Last Friday a 19-year old boy ran amok in a school in Erfurt, Germany. He killed 16 people before finally killing himself. The victims were 12 teachers, a secretary, 2 pupils and a policeman, most of them killed by headshots from a handgun. The perpetrator also carried a pumpgun which he didn’t used and 500 rounds of ammunition.
The boy had been excluded from school in February after being exposed to have forged attests to avoid exams.
As always with such incidents people are in shock and start looking for reasons which led to this disaster. And inevitably a certain aspect of this boy’s life is drawing attention: He was an active computer-gamer and listened to ’Heavy-Metal’-music (favorite group: Slipknot). It was reported that he played a lot Counterstrike (a ’killer-game’, as it was phrased by a press agency). For the sake of completeness he was also dedicated to weapons and member of 2 arms clubs, which allowed him to legally buy the gun.
Of course there’s more to the background of this boy. Will we ever know what finally drove him over the edge to run amok? It was reported the family would have been ’intact’ and ’normal’. I find that hard to believe. While I’m willing to believe the family was ’normal’ so far that there was no constant quarreling and beating I could very well imagine that this boy was introverted, trying to seclude himself from others and was left alone by his parents who didn’t notice what was going on inside of him. Are the parents to blame what happened? I don’t know.
But the public, especially certain parts of media and politics are pretty quick to blame something else: Violence in the media, be it movies, music and - of course - computer games. A German TV station just made a poll if violent games should be banned completely. I missed the results of the poll, but apparently 80% of the participants voted in favor of banning violent games.
In the forum of the TV station somebody made a very smart remark: People who have violent tendencies are attracted by media with violent content.
Makes perfect sense, because those people would look for an outlet of their own latent violence, either more actively (in games) or passively (in movies) or a bit of both (music, on which can be reacted physically). I could also imagine that such people would be attracted to certain kind of sport events. Also there have been previous cases in which such people had been attracted by the nazi-ideology.
But can you blame computer games for such outbursts of violence? Do computer games like Counterstrike dull people, decrease their threshold for using violence in real life? Do computer games - on closer examination - promote to solve problems by violence any more than many sports do?
I think for each case where this might have been true there are thousands, or even tens of thousands cases where it is wrong. For each amok runner there are thousands of people successfully separating fictionous violence from real-life violence.
Actually I’m kind of glad the perpetrator was no longer a kid. The whole - and actually just starting - discussion would be much fiercer if the amok runner would have been younger. People easily forget that as far as violent content in any form is concerned legal regulations and restrictions rarely work (well, they don’t actually forget, but they fail to acknowledge the necessary consequences) and that it all boils down to the parents actively raising their kids to deal with fictionous violence - and of course with real violence as well.
But people tend to prefer easy solutions to those more complex ones. It’s much easier to blame aggressive music and violent games than to examine where perhaps the parents, the school/teachers or the social environment has failed, or at least missed any signals of upcoming of this tragedy.
Maybe it would have to lead to the realization that sometimes such tragedies cannot be avoided. Parents are not perfect, families are not always intact, school today is usually not the place where teachers can be concerned about every single pupil. Maybe these outbursts of violence are more a byproduct of our modern society in general. This necessarily includes the media, but only as one factor amongst others.
But here I am again, preaching to the choir ...
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