Running head: VIOLENCE 1
VIOLENCE 2
Media Violence Outline
PSY 101 Introduction to Psychology
6/30/2014
I. Introduction
A. Thesis Statement
You are what you watch. Easy to say, and not too difficult to imagine either. A little over a decade ago, two boys who later became household names in America, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and went on a mass murdering spree where they killed 12 students, 1 teacher and injured 23 others before shooting themselves (Anderson & Dill, 2008). While their motives behind doing so cannot be ascertained, one possible contributing element which did surface was the influence of violent video games. At the risk of oversimplifying what is possibly a complex psychological minefield, Harris and Klebold did enjoy playing a game called Doom, which is licensed by the American military for the purpose of training soldiers to kill effectively. Harris had customized his own version of this game and put it up on his website, which was later tracked by The Simon Wisenthal Center (Anderson & Dill, 2008).
Senior year picture
English: Hi-Point 995 Carbine 9 mm semi-automatic ...
An Intratec TEC-DC9 with 32-round magazine; a semi...This version of the game had two shooters with an unlimited supply of weapons and ammunition, and their targets lacked the ability to retaliate. A class project required them to make a video of themselves similar to the game, and in it, they dressed in trench coats, armed with weapons, and conduct the massacre of school athletes. Less than one year had gone by when Harris and Klebold played their videotape out, in real life, and became the protagonists of the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history (Anderson & Dill, 2008).
II. Body paragraph #1
There is nothing new about the presence of violence in our tools of entertainment. Whether they were ancient Greek dramas, theatre in the Elizabethan era or the...