After a series of mass shooting incidents in the US in this year (well, to be fair, mass shootings is a common thing in the US now), the politicians in this country are pointing their fingers toward video games as the true cause of the mass shooting problem of this country. A lot of people have thought that video games are a huge cause of violence in general, and the mass shooting is just the ultimate result of the violence. But a new study in the US suggests a different viewpoint toward the problem.
According to the new research on the Psychology of Popular Media Culture journal, video game is being heavily blamed recently because the recent mass shooting incidents have been done by white male citizens (actually, white male people is the main type of people that conduct mass shooting). If the mass shooting incidents are executed by a color people, not just the politician, but all the people would likely blame the shooter himself.
This research is the result of the work from psychology professor Patrick Markey, Ph.D., in Villanova University, Radnor Township, Pennsylvania, US. Professor Patrick Markey and his team have conducted a lot of tests and then analyzed the test results to come to this conclusion. One of the tests was conducted on more than 200,000 news articles written about 204 mass shooting cases. These 204 mass shooting cases have occurred in the duration of 40 years. The researching team discovered that if a mass shooting is done by a white male person at a school, people will blame video games eight times higher, in comparison with mass shooting cases with a black person shooter.
Another test that was done by professor Patrick Markey and his team was on 169 college students. The researching team brought fake news articles that reported about a mass shooting incident with 18-year-old male gamers as the shooters. In the fake news articles of 84 college students, the shooters are white males, and in the fake news articles of the other 85 84 college students, the shooters are black males. And the result was not surprising at all when the first 84 college students said that video game was likely the main problems, while the other 85 college students thought that the main problems likely come from within the shooters.
In the conclusion of this research, the researching team also noted that the chances of someone who would blame video games for mass shooting problem are also depended on whether or not that person plays the video game. If he or she plays video games before, that person would be less likely to blame video games for any kinds of problems, including mass shooting.
Although we can never 100% cross out video games from the list of causes for violence, it is time for everyone (including but not limited to politicians) to admit that video games actually do very little harm toward the society. We can even say that video games have brought a lot of good things to our life. People should start having a fairer attitude toward video game and begin to accept that the violence of people can come from within themselves, regardless of their skin colors.