As of October 10th, 2015, there have been 52 shootings in

schools across the United States, leaving many people to wonder why
such horrible acts have become so commonplace. A fairly common
argument made by many people, including former presidential
candidate Ralph Nader who once referred to video game creators as
electronic child molesters and current republican party frontrunner
Donald Trump who posted Video game violence & glorification must
stop - its creating monsters! on Twitter. In once instance, the CEO and
executive vice president of the National Rife Association (NRA) [insert
name] said there exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting
shadow industry that sells, and sows violence against its own people,
and then referred to a number of well known video games, such as
Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, and Bulletstorm as examples
thereof; despite such claims, as an artistic medium, video games have
a right to depict violence. Art of all mediums has depicted violence as
a theme for centuries, and as creator of the game 1000 Days of Syria
Mitch Swenson believes, may even give one a better understanding of
violence as a dark reality of life. This is not helped by the fact that
many video game makers deliberately produce controversy to help sell
their games. Despite this, it has been shown in numerous instances
that video games do not contribute to real-world violence.
One common argument that has been made against video
games is that by depicting violence, they desensitize their players, and
make them aggressive - the monsters referred to my Mr. Trump.
However, researchers seem to be divided on this issue. While it has
been shown that violent video games can increase aggression and
desensitize players to violence in a laboratory setting, meta-analyses
of the rates of violent crime compared with video game use actually
indicate that the rise of video games have coincided with a reduction in
violent crime. While one cannot use this to imply that video games
have caused this reduction which, considering the aforementioned
lab results, would be a stretch anyway it does make one fact very
clear: whatever increases in aggression and desensitization
researchers are observing in laboratory environments, these effect
clearly are not translating to the real world. Otherwise, we would be
experiencing a crime epidemic of mind-boggling proportions, especially
considering that an estimated 99 percent of American boys and 94
percent of American girls, 54 percent of the American population
overall play video games for nearly two hours, and that around 90
percent of popular games depict acts of violence. To quote