Violent Video Games Debate Continues After Newtown Massacre

imageViolent video games may have motivated Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter Adam Lanza, according to anonymous law enforcement sources quoted by CBS News. Lanza may have “kept score” as he murdered 20 first graders and six adults at the school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The sources claim that law enforcement recovered a “trove” of video games from the basement of Lanza’s home, and say he spent “countless hours there alone, in a private gaming room with the windows blacked out, honing his computer shooting skills.” Lanza wanted to “top the score” of Anders Breivik, a Norwegian man who killed 77 people in Norway in July 2011, and targeted Sandy Hook because it was the “easiest target” with the most number of people. Connecticut State Police spokesman Lt. Paul Vance called these reports “mere speculation” and said it was too early to know the killer’s motivation.

“In my mind, we do not need to be glorifying violence,” Connecticut State Representative Debra Lee Hovey said in a statement. “What about murder and mayhem have become entertainment in our society?” National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre stated in a televised news conference: “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people through vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bulletstorm,’ 'Grand Theft Auto,’ 'Mortal Kombat’ and 'Splatterhouse.’”

Chris Ferguson, Associate Professor of Psychology and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M University, wrote in an article for TIME magazine that there is “no good evidence that video games or other media contributes, even in a small way, to mass homicides or any other violence among youth… In fact, during the years in which video games soared in popularity, youth violence has declined to 40-year lows… The notion that simply removing video games would make these events go away is as understandably tempting as it is nonsensical.”

As part of a broader effort to control firearms in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, President Obama called on Congress to “fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds.” On Jan. 24, 2013, Senator John Rockefeller (D-WV) sponsored the “Violent Content Research Act,” which would arrange for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games on children