Video games "normalize" violence and killing

http://www.ketv.com/newsarchive/15249738/detail.html

OMAHA, Neb. -- Playing video games increases aggression in some children and young adults and normalizes killing, some doctors said.

Research suggests that violent video games can make children feel different. A brain scan of a teenager who has just played what was deemed a nonviolent video game was compared to the scan of a teen who had just spent 30 minutes playing a violent game. Indiana School of Medicine researchers said highlighted areas in the brains showed increased activity in the areas involved in emotional arousal.

"Exposure to violent video games, even E rated video games, increases aggressive thoughts, increases pro-social behavior and increases general arousal," said Dr. Greg Snyder, a psychologist at Omaha's Children's Hospital.

Snyder said exposure to violence in video games can desensitize a teen to the real thing.

Research from Iowa State University, Kansas State University and the National Institutes of Health reached similar conclusions. Compared to teens who played nonviolent games, those who played violent games had a lower heart rate and lower galvanic skin response when they were exposed to videos of real violence, the studies showed.

"The more normal it is, the more likely it is they're going to activate or engage in those behaviors when provoked or even unprovoked," Snyder said.

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Here's the problem. I've been against violent video games ever since they were first invented. And I've been so frustrated at the wrong approach of researchers, which is why I like this article where, at last, they get it right. Folks who defend violent videos hear me out on this before turning it off and chanting "videos don't cause killing."

The important thing is that video games "normalize" violence and killing. In other words, they turn off the evolution provided horror of violence and killing and not only numbs people to violence but makes it appear "normal" and "manageable" (the philosophy of "it's just a game" and "better the game than to be actually violent.") Thus research in the past has been impaired because it tried to measure whether kids ran out and killed more after video games RATHER than measuring how much violence seems a normal part of social fabric and turns off their mental and physical abhorrence to violence. That is the problem. Kids raised on violent videos games are not going to be the champions of a violence free society since violence does not repel and fill them with abhorrence the way it did for the generations who grew up without being desensitized to violence. And they were not pussies. The generation that fought and won World War II did so without getting exposure to violence via videos and not TV's as they were not even invented then. If anything continual exposure to violence makes the peaceful more pussies than ever since they will not fight to keep violence from staining their society, and those who are prone to aggression will have a problem with self control since videos etc have normalized their mental and bodily functions to violence. So you can send all the people who do the talk circuits to schools about how violence is wrong all you want, but by night you are undoing that because via TV and videos violence is being normalized.

Suppose you swallowed some rotten food. At the first bite if you are healthy you vomit it out. That is revulsion that saves your life since nature evolved humans and animals to puke up something that might be poisonous or rotten. Videos teach you to suppress and eventually lose the ability to puke up violence and thus reject it. If our grandparents' or great grandparents' generation had seen only ONE example of killing that kids see every day now they'd be marching to Washington and burning down Hollywood, and I'm not kidding. They have intact and healthy revulsion to violence and they would never accept it as "art," "entertainment," and "'healthy' venting" the way it is today. Therefore our great and grandparents' generation worked for law and order, prosperity and peace in society, avoided war unless it was necessary, but then genuinely kicked butt when they had to. They retained the discernment that violence should be RARE and LAST resort, not "normalized," not "venting," and certainly not "entertainment."

That is the pit that the USA has fallen into. I've been so frustrated that researchers and irresponsible entertainment people (who certainly see their share of psychiatrists) have not understood that it is the normalizing of violence that is the downfall and the danger of today's society. They have literally turned off one of humanity's most vital and important survival instincts.

And not to get into the other topic but abortion is the other shoe of normalizing violence. Violence as normalized social objectives and entertainment are one shoe, and the termination of unborn babies is the other shoe. It is this generation that views a dead unborn baby as "a choice" and "an option" that has been robbed of another vital survival instinct. Even the toughest man is supposed to feel tender toward a pregnant mom-to-be, the unborn baby, and the born infant. That is how it used to be. Now we have an entire generation that does not remember men and women, boys and girls who felt that way and shared that view. This is an essential survival instinct. A generation that thinks an unborn baby is a lump of meat consumer choice and not a person is doomed. By giving violent entertainment and an abortion culture to this generation the previous generation has robbed their own children of two of their most important survival instincts. And then they wonder how fathers can beat the life out of a baby only a few weeks old, and mothers can torture or drown their children. It's not "mental illness." It's societal illness of normalizing a baby as a purchase choice and the normalizing of "expressing your real feelings, including rage" through the numbing and normalizing of violence.

I do not understand why millions of people do not understand this and start saving themselves and their children, to say nothing of saving humanity as a whole.