I think children can just as easily discharge their so-called aggressions with games that are competitive, challenging and enjoyably reckless, like the Off Road Racing game. Fran Liscio B oal's article on the connection between video games and violence completely missed the point. He was quick to criticize Maj. Grossman's theory on video games is not that they make people violent, but that they lower the resistance to pulling a trigger. The military has had a long-standing problem with getting people to pull the trigger.
Most people think too much before shooting.
Video games make that trigger-pulling reaction an immediate response, one that bypasses the normal safeguards that keep us from killing. These games are identical to the training that elite forces go through to get them to kill instantly in close-quarters combat. Even cheaper to make snide comments about his departure from the Boston Globe. We don't hear discussion about such topics with clarity and without arrogance in many places. But perhaps it did not occur to Poniewozik that the readership is in fact smart enough to recognize good journalism when we read it, and that we rate it accordingly.