Vicarious Violence as Therapy

THE FIFTEEN YEAR OLD disabled kid I work with was in the middle of a Bruce Willis movie, "Red 2" I think it was called, and by the time it was half over, I swear Willis had had at least one hundred thousand rounds of live ammo fired straight at him, but he had managed to duck it all. I was beginning to wonder how much longer his luck could possibly last. Willis was on his belly, on a sidewalk in Paris, hiding behind a row of cars. Across the street, a Chinese guy was spewing bullets out of the fastest, most deadly automatic weapon I have ver seen, period. Not a scratch on Bruce. Suddenly, my client pulled out the movie, and put in "Call of Duty", the video game he is currently hooked on, along with, I take it, the rest of America. Its an amazing game. Marvelous computer images, on the big screen HD TV. Like watching a movie with real people, almost. My kid is now killing people, somehow in charge of aiming a weapon and pulling the trigger. At the same time, he wears earphones, and shares a game with kids all over town, special ops Bruce Willis types running all over the place, my kid killing the enemy, usually zombies, or monsters. After about a half hour of this, the Bruce Willis movie goes back in, and the two hour fire fight continues apace. I found it difficult to resist the notion that watching the Bruce Willis movie incited within my kid a need to participate more directly in the orgy of violence, hence, the quick switch to Call of duty. Makes me wonder whether video games make people less violent, as a few outside the box researchers are claiming. Without Call of Duty to siphon off his heightened blood lust, would my client be out walking the streets, looking for victims in real life? Surely not. Maybe ultra violent images in movies and video games have no impact on people whatsoever.