video games have a negative influence

[Flackle]

Saying that children cannot tell the difference between video game violence to real life violence is an insult to human intelligence as a whole. There is no evidence that becoming Desensitized to video game violence causes violent tendencies in real life.

No evidence? What about the "coincidence" that most of  the recent mass shooters spent most of their time playing violent video games?
Children are much more impressionable than adults, and they can't always tell the difference between games and real life. Besides, we are talking about young adults with mental problems,  who obviously translate their video games into real life.

Correlation does not mean causation. I bet most of these people also watched movies, read, watched the news, exercised, and ate. Would you also argue that these things cause violence? I agree, these people had a mental disorder. But don't blame the video games for making them violent. They would have probably been violent without video games. You cannot use these mass murders as real scientific evidence. Real scientific evidence can only be obtained through a series of controlled experiments that are repeated to such a degree that it is overwhelmingly clear that the evidence is true, and from that we can use basic logic and reasoning to put together evidence to form eventually form a theory. Even then the evidence could still be proven false, which is why its called a theory. Do you not understand how the scientific method even works?

Furthermore, the original poster was talking about children. Not young adults. Just because other people started to talk about the recent mass murders doesn't automatically mean that's what this thread is about.

[crazyzoo]

Video games are not the problem. It is the parent who exposes their child to something without making the child understand what a game is.

exactly..........I also think that too many parents let video games and tv babysit their children instead of actually doing things with their child  or communicating with the child.

[Screwedupclick4life337]

The parent should just teach the child that it isn't real an there are other games out there besides violent ones

[nhendrickson]

Sometimes things like this can be a non-aggressive way to work out aggression.  Most of the people who have gone out and shot other people in public places are mentally ill.  I'm not trying to excuse their behavior, but things that would not trigger the average person may trigger someone who schizophrenic. 

We can't ban all violent video games because what one person regards as violent someone else may not.  It can be a very subjective call.

The only real harm I see that arises from playing video games constantly is sitting on your rear for hours.  Get up every now and then and get some real exercise lol.

[coreyw87]

Sorry I don't believe games and most movies have an effect on people, its mental illness that already exists.  I played games and watched most movies and I have no problems wanting to hurt people. 

[jowbow]

As a mother of a 24 year old I don't see any problems with video games and certain TV programs as long as the parent teaches the child that video games and certain TV programs are NOT REAL.  I also played most of the video games with my son so I do know what he played when he was younger and he plays now.  And video games were allow only when school work was done and only for an hour.  There were certain TV programs banned in my house after I watched them alone. And all the kids and my son were told those programs are NOT aloud to be watched in my house.  I did the same thing with certain internet websites.

[ben50]

This is one of the first things I thought of, we see the younger kids doing this now, look at the movie theatre and now this. This kid probably thought he was in some video game and went after kids because they could not fight back.

[brum7814]

riiiiiight, because out of the hundereds of millions of video games sold and played, every single person that's played them is insane.  =-P