Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the recent massacre in Oslo that left 76 dead has said he used Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as part of his training for the attack. However, clinical psychologist Christopher Ferguson, who is also a leading expert on video game violence and mass killings at Texas A&M, says that this and other shootings involving a white male being blamed on video games smacks of racism.
“I know it’s a little controversial to say but there’s a certain type of racism in place with these killings,” said Ferguson to Forbes. “When shootings happen in an inner city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up. But when these things happen in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed. I think that there’s a certain element of racism or ignorance here.”
Despite claims in the past blaming video games for similar sorts of shooting sprees, the response from the mainstream media has been more muted this time, which might be a signal that societal views on gaming are changing. “There are groups out there who are going to blame video games on everything,” said Ferguson. “They’re like ambulance chasers, really. I think it’s irresponsible and thoughtless to try to make political gain off of someone else’s tragedy, but they’re going to do it. That’s what they do. But even those groups have been much quieter with the Oslo tragedy.”
“Scientifically, the idea that video game violence, movie, or television violence contributes to mass homicides is pretty much a debunked idea that has no real basis to it,” he added. “I think certainly the Supreme Court case helped, especially since they were so clear in pointing out that current research was not able to support that line of reasoning.”
Since the Columbine shootings in 1999, there have been numerous studies examining what connection there was between video games and real life violence. The results have actually benefited the industry because their results pointed to no conclusive causal link between playing the game and perpetuating the shootings.
“One thing we’ve learned from research is that approximately 95 percent of young boys have played a violent video game,” said Ferguson. “That becomes a tricky thing when these mass homicides occur and the shooter is a young male. The odds are he’s played violent video games. Linking the playing of violent video games to a mass homicide when the perpetrator is a young male is like blaming the killing on the fact that he was wearing sneakers. The base rate of that behavior is so common that it has no predictive value whatsoever.”
[Via IndustryGamers]
