(Brown 1).
While it seems undeniable that those immersed in these games, especially when emotionally unstable, will become increasingly desensitized, which could explain how some mass murderers have carried out their deadly rampages with complete scorn, even laughing as they slaughtered their schoolmates. They lived the scenario out a thousand times before(Brown).
"A youth pastor in Seattle, Washington told me with shock that young people he spoke with at a local high school the fateful day of 9-11 were hardly moved by the tragedy. They explained to him that they had seen much better graphics than what they had witnessed on TV that morning as the planes flew into the Twin Towers. The real like stuff hardly competed."(Brown).
This issue is especially relevant today, because the games are more realistic and bloodier than ever, and because most American boys play them at some point. Playing the games can cause in the short term, hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior to arise. However, it is not clear whether, after long increments of time that playing these games increases the overall likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime, like murder, rape, or assault, much less a Newtown-like massacre.(Carey) After it was reported that Adam Lanza, who carried out the Newtown shooting was an avid Call of Duty player, this gives a scary possibility of the link between games and violence because first-person shooters represent a $5 billion market, played by millions of people every single day.(Keim).
To try and figure out if these millions of players are ticking time bombs, the researchers need to take several tens of thousands of people, from children on up to adults, dividing them into groups with comparable socioeconomic, genomic, and behavioral profiles, setting them to play first-person shooters with varying amounts of regularity, and then following them for years, routinely conducting psychological tests and tracking their real world behaviors.
