Media have gotten the idea that if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.  First person shooters (FPS) have been the fodder for the outbursts of mass shooting sprees.  In the opinion of the experts and people that have some sort of expertise in the high calibre weapons field, the high exposure that our children have recieved with the video games have made them increasingly more violent and that it's the video game industry's fault.  That is a bogus and unfounded statement.  Video games may have become more realistic, if anything, but they have not scientifically proven that violent video games cause children to become more violent than they already are.

Anderson, Craig A., and Brad J. Bushman. "Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature." Psychological Science 12 (2001): 353-359.

Entertainment Software Rating Board. 5 Mar. 2003 <esrb.org>.

"For Mature Eyes Only." Official Playstation Magazine Aug. 2000: 24.

The article discusses the impending legislation of video games in this country. Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan pressured Illinois game retailers to take a hard stand and enforce the ESRB (Electronic Software Rating Board) ratings. He conducted a sting operation with 13 to 15 year old kids and in all the attempts of those kids buying an M-rated (appropriate for adults aged 17 and older) were successful. Through that pressure Wards (now defunct) pulled all it’s M-rated games and Wal-Mart soon followed suit. It should be noted that the vast majority of all shooters are M-rated. This article shows that the government is trying to actively trying to change the availability of those types of games. What the government does not say is if any one of those games that were shooters helped or developed any strategies that could have contributed to any violent shooting outbreaks.

Grace , Kevin M. "VIDEO-VIOLENCE CRACKDOWN." Report / Newsmagazine n.d., Alberta ed.: 40-41.

This article discusses British Columbia’s rating of a First Person Shooter (FPS) as a porn game. It also is citing the reason it is doing so as a symptom of the culture of FPS games rather than the cause of them. The game was reviewed by the province’s Director of Film Classification rather than someone relevant to that position. This article is very helpful. It not only shows the paranoia of video game violence in this country, but that it has also spread to others as well. It also shows that the way video games are rated is not very fair seeing that the Film Director rated this game, not a separate association that deals exclusively with video games and can rate them based on other games without influence from other media.

Grossman, Dave. "We Are Training Our Kids To Kill." Saturday Evening Post July 1999: 64-72.

Lt. Col. Grossman contends that video games are teaching young children how to kill through video games. He claims that in military and police training, the cadets are trained reflexively to point and shoot their target. “Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills?” He thinks that we are training kids in a Pavlovian manner conditioning kids to shoot for the same targets areas and employ the same military and police tactics in video games. What he doesn’t note is that those games were not that realistic. He also is afraid that kids today are being desensitized from shooting virtual people because a middle school teacher said that her class had laughed when she brought up the Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings.

---. "We Are Training Our Kids To Kill." Saturday Evening Post September 1999: 54+

Lt. Col. Grossman continues his thoughts on video games and their direct relation to kids shooting their classmates in school. His thoughts to curb the violence is to turn it off, the video games and the violence on television in general. His second thought was to implement some sort of gun control. His third thought was to legislate video games and outlaw violent video games for children. Lt. Col. Grossman was apparently not made aware of the fact is that there are no violent video games for children. Every violent video game (mainly fighters) carries with it a T-rating for teens aged 13-17, but the shooters are all M-rated. None of the shooters are made for kids. I feel that this is another example of another so-called pundit saying that the video game industry is doing a disservice to the children of America because it is promoting realistic violence. Of the shooters popular then, they had no real realistic feel to it (ex. no pre-programmed human targets to shoot at, basically all the targets were bitmapped monsters).

Larkin, Marilynn. "Violent video games increase aggression." Lancet 355 (2000)

"Lieberman's Gameplan." Official Playstation Magazine Oct. 2000: 40.

This provides a basic background on Senator Joseph Lieberman’s (D-Connecticut) stance on his war against the violent video game industry. It doesn’t get into any specifics when it comes to naming games, other than the one that set him off (Mortal Kombat) but it does go into the steps of what he had to do to keep the more violent games out of the hands of the younger children. This article does bring up two points which I think are important:

1. Lieberman claims that the violent games hurt young children when there is no proof of such.
2. Lieberman believes that if the “video game makers don’t clean up their act, (he) firmly believes it’s the government’s responsibility to step in and pass new laws regulating the games industry and other media”.

Nowhere in this article does it say that Lieberman has had any personal experience whatsoever with a video game of any type. This just shows how the government always tries to mess with things it doesn’t understand instead of letting the ones with the personal involvement police themselves.

Merriam-Webster OnLine. 5 Mar 2003 <m-w.com>.

New law restricts violent video games in Indianapolis July 18, 2000. 18 July 2000. 5 Mar. 2003 <http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/18/violent.videogames.ap/>.

The City of Indianapolis and Marion County passed a law restricting access to coin operated video games in arcades. All violent coin-ops were to be labeled as violent and placed 10 feet away from all other video games. Those games were also hidden behind a curtain or a wall and all game players had to be 18 or accompanied by an adult to play. The city required all coin operated machines to have a city permit and the city thought it could enforce that law. A Purdue professor thought that the law wouldn’t do any good. He didn’t see a correlation between the violence and a person playing a violent video game. This article shows exactly what can happen when an uninformed public gets a hold of information that seems similar and they jump to conclusions trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.

US attorney general takes aim at violent video games April 4, 2001. 4 Apr. 2001. 6 Mar. 2003 <http://web.archive.org/web/20010405103159/http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/04/04/crime.ashcroft.reut/index.html>.

    This CNN article goes into how Attorney General John Ashcroft was about to take the violent game makers (most notably the makers of First Person Shooters) to task for making their games so violent. He says that he doesn’t want to infringe on those exercising their first amendment rights but he said that people needed to restrain themselves from exposing themselves with such constant violence. Ashcroft also mentions that one of the shooters in Columbine had programmed his copy of the game “Doom” to mimic his neighborhood and that Michael Carneal had never fired a gun before but learned from playing “violent video games”. This article is much different from the others because it mentions that the media coverage may have also contributed to some of the copycat Columbine shootings. Although this article mentions that two of the three shooters had some direct involvement with shooting games, it does not say that it was the cause of them committing their acts.

Van Horn, Royal. "Violence and Video Games." Phi Delta Kappan Oct. 1999: 173-174.

Van Horn uses this article to bring together several similar articles to bring together his point. One of the lines that he uses shows that the initial writer one of the stories he used knows what he was talking about: “Violent computer games don't spur violence; violent computer games channel antisocial behavior in societally acceptable ways” (Greg Costikyan, "Games Don't Kill People -- Do They?," Salon, http://www.salonmagazine.com/tech/feature/999/06/21/ game_violence/index.html). He uses facts that show that the teenagers who played video games 20+ hours a week played without parental supervision and they set less rules concerning video game violence. This clearly shows that those who do play video games are unmonitored and can basically play any type of game that they want and that the parents can remain clueless about what their children are watching. But it also does not state anywhere that those gamers that play shooters have actually gone out and shot a large group of people. Again, this is yet another article that acknowledges that young teenagers do play violent video games, but it also says that it is not the cause of people actually shooting people.