Gun Violence, Game Violence, And Our Thoughts

In the wake of many gun violence incidents in both recent and past years, President Trump will meet with video games representatives today to discuss the violent content contained in some video games. The President has expressed the view that violent games were "shaping young people's thoughts" (see BBC News article), and this writer believes he may be more right than not.

While no human study has proven a direct link between the playing of violent video games and violent behavior (see article), according to this Mother Jones article:

"Metastudies—comparing the results and the methodologies of prior research on the subject—have also been problematic. One published in 2010 by the American Psychological Association, analyzing data from multiple studies and more than 130,000 subjects, concluded that “violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors and decrease empathic feelings and pro-social behaviors.” But results from another metastudy showed that most studies of violent video games over the years suffered from publication biases that tilted the results toward foregone correlative conclusions."

It's eye-opening to note that the above research conclusion was that violent video games "increased aggressive thoughts, angry feeling, and aggressive behaviors." By verbal inspiration, the Bible teaches that our thoughts are directly linked to our actions (Mark 7:14-23 NLT - see here and here). Also note sin's chain of progression in the case of Achan here.

Another question we need to ask, is whatever happened to concerned and responsible parents knowing what activities their children are engaged in? (see article). Beloved, parents not only need to be involved in the training and upbringing of their children (see here, here, here, here, and here), but teaching them that if some activity even looks suspicious ..... to abstain from engaging in that activity (1 Thessalonians 5:22 KJV). Folks, the Bible has solutions to man's problems!

---Mike Riley, Gospel Snippets