Reading During November and December --

 At this time there is a sentencing about the terrible Aurora Theater Shootings.  I read The Spiral Notebook, which  is about “the Holmes case, but with an emphasis on the cultural influences that had shaped him and his generation.”  In their book about the Aurora Theater Shootings in July 2012, the authors quote people in their teens and twenties about these influences, as well as specialists.  These two quotes included in the book are about the influence of violent video games:

“There are two major types of memory and learning,” he (Dr. Larry Wahlberg, clinical psychologist) says.  “One type is Deductive Learning that comes from memory:  You  learn that Denver is the capital of Colorado by repeating this again and again.  The second type is called Procedural Learning and it comes from repetitive actions and practice, like shooting a basketball over and over until you become good at it.  One of the problems with video games is that you’re learning to kill repetitively in simulated situations.  You get better at it and you get more desensitized to the process.”

The authors, Stephen and Joyce Singular, refer many times to on-line responses to the violent attacks and to interviews with young people to respond to a stated point of view that older people have not experienced the culture as young people have.

From a twenty-five-year-old male graduate student:

If you don’t have close friends or a good relationship with your parents, what do you have?  Action characters in video games and movies.  The point of these games is violence…

The video games cover all the recent wars: Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  It’s not hard to figure how someone raised on this stuff could act it out in a real way that causes real violence…