If You Are Pointing Fingers, Point Them At the Video Games

(Above is a picture of me with my parents, both very strict yet still connected with me and my siblings.)




“The sympathetic imagination is the ability of a person to penetrate the barrier which space puts between him and his object, and by actually entering into the object, so to speak, to secure a momentary but complete identification with it” (WJ Bate 131)

The “object” I am aiming to identify with is the idea that liberals are not only the cause of 9/11, but are bringing down society as a whole and that their ideals and morals need to change.

Rather than taking the approach that many took, arguing from the perspective of someone like Osama Bin Laden, I am going to argue from the perspective of parents. In general, parents attempt shelter their children from the negative aspects of the life. Often times, children do not understand the goal of this and end up rebelling, however, having grown up in an extremely strict household, I have come to appreciate the sheltering I received.

Childhood is one of the most impressionable times of someone’s life. Children grow up to run the world, to make decisions; they are the future. It is for this reason that we must censor everything involving sex and violence.

What is the value of putting negative images and ideas into the environment for youth and even adults to absorb, eventually affecting their behavior, personality, and views?

On April 20, 1999, two shooters by the names of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School armed with both bombs and guns with the intention of blowing up the cafeteria and the library. (This is a picture from a security camera of the boys during their shooting spree.) When the bombs placed in the cafeteria failed to fully detonate, the boys, anxious to begin their killing spree, entered the school area and immediately killed Rachel Joy Scott and injured a friend a hers sitting nearby. The shootings continued for approximately 50 minutes. The end result was shocking, terrifying and heartbreaking; 12 students and 1 teacher were killed and 24 students were injured. Harris and Klebold both committed suicide in the library after committing this tremendous crime and destroying the lives of many innocent people.

Post-shooting, the boys’ lives were investigated and it was discovered that violence was not a stranger to them. The boys spent a great deal of time playing violent video games that simulated shooting and killing people,

such as Doom and Wolfstein 3D, as well as other acts of violence. The boys had also recorded videos of themselves describing what they wanted to do and voicing the hate they felt for the world and many of their classmates.

Now, I do not fully blame violent video games for the mental disturbances that these boys must have suffered from, but I do believe that the violent games largely contributed to their ability to recreate violent scenes and dream up their killing scenes. Had Harris and Klebold’s parents monitored their activities had viewed video games more conservatively, it is very likely that those 13 people would still be alive today rather than being killed in their school, a place that is supposed to be a safe haven. (This is a memorial for the 13 killed in the Columbine shootings.)

If we were to rid the nation and even the world of these games and ideas, fighting and violence would be far less prevalent in the minds of young boys and girls and the excitement that these games can create would disappear. There is no reason for us to encourage children, or anyone for that matter, to think about inappropriate sexual or violent acts that do nothing positive for society. We should eliminate these as much as we can before they cause more damage to our world.