, and firing two clips of ammo the night before the massacre,
this ninth-grade boy had never fired a real pistol.

During the investigation, police learned that the boy had honed his shooting skills by playing hundreds of hours of video games. The incident itself had apparently been
modeled after a similar scene in the movie
Basketball Diaries.
And one other thing: the boy’s locker contained a book about a student who brings a gun to school, kills his teacher, and holds his class hostage.

The book?
Rage,
by Stephen King.

*   *   *

I want to get a few major disclaimers out of the way right up front so that there’s no confusion:

I don’t believe that violent video games can turn a normal kid into a cold-blooded killer.

I don’t believe that watching violent TV shows can take a kid who loves his life and respects his family and turn him into a monster.

I don’t believe that violent movies or music videos or rap songs can force kids to massacre their classmates.

Because I don’t believe any of that, I also don’t think the answer is to ban video games or television shows or movies.

I believe in the First Amendment just as much as the Second; I believe in more speech, not less. I don’t want to write more laws or pass more regulations or give some government agency more oversight.

I believe in more freedom, not less.

I have a lot of ideas for how we can fix this, but none of them involves the Federal Trade Commission or the ATF or the hallowed halls of Congress.

I do, however, believe passionately in personal responsibility. I believe that all of us, as parents, brothers, sisters, coworkers, and mentors, have a role to play in our communities.

I believe that, with a few obvious exceptions, we all know right from wrong and good from evil. Or—at least I used to believe that. With all that is happening in the world lately, I’m not so sure anymore. We are all born with common sense, but we don’t all use it. Many people have seemingly decided that the easy answer is always the right one. We put our kids in front of video games and iPads and then we get hostile when someone dares to say that maybe that’s not the best thing for their developing brains. Instead of taking responsibility we blame the messenger.

With all of that being said, and with all due respect to Stephen King (he’s a wonderful writer of fiction, after all), his analogy about cigarettes and lung cancer only hurts his argument. While there’s great evidence to suggest that cigarettes are a major contributing factor to lung cancer, smokers who die of lung cancer have a very hard time proving to juries that cigarettes are specifically what killed them. Why? Well, one reason is because
fewer than 10 percent of lifelong smokers will ever get lung cancer. Fewer still will die from it. It’s virtually impossible to take a person with lung cancer and isolate the effects that his smoking had from the effects of everything else he did in his life—even if it’s clear that cigarettes were the primary risk factor.

To make the direct connection—and control for all other variables—researchers would need to design a controlled, double-blind study like the ones used by the Food and Drug Administration in considering new prescription drugs. But, at least here in
America, we don’t commission studies where the primary objective is getting lung cancer. We don’t use “placebo cigarettes” to measure one group against another. As a result, we don’t know, with absolute scientific certainty, that smoking cigarettes directly causes lung cancer.

Yet, even without that absolute certainty, we’ve tightly regulated tobacco companies to the point where massive warnings and disgusting photos of disease-ridden organs are printed directly onto their product as a way to discourage use. Why? Because society has basically accepted that the link between cigarettes and cancer exists, even if researchers aren’t able to design a study that scientifically proves it.

And that brings us back to Stephen King.

Just as with cigarettes and cancer, it will
never
be scientifically possible to prove that consuming violent entertainment results in an increased propensity for violence. We can listen to what the killers themselves say and we can look at the statistics and studies that show the strong correlation, but we will never be able to design a study that would prove it conclusively. Why? Well, think about what that study would have to look like:

1. First, we’d have to select a large group of kids of similar demographics and upbringings.

2. Next, those children would have to live in a lab environment controlled by the researchers for a significant amount of time. Everything these kids do would need to be monitored and controlled: what they eat; what they do for fun; what they learn in school; how their parents raise and discipline them. Remember, the idea is to isolate violent-media consumption as the
only
factor having an impact on their lives.

3. During the study we’d have to force half of the kids to play violent games and watch violent television for three or four
hours a day while the other half read poetry or listened to Michael Bolton songs.

4. For the next forty or fifty years we’d have to individually track each of the kids to see what happens in their lives.

Unfortunately, even that study would fail, because as soon as the kids left the lab they’d be open to all kinds of outside influences. What if a child from the video game group later goes on a killing spree, but we subsequently find out that he’d been on all kinds of prescription drugs? What if a child from the control group kills his classmates but we later find out that he’d been traumatized after the study was done by seeing his father killed in a home invasion? How would these crimes be classified?

The issue is just not as simple as people would like it to be. When the
New York Times
asked Michael Ward, an economist at the University of Texas at Arlington who is studying the issue, whether violent video games increase the likelihood that someone will commit a violent crime later in life, he answered, “I don’t know that a psychological study can ever answer that question definitively.”

And that’s the point: it will never be possible to scientifically prove this correlation. There are just too many variables, too many ways that even the best-designed studies can be corrupted. But that doesn’t mean we simply dismiss the idea or stop looking for answers (even though that’s what many people in the entertainment industry would like). In fact, just the opposite is true—we should be ramping up our efforts to understand this relationship.

Besides, data is only one part of the equation. The other part, common sense, is equally important—and, in this case, even more conclusive. Anyone who is willing to take the time to actually read about the video games our kids are playing (or better yet, to play those games themselves) will probably be shocked. I know I was.
Once I saw these games with my own eyes I was left with no doubt they should be classified as a risk factor. Just as good parents don’t leave their children with unfettered access to pornography, good parents would never let their kid play a game where the goal is to commit increasingly heinous violent acts so you can
move up the ranks of a criminal organization.

It does not mean, of course, that everyone who plays a game like
Grand Theft Auto
will become a spree killer, just as 90 percent of lifelong smokers will never get lung cancer. Unfortunately, this has become one of the most effective excuses of those who defend the industry. “I played all of those games and I’ve never killed anyone,” they say.

That, of course, is true: most people who play violent games or watch violent TV
don’t
commit violent acts. But that’s not the way reasonable people look at an issue. Most people who fly in airplanes never die—but that doesn’t mean we stop trying to improve aviation safety or never explore the causes of the rare accidents that do occur.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of
Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill,
is one of our country’s foremost experts on the psychological aspects of killing. I asked Dave for his help with this part of the book because he’s spent virtually his entire career, from being an Army Ranger to teaching psychology at West Point to traveling the country to train local law enforcement, on the subject of “killology”—the science of killing. After years of research and untold hours of field investigations—talking with killers and their friends and families—Grossman believes without a shadow of a doubt that we are literally training our children to be killers in the same way that armies train their soldiers.

Dave has a pretty compelling answer to the argument that most kids don’t turn into killers—one that shows the idiocy of it. He tells people: “I never buckled my seat belt as a kid, and I’m just
fine. None of my friends growing up used their seat belts, either, and none of them were killed in car accidents, either. Given all that evidence, why should I buckle my kids up?”

A surgeon general’s report from the 1970s summarizes this point pretty well:

[U]nder certain circumstances television violence can instigate an increase in aggressive acts. The accumulated evidence, however, does not warrant the conclusion that it has . . . an adverse effect on the majority of children . . . . The evidence does indicate that televised violence
may lead to increased aggressive behavior in certain subgroups of children, who might constitute a small portion or a substantial proportion of the total population of young television viewers.

To say that violent media consumption is not a risk factor for violent aggression later in life means that you are either ignorant, have a political agenda, or, like Stephen King, are looking for some way to make yourself feel better about your contributions to the crisis.