Youth Violence

It seems that every time you turn on the radio today you hear another story about a school shooting, or another teenager who gets mixed up in a gang war. Well, maybe it’s not every time you turn the radio on, but it certainly happens more than it should. But why does it happen? Why do seemingly good youth turn to violence?

One view, and one that is often touted, is that students who resort to violence are desensitized to it though video games and therefore do not see what they are doing as wrong. In the example of Columbine High School it was discovered that the gunmen often played the video game “Doom” and this is what gave them their nature of violence. But if it was this single game that brought rise to the violence than it would follow that there would be many, many more cases of youth violence. But this is simply not the case. Although there is a frightening amount, the numbers just simply do not add up if video games are to be blamed as the single reason.

There are thousands of people (many under the age of eighteen) who regularly play games equally violent, or more violent than the example of Doom. The overwhelming majorities of these people do not “take the game into the real world” and are instead perfectly happy to blow the heads of pixels inside of the computer. If video games were the culprit than there would be many more incidents of violence from those who play those games.

If video games are not to blame than what is? Another suggestion that has been brought to the table is drugs. No, we aren’t talking about the illegal kind that people take to get high, but the kind that doctors give to kids who they label as “hyperactive” or “unable to focus”. It has been suggested that these drugs have the side effect of making children irrational and prone to violence. Again, as with video games, there simply are not enough cases of violence by those who are taking these drugs for them to be the answer. They may well have contributed to the problem, but they are not the catch all solution.

If it is not an outside influence like video games or drugs than perhaps we should look inside violent youth for an answer. The first thought that comes to mind is peer pressure, other youth who compel a youth to violence. This seems like a fairly logical explanation on the outside, the youth is dared to go into school and kill a bunch of people…. But wait, doesn’t it seem slightly odd that the youth is actually doing it. Most people (if not all people) have an ingrained sense of right and wrong, enough so they won’t kill people just because their friends compelled them to it.

Perhaps then it is the students feeling that they are “left out” or rejected by there peers that drives them. This seems much more logical than the last example. A student who feels that he is completely left out by his peers and teased about it goes and decides to take revenge on those who exclude him. This is again rather plausible except for the ingrained knowledge of right and wrong that is inside of every person.

There is another possibility which I believe is the most likely to explain the acts that these students commit, and that is the lack of morality that fills our culture today. If you look at statistics the number of violent acts by youth has been on the rise as the cultural morality has been on the decline. Three hundred years ago youth had access to weapons, they had motivation, but by and large they did not. The real variable between these youth and the youth of today is not the access to dangerous weapons or the changes in the social lives of the youth it is quite simply the changing in the culture of the world. Three hundred years ago youth were instructed in morality, they were taught that there was a God who would punish them if they killed people, and they learned the proper way to relate to others. The culture had just as many violent influences, just as much peer pressure, and many of the same problems. But it had morality. That is what is missing today, and it is why there have been so many cases of teen violence. If anyone want to change this they won’t accomplish it by banning weapons on school property, they won’t accomplish it by banning video games, they will accomplish it by changing the world towards morality.