Violent kids or violent video games? Who is to blame?

Since they have come out violent video games have always been blamed for kids behavior. Death Racer was considered to be one of the first violent video games out there. In the game you would drive around and run over as many people as possible before the time ended. Since the years have gone on the graphics and violence has continued to increase. After years of research no one is able to fully correlate violence in video games to violence in real life. 

News stories involving violence will tend to include these violent video games as part of why the violence happened. For Example, The Montreal Gazette says “We have to address cultural influences that extol the gang lifestyle and desensitize impressionable minds to violence, be it social media, video games, TV, movies or music.”. When there is no other evidence but a game involving similar violence how can you blame them. With lack of evidence in the violence also comes with a lack of evidence with the video games. Games like call of duty, mortal kombat, and GTA are some of the most popular games, with violence being the focus of their games. There are reasons games like these are age-restricted. Kids shouldn’t be handed games like this with this much violence. They don’t have the capability to understand what is wrong with recreating what they saw in the game they played, but that doesn’t mean they automatically will. People have a moral compass where we know right from wrong. The knowing of right from wrong will always be there when watching the violence played through games. The only times when games are recreated in real life are when kids decide to purposely do wrong and want real-world violence. The game has nothing to do with the kids wanting to do these acts of violence. The only thing that video games are doing is giving them ideas but that desire for violence is in the kid.