Many articles relate recent violence’s to the increase in popularity of first person shooter video games and other forms of violence which is seen through the media such as movie. On the 14 th of December, a 20 year old man by the name of Adam Lanza killed his mother before going to Sandy Hook Elementary and killed about 20 children younger than 7 and 6 other staff members including the principal of the school. Norway experienced a similar event on the 22nd of July in 2011 which saw a massive car bomb erupt beside the liberal party members building before going to the island of Utoya which had children from liberal party members on it and gunning down 69 adolescents methodically.

In the case of Sandy Hook Elementary, Adam Lanza had no evidence of suffering a horrible childhood but he was said to be slightly autistic. Unlike Anders Breivik, there was no sign of motivation but the one thing which both killers had in common was the obsession they had for the first person shooter Call of Duty.

On the 22nd of July 2011, Anders Breivik was ready to put his three year plan into action where over the three years he had planned how to make the bomb and purchase gun parts slowly through the years to avoid attention. His motivation was to get rid of all Muslims in Europe and had very similar thinking to that of Hitler’s. There was talk about a perfect race and the elimination of Muslims in Europe; this was all found in a manifesto which was rumoured by the Daily Mail to be sparked by the game Call of Duty. One of the campaigns involved the killing of many Islam extremists and portrayed them in a very negative way. In addition to this, the survivors on Utoya had described the way Breivik killed their friends as calm, cool and slow. This is consistent with the argument that first person shooters do in fact desensitise the brain to violence. When Anders Breivik was taken to court he was quoted to say Call of Duty was good practice to simulate police response for training purposes.

Although many people use video games as a scape goat for these mass murders, it is impossible to say for certain and the data is definitely far from conclusive. From the graphs on this slide, it is clear that the number of shootings have been rising in young people especially, but this trend is not replicated by video games. The number of releases each year have been decreasing but the number of shootings are still increasing meaning that video games cannot be the only reason for the increase in shootings. A common argument is that there are many video games in Japan where more people play video games there compared to anywhere else. The situation is similar in Korea but the US still occupies 25% of all mass shootings. Therefore it is likely that the availability of weapons is a huge problem that contributes to these shootings.

Another example of technology contributing to heavy violence was seen about 3 years where in 2010, the killing of about 8 people was caught on video. In world war two, only about 20% of soldiers shot to kill and this was because of the very real situations that the soldiers were faced with. Now with technology, a man in Virginia was able to coordinate an attack on a news crew who were said to be armed men when in reality, they were only carrying cameras.

3:16 : a man is telling the gunner to keep shooting quite ruthlessly even though most of the people were already on the ground.

3: 45: the man laughs and does not have any remorse for what has happened.

There is no remorse and it is clear that through a screen almost anyone would be able to ‘shoot to kill’ compared the 80% of people in the actual war who were not able to shoot a Nazi and would miss on purpose.

Similar to this, the Milgrim experiment saw 100% of people pushing the 300 volts button and 65% going all the way to 450 volts before stopping. Being able to see the pain and experience everything first hand is very important in this case because the feelings are quite real, whereas in this experiment, the ordinary person was kept in a room where they could only hear the suffering instead of actually experiencing the pain. If the two people were in the same room, nobody will go up to 300 volts.

Therefore, in conclusion, the recent spike of violence’s in society is attributable to technology but only to a certain extent where external factors such as mental issues play a large role.