SEARCY -- Dave Grossman is hitting his topic -- violent video games -- hard. He has a crowd at Harding University's Benson Auditorium hanging on every word.
On violent video games: "Every year they get more realistic, more powerful and more sick."
On their effect: "We're raising the most vicious generation of killers in world history."
To parents: "Stop feeding your kids violence, death and horror."
On school security: "If your kids' college doesn't have armed cops on campus, take them out of there and send them to a college that cares."
On educators who fail to prevent school killings: "You will spend the rest of your life in hell."
Grossman is heard. He is believed. He gets a standing ovation. After his presentation, he's practically mobbed.
But is he right?
NONSCIENTIST ACTIVIST
Grossman has been around the issue of violent entertainment media for a long time. His book, written with Gloria DeGaetano -- Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill -- was first published in 1999. An updated version will be out later this year. He's also the author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. A retired Army officer, he taught psychology and military science at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
When two schoolboys shot up a middle school at Jonesboro, killing four students and a teacher, Grossman was recently retired from the Army and living in Jonesboro. One of his children was in middle school -- a different one.
His appearance at Harding, he said, was one of many over the course of nearly 300 days of travel a year. So well known is Grossman on this topic that his name appears in academic studies on the issue. In one, he is described as a "nonscientist" who connects "individual real-life violent crimes to violent games, despite evidence that violent crimes, including youth crimes, generally are decreasing." In the same study, he is said to be "[P]erhaps the most respected of the causal hypothesis activists."
Grossman is as intense one-on-one as he is in front of a
crowd. In the 15 years since publication of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, what has changed? Three things, he said.
First, he said, the violence and misogyny are worse than ever, exemplified by Grand Theft Auto 5.
"It's about being a criminal. That's all there is to it. The games are computer-generated, they're played for hundreds of hours and you never repeat yourself. And for hundreds of hours you steal stuff, you sell drugs, you kill cops, you can make a lot of money. You accrue all the money you can, and you can buy sex from a prostitute. After you're done having sex with the prostitute, your character level goes up. And then you murder the woman you had sex with [and] you get your money back."
Variety, the newspaper of the entertainment industry, reported in February that Take-Two Interactive, maker of the video game Grand Theft Auto 5, had shipped an estimated 32.5 million copies of the game to retailers, and that sales reached $1 billion in three days.
That brings Grossman to the second change -- the penetration of video games into the youth population.
"There was a survey in Michigan, when Grand Theft Auto 4 was out, 30 percent of the second-graders had played the game."
The third change, he said, was that the United States Supreme Court ruled the Constitution protects violent video games.
In June 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a California law that banned the sale of violent video games to minors. By a vote of 7-2, the court said the law -- which would have imposed a fine of $1,000 on those who sold or rented such games to minors -- violated the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
One of the dissenters was Justice Stephen Breyer, who made comparisons to laws that prohibit the sale of pornography to minors.
"Why are the words 'kill,' 'maim,' and 'dismember' any more difficult to understand than the word 'nudity?'" he wrote in his dissent.
Previous cases, Breyer wrote, make clear "that a State can prohibit the sale to minors of depictions of nudity; today the Court makes clear that a State cannot prohibit the sale to minors of the most violent interactive video games. But what sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting a sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?"
On the other side of this barbed-wire fence is the Entertainment Software Association, which represents computer and video game publishers. Rich Taylor Sr., vice president of communications at ESA, said the court affirmed what the industry has always known -- "that free speech protections apply every bit as much to video games as they do to other forms of constitutionally protected creative expression like books, music and movies."
Taylor disputes Grossman's assertion that 30 years of research prove media violence causes violence.
"There is no scientific evidence that computer and video games cause real-life violence," Taylor said, adding that "numerous independent studies have concluded that there is no link between video games and real-world violent behavior."
CHICKEN AND EGG
Grossman sees bad times ahead.
"The kids who gave us Jonesboro in the middle school, Columbine in the high school, Virginia Tech in the college, are now coming back to school and giving us Sandy Hook in the elementary school," he said at Harding.
"They've given us crimes as children we've never seen before. They're going to give us crimes as adults we can't begin to imagine."
What about school shooters and a link to violent video games? A lot of thinking about this is what criminologist Tim Brown calls "reverse causation." Brown's an assistant professor in the department of criminal justice at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Rather than video games creating violent young people, "aggressive individuals are attracted to violent video games."
A 2002 report by the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education examined 37 school shootings. There was no accurate profile of students engaged in school violence, the report said.
"Although all of the attackers were boys," the report said, "there is no set of traits that described all or even most of the attackers."
Most attackers had no history of violent or criminal behavior. But most "showed some history of suicidal attempts or thoughts, or a history of feeling extreme depression or desperation." About three-quarters "felt persecuted, bullied, threatened, attacked or injured by others prior to the incident."
About one-quarter of the attackers showed an interest in violent movies. Same for violent books. Only one-eighth of the attackers "exhibited an interest in violent video games," the report said.
The largest group of attackers, 37 percent, "exhibited an interest in violence in their own writings, such as poems, essays or journal entries."
CALL OF DUTY
One point of agreement is that parents have a role in controlling video game use by their children.
"At the minimum, absolutely enforce the rating system," Grossman said. "Call of Duty is an M-rated game. If your 13-year-old wants to play Call of Duty, say, 'The people who made this game say you shouldn't be playing it.'"
"Not all video games are appropriate for all players, just as not all movies and books are suitable for all audiences," the ESA's Taylor said. "Parents are, and should be, the decision-makers when it comes to choosing video games for their children."
In that case, meet Brenda Ficklin of Little Rock, whose son, Caleb, is a 15-year-old sophomore at Central High School. Caleb's video game time is restricted. He gets to play on Fridays and Saturdays, and on Sundays but no later than 8 p.m. Ficklin also monitors what he plays.
"I believe in my heart that anything that goes into the mind has an effect. As it relates to video games, I am just so adamant about screening the video games my son plays," she said.
Caleb doesn't like for his mother to go with him as he shops for video games.
"His whole thing is he doesn't want me to go inside," Ficklin said. "But I'm going inside -- I need to know."
Once upon a time, Caleb had Call of Duty.
"He got by with that because I didn't know what it was. Call of Duty -- sounded good to me. Sounded like it may be educational. But when I first heard him play it, there was literally a war going on in my home because of the shooting and the killing."
VIOLENT CRIME IS DOWN
Brown, the UALR criminologist, said violence as a whole in the United States is the lowest on record, and youth violence has declined as well. Meanwhile, sales of violent video games are up.
"There's no correlation there," Brown said, "let alone causation."
Violence is complex, Brown said, and "people want answers quickly and succinctly. Media like video games are now the scapegoat utilized in these situations."
Look outside the United States for comparisons, Brown said. In Europe, people play the same games, the first-person shooter games, but rates of violence are lower than in the United States. "They're seeing the same media, but not having the same rates."
Why are U.S. crimes rates on a downward slope?
Incarceration has had an effect, Brown said -- 2.8 million Americans are in prisons -- but there's a tipping point where more imprisonment has a different effect because of the absence of workers and fathers.
Instead, America has "aged out of crime."
Fifteen to 24 is the age curve of crime, Brown said, for victims and perpetrators. In the 1970s and into the 1990s, the baby boom generation was in that age curve.
One of Grossman's criticisms is of the news media.
"If you can just get a body count, you can get on the cover of Time magazine." The media, Grossman said, in his speech at Harding, have become a co-conspirator. They offer "fame and immortality on a glass platter."
Interpersonal relationships shape our sense of right and wrong, Brown said, rather than media.
"Media doesn't make us. We make media."
Family on 03/19/2014