Call of Duty should be banned for children under the age of 17

I accept, and will be arguing that Call of Duty should be banned for children under the age of 17. FRAMEWORKBecause we have a normative resolution before us, CON and I will be sharing the burden of proof. You should vote for the person who is able to demonstrate the most significant net impacts in support of his proposal. Call of Duty is obviously a violent video that glorifies violence and killing--this is not how our children ought to be spending their time, nor should we encourage these types of behaviors or send the message from a societal level that these types of behaviors should in any way be emulated. CONTENTION ONE: Neurological Development First, young brains are far too immature to respond maturely, without the fear of dealing harm to themselves or their peers. Neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt says the following: "So the changes that happen between 18 and 25 are a continuation of the process that starts around puberty, and 18 year olds are about halfway through that process. Their prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed. That's the part of the brain that helps you to inhibit impulses and to plan and organize your behavior to reach a goal. And the other part of the brain that is different in adolescence is that the brain's reward system becomes highly active right around the time of puberty and then gradually goes back to an adult level, which it reaches around age 25 and that makes adolescents and young adults more interested in entering uncertain situations to seek out and try to find whether there might be a possibility of gaining something from those situations" (1).In other words, people below 25--and obviously this is worse for children--are unable to properly make decisions and ihibit impulses to act for the sake of reward. This means that being inundated with any violent video game, especially one as bad as Call of Duty, could produce rash behavor. What happens if a young child, too immature to understand the ramifications of his actions, were to emulate the death scene he just witnessed on his video system? Let's say he takes a pellet gun and shoots his friend in the eye. Let's take a step furhter, and imagine that this type of behavior becomes common practice and kids are constantly trying to outdo each other. So, instead of using pellet guns, they're using melle weapons. What kind of message are we sending if we tolerate this type of behavior?CONTENTION TWO: Descentivization to Video-Game Violence May Contribute to Real-World Violence"Indeed, in 2005, The Lancet published a comprehensive review of the literature on media violence to date. The bottom line: The weight of the studies supports the position that exposure to media violence leads to aggression, desensitization toward violence and lack of sympathy for victims of violence, particularly in children. In fact the surgeon general, the National Institute of Mental Health and multiple professional organizations — including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association — all consider media violence exposure a risk factor for actual violence" (2).CONTENTION THREE: Opportunity Cost of Playing Violent Video GamesOpportunity cost in economics is "The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action" (3). The fact of the matter is that the educational value of playing Call of Duty and mindlessly shooting people is almost completely zilch. There are infinitely more things that young children could be doing which would constitute better uses of their time, meaning that there's no logical reason that children should succumb to playing this game, anyway--meaning that a ban on playing violent video games sets a standard and incentivizes proper behavior that will help these children to grow up to become decent, contributing citizens. Rebutting CON's CaseCON states, "It is true that Call of Duty may be banned, but it doesn't have the ability to give people nightmares."This remark is patently false, and had CON taken the time to do research on this instead of playing COD, perhaps he would've seen that. On a video game forum far, far away, user electricfuneralfire reports the following: "lol I know this is sad but ive had a couple of nightmares recently about playing MW3. In the first I am trying to knife people and just keep missing over and over and cannot knife anyone period. In the second i am in the beginning of a match and the enemy team automatically starts raining down predator missles on my team. Weird I know" (4).In other words, CON's remarks are completely off-base. COD can in fact give you nightmares.CON states, "The two main reasons that Call of Duty is rated M is because of strong language and intense violence. It is a fact that people aged from 10 to 12 use these words in everyday life."He claims it is a "fact" that people aged 10 to 12 use strong language regularly, but he doesn't prove that this is a fact. Moreover, he doesn't prove why, even if it *were* a fact, why it *should* be a fact, and why we not only shouldn't discourage it, but should exacerbate by allowing children to play these violent video games. Not to mention, he fails to account for the fact that the language used in COD is likely far worse than the language of most adults, never mind a young 10 year old.CON states, "Many children under the age of 12 play Call of Duty."He fails to realize that this is an argument *for* banning COD to prevent these children for witnessing the horrid language and grotesque violence. CON states, "The intense violence is not natural."This is absolutley true, and is one of the main reasons that we should not allow kids to witness this violence: because they will try to emulate the unbelievable things they see on their video game screens, and it will have a number of deleterious effects.CON states, "For example, many foreign movies have an intense amount of blood, but parents allow children to watch these movies."Even if this were the case--and CON gives us no reason or evidence to make us think that it is--this is changing the goalposts, because we're debating whether these games SHOULD be banned, not whether parents currently allow their kids to play these games. This contentions is completely irrelevant, and there are a number of distinctions between foreign movies and violent video games. But, even if there weren't, we could simply prevent children from seeing them both, though I need not defend banning both for the sake of this debate in order to affirm the resolution. The resolution is affirmed. SOURCES (1) http://www.npr.org...;(2) http://mobile.nytimes.com...;(3) http://www.investopedia.com...;(4) https://community.callofduty.com...;