Assassination Generation Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing
Paducah, Kentucky, 1997 : a 14-year-old boy shoots eight students in a prayer circle at his school. Littleton, Colorado, 1999 : two high school seniors kill a teacher, twelve other students, and then themselves. Utoya, Norway, 2011 : a political extremist shoots and kills sixty-nine participants in a youth summer camp. Newtown, Connecticut, 2012 : a troubled 20-year-old man kills 20 children and six adults at the elementary school he once attended. What links these and other horrific acts of mass murder? A young person's obsession with video games that teach to kill. Lt. Drawing on crime statistics, cutting-edge social research, and scientific studies of the teenage brain, Col. Grossman shows how video games that depict antisocial, misanthropic, casually savage behavior can warp the mind -- with potentially deadly results. His book will become the focus of a new national conversation about video games and the epidemic of mass murders that they have unleashed.