Tradition of violence undermines its real impacts

The recent shooting at Reynolds High School in Oregon, in which 15-year-old Jared Padgett shot and killed another student before taking his own life, has been described as “yet another school shooting” — key phrase: “yet another” — as if the story of school shootings has become a terrible pattern.

However, it isn’t ungrounded. Within the past month, news headlines of school violence have threatened to become routine — a campus shooting on Thursday, June 5, at Seattle Pacific University resulting in one dead and two wounded was quickly followed by the June 10 fatal shooting in Oregon. Between the December 2012 Sandy Hook shooting and the Reynolds High School shooting, there have been more than 70 school shootings in the United States. 

School violence does not cease at shootings. In Milford, Conn., a 16-year-old boy was accused of fatally stabbing another student in April after she declined his junior prom invitation. Also in April, in Murrysville, Pa., a 16-year-old was accused of committing a stabbing spree at Franklin Regional High School, in which more than 20 students were injured, along with a security guard. 

Reasons behind the increase in school violence vary but mental illness appears to be a sweeping factor. In an interview with Pacific Standard on June 10, 2014, Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke University psychiatry and behavioral sciences professor, said, “People with serious mental illness are three to four times more likely to be violent than those who aren’t.” 

Having a mental illness does not automatically make an individual violent. There are other contributing factors.

A violent mindset is becoming prevalent in our country, evidenced by popular television shows such as “Game of Thrones,” “True Blood,” “The Walking Dead,” “Hannibal” and “Dexter,” as well as consistently favored crime shows like “NCIS” and “Law and Order.” These shows range in target audience and genre but all share violence as a form of entertainment.

Mirroring the steady increase in school shootings is the increase of exposure to the media, via television and the Internet. The Kaiser Family Foundation — a U.S.-based non-profit and non-partisan foundation that focuses mainly on healthcare policy — conducted a study in 2009 and found that children between the ages of eight and 18 spend an average of more than four hours a day watching television. To this point, The National Violent Television Study by the American Psychological Association found that in 1998, 60 percent of television shows included violent themes. Revisited in 2006, the study found a significant increase in violence during every time slot. Specifically, violence in shows airing at 8 p.m. increased by 45 percent, violence in shows airing at 9 p.m. increased by 82 percent and violence in shows at 10 p.m. increased by 167 percent. 

Albert Bandura, a psychologist at Stanford, found a correlation between real-life and on-screen violence through a research study he performed in 1965. Bandura’s conclusions are based on the sociological concept of “social learning” — the act of learning through imitation. Bandura found that increased exposure to violence increases violent tendencies in those who view it. He said that such exposure “decreases viewers’ concerns about victims’ suffering, decreases viewers’ sensitivity to violent acts and increases the likelihood that viewers will emulate the aggressive acts depicted in the show or movie.”

Additionally, advancements in technology have led to further desensitization. Such advancements are specifically evident in video games.

The Mature rating label on video games — which informs that content in the game is suited for those 17 and older — appears to be taken as more of a suggestion than a rule. A 2007 study conducted in Pennsylvania and South Carolina in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that of the 80 percent of seventh and eighth graders played video games in the past six months, about half played at least one M-rated game regularly.

A combination of the mature content of video games and their increasingly hyper-realistic graphics makes this form of entertainment hard to ignore in the context of increasing violence among young people. 

Actual news stories of real-life violence have no entertainment value but they’re becoming as prevalent as the staged violence we pay to see and participate in through screens and games. With the increasing frequency of school violence, each instance is threatening the norm we used to call safety. We must always question school violence.

Violent television and video games aren’t solely responsible for the deaths and injuries resulting from campus crimes. But combined with mental illnesses, both are high risk factors — Adam Lanza, the accused Sandy Hook shooter, an allegedly mentally unstable person, racked up more than 83,000 “kills” in an online first-person shooter game as he trained himself for the horrific massacre.

Schools have a responsibility to take action to draw and emphasize the lines between real-life violence and violent entertainment and especially to make this distinction clear to individuals with mental illnesses. School shootings must be addressed in classrooms nationwide and children should learn at a young age that even though school shootings are frequent, they are not justifiable.

Write to Danielle at dnd20@pitt.edu