Week5 - Yuchen Qu

Yuchen Qu

Section A03

Week 5

At the beginning when I was reading this week’s article “Empire Death and the Plague of Civil Violence”, I was wondering why we have to read these seemingly negative contents. Gradually, two sections raised my interest, and I would like share some of my opinions. In the section “The Phenomenon of Serial Killer”, it mentioned that the term was inspired by Robert K. Ressler after watching suspenseful cliff-hangers, which reminded me one situation in real world nowadays. This is 21^st century, technologies are becoming more and more cutting edge, certainly, including the video gaming industry. Nowadays, shooting and RPG (role play games) are the most popular ones. With the help of the elevation in image qualities, better sound effects, and state-of-the-art devices such as Virtual Reality, the gamers can enjoy games in an environment which is nearly the duplication of real world. This is dangerous, especially for violent video games, such as GTA. In the game, you can kill people with guns, hit people driving a car, break into cars etc. This violent game may drive people mad, especially children because they are too young to distinguish what is legal and what is illegal. Gradually, this may lead to more serious consequences, such as serial killers and massive murders. In addition, I would like to express my opinions about wars, related to the section “Race Murder”. In the article, Patrick Eugene Purdy was the son of a soldier who witnessed the Vietnam war. According to the article, in 1989, “He proceeded to kill five Southeast Asian American children and wounded thirty others with the AK-47 he carried.” We can see from the expression that the impression of hostility against Asian was already deeply rooted in his mind, and it led to the tragedy in the end, nearly after 20 years of the Vietnam War. In general, the scars brought by wars will not fade away after years, but will turn to enmity against a race instead. More effectively, if the enmity is passed down to their children, the world will be more chaotic instead of peaceful in the future.

Question:

What can people do to mitigate the influence of violence on children? Cause the Internet is really convenient today and children can search any information about violent video games they want and they can see adults playing the games sometimes if the adults don't pay attention to whether there are children around or not when they play the games.

References:

1.     Hamamoto Y, Darrell. (2003). Empire of Death and the Plague of Civil Violence. Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in the Era of American Empire by Carl Boggs. Retrieved October 22, 2017.

2. Lobotero in Military. (2016, November 22). [Digital Image] “The Demise of Anti-War Liberals?” Retrieved October 22, 2017 from https://lobotero.com/2016/11/22/the-demise-of-anti-war-liberals/