Does it Matter That British Teen Suspected of Stabbing Teacher to Death Played Violent Video Games?

The
Daily Mail is reporting that the teenager in England who
is suspected of recently stabbing a teacher to death in front of
students played “ultra-violent video games,” “experimented with
drugs,” and threatened to commit suicide after he complained about
bullying. The Mail also mentions that the 15-year-old
boy’s peers regarded him as a loner who mostly did well in school
but “seemed increasingly troubled in recent months.” The Grand
Theft Auto series and Dark Souls are all mentioned as
games played by the suspect in the Mail‘s reporting.

Most readers will remember that after the Sandy Hook Elementary
shooting in December 2012 it was reported that Adam Lanza enjoyed
violent video games such as those in the Call of Duty
series. In March 2013
The New York Times reported that according to one
witness Lanza was a “shut-in and an avid gamer who plays ‘Call of
Duty,’ amongst other games.” According to The Daily Mail,
Lanza also played
Gears of War.

However, while it might be the case that many of those who
commit violent crimes also played violent video games it is not
clear that there is a causal relationship between playing violent
video games and violent crime.

In the March 2014 issue of Reason
Jacob Sullum points out that Lanza played Dance Dance
Revolution every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in the months
before the Sandy Hook massacre. No one is suggesting that Lanza’s
obsession with dancing as being causally related to his murder of
27 people.

Reason‘s Jesse Walker notes in the June 2014 issue
of Reason that in the wake of the Sandy Hook
massacre there was support for action to be taken against video
games across the political spectrum, with Donald Trump tweeting
“Video game violence & glorification must be stopped—it is
creating monsters!” and Vice President Joe Biden proposing a tax on
video games.  

It was not only Lanza’s penchant for violent video games that
some thought could in some way be linked to his violence; others
pointed out that he had Asperger syndrome although, as Sullum
points out, The New York Times noted that “there is no
evidence that people with Asperger’s are more likely than others to
commit violent crimes.”

Last year, Kotaku
published an article on what 25 years of research on violence and
video games has come up with. Kotaku notes that, “While there are
no documented scientific links between video games and criminal
violence, the question of whether violent video games lead to
aggression has been hotly debated.”

The article goes on to point out that “there have been two major
meta-analyses” done on data relating to video games and violence
and that the two groups that did studies on the data came to
different conclusions.

Scientists such as
Brad Bushman and Craig Anderson believe that there is “a definitive
causal link between games and aggressive behavior.” The Kotaku
article notes that there is a distinction between aggression and
criminal violence:

That distinction between criminal violence and aggression is
critical. Science has yet to show any links between video games and
violence, but violent games may have a more subtle effect on
children: for example, they could make a child more inclined to
bully or spread rumors about his peers.

However, researchers Chris Ferguson and Cheryl Olsen, who
examined the same data as Bushman and Anderson, believe that there
is no conclusive evidence between violence and video games.
Ferguson told Kotaku:

I think anybody who tells you that there’s any kind of
consistency to the aggression research is lying to you, quite
frankly… There’s no consistency in the aggression literature, and
my impression is that at this point it is not strong enough to draw
any kind of causal, or even really correlational links between
video game violence and aggression, even, no matter how weakly we
may define aggression.

For more from Reason on video games click here, and be sure to check
out Reason‘s June 2014 video game-themed issue.