## Should Violent Video Game be Banned?

  
  
In 1971 Pong, the first Video Game was released 47 years ago and with time more video games have been released, which became more realistic. Violent video games are consumed by teenagers and older children, ranging in age from 7 to 17. Although Violent Video games are easy to access and can easily entertain your children for hours, psychologists have proven over and over again that Violent Video Games can affect your Childs psychological state, Violent Video Games should be banned completely in Canada. Violent Video games will affect your child by psychologically desensitizing them, increasing aggressive behavior, and even making your child have more violent tendencies.  
  
Children who play violent video games are reluctant to respond to violent situations, they do not see them as a real situation anymore. Watching the repetitive killing in these games have become the norm for the children, the children do not react to the situations anymore as they have seen them too often, it has been scientifically proven that when children play these violent video games it affects their cognitive development. In one experiment done by the Radiological Society of North America had provided results by showing how violent video games change the way children think and affect their cognitive development. The study had the children play a violent video game for ten hours a week and then stop for the next week, the other group of children was asked not to play any violent video games for a two-week period. The children after the first week underwent a functional magnetic resonance imaging and then the children had another imaging test done at the end of the experiment. In this experiment it showed that these children's cognitive function and emotional control was altered even after only one week of playing the video games, the experiment showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional tasks and less activation in the Anterior Cingulate Cortex during the counting tasks. When the children did not play any video games in the second week the experiment showed that the changes to the executive area of the brain had diminished. This is very important because when children become desensitized they can become dangerous, as their aggression will increase, and their empathy will decrease.  
  
Violent Video Games affect childrens behavior negatively when children play these video games there will be an increase of aggressive thoughts, the children will be experiencing more angry feelings, they will also be experiencing physiological arousal, which includes increased heart rate, and aggressive behavior. The aftermath of playing these video games also means a decrease in empathy and even helping behavior. Children will start having tantrums when they do not get what they want, they will get extremely frustrated with the littlest things, they will have an extremely short temper, and may even hit or throw things. Children will not have any sort of positive impact from these games, their behavior will change at the start in little ways like having the tantrums more often and soon they will be using violent tendencies like punching and throwing objects. "exposure to violent video games increases physiological arousal and aggression-related thoughts and feelings. Playing violent video games also decreases prosocial behavior" ( journals.sagepub/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00366 ). Children love violent video games and even become addicted to them which can cause more of a problem. Children playing the games will not hang out with other children as much, they will become anti-social and far more aggressive than the average child. The increase in aggressive behavior almost always leads to violent tendencies, these violent tendencies can cause harm to others.  
  
The two shooters in the Columbine massacre in 1999 were fans of a violent video game called Doom which is a first-person shooter game, we also can not forget about Anders Brevik, a Norwegian mass shooter who had claimed at his trial that he had trained for his shooting by using Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 which is another first-person shooter game, and of course the Virginia Tech shooter just so happened to be a huge fan of the video game counter strike which just so happens to be another first-person shooter game. Sadly, these are not the only incidents in which video games have inspired murderers, terrorists, and mass shooters. "For many in the general public, the problem of video game violence first emerged with school shootings by avid players of such games at West Paducah, Kentucky (December, 1997); Jonesboro, Arkansas (March, 1998); Springfield, Oregon (May, 1998), and Littleton, Colorado (April, 1999). More recent violent crimes that have been linked to violent video games include a school shooting spree in Santee, California (March, 2001); a violent crime spree in Oakland, California (January, 2003); five homicides in Long Prairie and Minneapolis, Minnesota (May, 2003); beating deaths in Medina, Ohio (November, 2002) and Wyoming, Michigan (November, 2002); school shootings in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania (June, 2003) and Red Lion, Pennsylvania (April, 2003); and the Washington, DC. "Beltway" sniper shootings (Fall, 2002). Video game related violent crimes have also been reported in several other industrialized countries, including Germany (April, 2002), and Japan (Sakamoto, 2000)" (sciencedirect.science/article/pii/S0140197103000976 ). Violent Video Games have inspired many violent events and situations, they will continue to inspire mass shooters, murderers, and terrorists as long as they are on the market.  
  
Violent Video games will affect your child by psychologically desensitizing them, increasing aggressive behavior, and even making your child have more violent tendencies. Violent Video games have created teen murderers, terrorists, and mass shooters. We have watched teenagers murder their peers every day whether it is in a school shooting or just for fun. It seems that the cause is always video games and because of this, they should be banned and taken off the market.