Teaching Kids How To Kill
Connections:
Child soldiers in places such as Africa are taught to intentionally kill, just as soldiers are taught to kill in training camps and so on. They are taught to go against their natural instincts of not killing their own species and made to kill other humans. In the case of children in first world countries it is video games and media violence that is teaching kids to kill, but in the third world countries drugs, training and abuse are teaching these kids to become violent and go against their morals. So in the end no one is just a natural born killer but children one way or another are taught how to kill.
Challenges:
How they said that violent video games and media are teaching children how to kill. I think that's wrong. That there are millions of kids including myself that are exposed to violence through media and video games and that they don't go around killing people. There were probably many factors affecting why that teen chose to shoot up the school such as his family life, social life, emotional status, connection to victims, access to weapons or maybe he had a mental disease like there are 100's of reasons why he might have acted like he did so blaming the video game company was in fact wrong.
Concepts:
Some of the key concepts that are important are:
- How video games and media violence are affecting our children
- The 3 methods in this madness:
- Brutalization- where your bullied into embracing brutalization and letting it become a part of you
- Classical Conditioning- where over time you begin to associate violence with laughter and popcorn and the joy of getting the kill in a game and you begin to present that in everyday life
- Operant Conditioning: where you begin to have reflexes over time and begin to make violence a part of you and have it drilled into your brain
- Role Models- where someone you respect such as an actor is on screen and killing which makes you sense that its okay to do something like that
Changes:
That we should strictly start to limit how our media violence and video game violence is spread and we should learn how to prevent against the techniques shown above that are corrupting our children's minds. We need to also asses how well our children's surroundings are and how and who they hang out with. There are many things we can do to prevent this kind of violence and we should start to take action.
