Summary of Do Video Games Kill by Karen Stemheimer In the commentary, “Do Video Games Kill”, Karen Sternheimer brings to light an interesting and incredibly controversial subject; are video games to blame for youth gun violence? She maintains that due to many biased opinions; political, religious and advocacy groups, the media have failed to provide ample information to the public resulting in the inability to form an educated opinion, in turn causing a mass hysteria resulting in tougher security guidelines in schools, stricter juvenile laws and far less personal and parental responsibility. An incredibly popular first person shooter video game, Doom, is ripe with gratuitous violence. So much so that it has been blamed for several mass shootings, perpetrated by middle-class, white, young-adult males. The media, politicians, advocacy groups as well as the FBI are steadfast in claiming that the only rational explanation is that of the individuals falling prey to the aggression inciting video game.
Personal safety for a website for young people Nowadays, young people from the age of 12 to 18 are constantly victims of different crimes from robbery to murder. A very common problem is cyber bulling or adults pretending to be teenagers and talking to younger girls online on different social websites. There has been a recent article on a young girl that was abducted from her house and was sexually molested by a 30 year old man who has been taking to her on a social website and pretended to be a 17 year old boy. This is because young people do not know or acknowledge the dangers of surfing the web, as they were not told or not educated about it. To prevent these parents should be more vigilant and monitor their children’s access to the web.
With the rapid development of the society, Internet plays a larger and larger role in our daily life. The question of how free we are when we express ourselves online also becomes an issue. The Supreme Court deals with a case called Elonis v. United States this term, which involves a man says on Facebook that he will kill his wife, a FBI agent, and bomb an elementary school. As far as I am concerned, the Supreme Court should limit the extension of such kind of violent speech because it has already caused threats to other individuals and the society as a whole, and such fact is more important than whether he intended to do so or not. Elonis believes that his right of free speech under the protection of the First Amendment was violated.
In this article, McGoey starts by talking about the violence that have taken place in our schools in the recent years. He does not feel that the solution to America’s problem is as easy and blunt as banning all guns nor adding more regulation because it would easily increase the black market(2). To stop such horrific violence, it must be pulled out at the roots. Careful look at the past incidents shows that evidence of potential violence is found in different areas of the ones that are committing such acts; home, computer, notebook, and school lockers (7). Video games have become more real than ever before.
In the documentary they also displayed the terrible Columbine shooting that occurred in which two teens took many lives and one of them was on prescription drugs as well. It’s just crazy; I don’t think that just because a child is displaying acts of being hyper or just being a kid should not mean that they should be labeled as a child with ADD or ADHD and pretty much force them to take these drugs that have extreme side effects. The Neurologist Fred Baugman even said himself how frightening it is that kids those days were easily diagnosed with ADHD especially by school
“Bullying is a big problem that effects millions of students, and it has everyone worried, not just the kids on it’s receiving end” (Lyness 1). Bullying does not just affect kids, but the parents too. It affects the parents because a lot of their children begin to be afraid attending school. In the novel Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Melinda was affected by being bullied lead her to think about suicide, scared of coming to school, and victims like Melinda begin to not care about school and fail. Melinda was affected by being bullied and led to many things and one of them is thinking about suicide.
Is it Drugs Not Guns that Cause Violence? The recent shooting in Newtown Connecticut brought a shocking surprise to the Nation a few months ago. Many young lives were taken and such a tragedy strongly impacted the people thought the United States. The big question was ‘why’. Why did this kid feel he needed to take the lives of innocent people?
The documentary “From One Second To The Next” by Werner Herzog shows the tragedy of a few people who was involved in a car accident. Texting and driving is obviously not a good idea so why do people still choose to do it? This documentary both shows and tells about how fast texting and driving can change someone’s life. The fact that you can kill someone should make people not want to drive and text. “According to U.S. Department of Transportation statistics, 3,331 people were killed and 387,000 more injured in crashes involving a distracted driver in 2011” (Herzog, 2011).
The physical and mental effects on teenagers through technology are causing concerns for many parents and experts. According to Strasburger, Jordan, and Donnerstein, "parents and professionals are seeing an increase in aggressive behavior, sexual experimentation, weight gain and loss, and school academics” (Strasburger, Jordan, & Donnerstein, 2010). The average teenager will have viewed almost 200 000 violence acts on television. Interactive technology can foster antisocial beliefs and behavior in teens because of the violence in new technology, which can be found video games. An example is "In the aftermath of the West Paducah, KY School shooting, it was revealed, the shooter had never fired a real gun in his life, yet his marksmanship was both accurate and lethal” (Strasburger, Jordan, & Donnerstein, 2010).
Paper on Cyberbullying Texts(articles): Nina Lakhani: “One in five children is victim of cyberbullying” Aleks Krotski: “Hate and the Internet” Jan Hoffman: “Online Bullies Pull Schools Into the Fray” In the first text, we are introduced to an article describing the current situation in cyberbullying. The writer Nina Lakhani describes how cyberbullying has become an extremely viral phenomenon and how this type of teenage cruelty hasn’t been present until now due to the lack of technology. She explains why this is a serious threat to young people, due to the intensity of the bullying which is caused by the fact that teenagers are not able to isolate themselves from the bullying. Surveys have also concluded that the impact is much greater than with regular bullying because of how it can spread out to the rest of the world in however long it takes load a picture. Nina ends her article with three cases of cyberbullying causing the victim to commit suicide.