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Violent Events - Media & Tech

The Connection

Politicians have been connecting violent events, especially school shootings, to the influence of violent video games since the 90s. Lawsuits against the companies making the games have been filed many times by these politicians, and also by the parents of children injured or killed in the school shootings connected to video games. These charges against the producers are almost always dropped, usually for the conclusion that the jump from violence in a video game to violence in real life is too wide for a real connection to be present. With coming research, though, these ideas may change.

The Events

There are three school shootings often connected to video games, where the perpetrators were high-school aged teens. At Red Lake Senior High School of Red Lake, Minnesota, Jeffrey Weisse killed 9 other students, injuring 5, then killing himself. Jeff was known to play video games, but was also under the stress of a father lost to suicide and a mother with brain damage. He had tried to commit suicide twice, and was on Prozac after that.

The shooting at Heath High School in West Paducah, Kentucky, perpetrated by Michael Carneal who killed 3 and injured 5, resulted in a $33 million lawsuit by Jack Thompson, a representative for the parents of three victims of the shooting. The charges made against several computer game distributors, pornography sites, and the makers of two films were dropped the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because the jump from video games to real life violence was too extreme to justify the charges.

The third and most widely recognized event is the shooting of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were both avid video game players who killed 13 people, injuring 21 and then killing themselves. Here, the psychiatrist Jerald Block argued that it was not simply their psychiatric diagnoses that led to their violence. Instead he said that it was their immersion in and then grounding from video games that drove them to their actions. Games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D were favorites of the two, with Eric even constructing levels and modifications for Doom that were rumored to be built in the image of Columbine.