Do Video Games Influence Youth Violence?

In a world where a parent can easily go buy the latest first person shooter for their child, you may think that games such as Call of Duty or Halo may affect the minds of children due to the excessive amounts of violence present in games such of these. It would make sense too, since one may take experience seen in-game and apply them to the real world, which may cause dire consequences. Allegedly, the shooters from Columbine were influenced by violent video games. Do these games have a similar effect on all teens though? Do violent video games cause teens to go out and commit crimes because of what they view in them? Here is a graph of a correlation between video game sales and youth violence:


Source : http://videogames.procon.org/files/youthviolencevideogamechart.jpg

This chart graphs video game sales in the United States vs. incidents of serious youth violence. In the case of youth violence, it has steadily declined from 1996 due to the increased amount of video game sales.
So in actuality, it appears that video games do not influence youth violence in a negative way. They appear to decrease it. This may be because instead of going out and breaking the law, youth have a chance to relieve their anger with the use of recreational gaming. This makes sense; instead of going out and hurting someone, a kid can just load up their favorite first person shooter and "kill" virtual people with no repercussions that would affect their life.

Let's look at the sales of violent video games in the past 10 years now to see if there is a correlation:



This graph shows that the crime rate started to decrease when popular titles such as Doom series and the Grand Theft Auto series started to become released. This further more shows that violent video games may actually be a remedy for violent crimes instead of instigating them. The media constantly claims that violence in video games only cause problems, but no evidence is ever given showing that they cause people to commit crimes. The shooters at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and recently in Newtown just happened to be known to play violent video games. This shouldn't be a surprise, since 68% of American households are involved with either pc games or console games. Therefore, you can not tie violent video games to three separate incidents because such a vast amount of people are involved with gaming. You're always going to have outliers, so accurately  you can not come up with a conclusion that they do influence the youth to commit crimes.

If anything helps with the situation, it is that a child that is younger than 17 can't purchase an M rated game without a parent present. This enables the content given to the child to be controlled so that it doesn't become a problem. If a parent does not want their child exposed to it, then they can simply choose to not buy the game for them.


Source:
http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp
http://www.webpronews.com/nearly-70-percent-of-us-households-play-video-games-2009-06
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