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Heeding the Signs Part 4 MEDIA After 30 years of research, psychologists and media experts no longer bother to dispute that children are affected by their exposure to media violence. The debate now is why violent images take hold of the imaginations of some children, and not others. Millions of kids watch graphic depictions of death and destruction on TV every day, yet only a few pick up guns and act out their fantasies. "Television and the movies have never, in my experience, turned a responsible youngster into a criminal," Stanton Samenow, author of Before It's Too Late: Why Some Kids Get into Trouble and What Parents Can Do About It, told Time magazine last April. However, for kids who have never learned to control their own aggression, growing up in a culture saturated with media violence can make a lethal difference. "(When) a youngster who is already inclined toward antisocial behavior hears of a particular crime," Samenow says, "it feeds an already fertile mind." Copycat crimes inspired by movies and TV have become a serious concern in recent years. Barry Loukaitis, a 14-year-old honors student at Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake, Washington, walked into his algebra classroom in February 1996 and shot his teacher in the back with a powerful hunting rifle before turning his gun on a student who had teased him. Both the teacher and the teaser died, along with another student who was in the line of fire. Earlier, Barry told a friend he thought it would be "pretty cool" to go on a killing rampage like the lead characters in Natural Born Killers, one of his favorite films. Jurors at his trial watched a Pearl Jam music video, Jeremy, which Barry's mother claimed had inspired him. It features a troubled teen who fantasizes violent revenge against classmates who taunt him. Kip Kinkel was so enmeshed in violent television and computer games that his parents discontinued their cable service and took away his computer in the months before the shootings at Thurston. "Children watch movies and television programs that glorify violence and fail to teach them how to express their rage in nonviolent ways," says Kevin Dwyer of the National Association for School Psychologists. "In too many cases, the message is: I am emotionally angry; I'm going to kill someone." Newly added to the violent media culture are video games like the ones that filled after-school hours for Evan Ramsey and his friends. A chilling description of kids' fascination with this pastime comes from Evan's 14-year-old brother William. "I love playing Golden Eye," he told a reporter from the Boston Globe, referring to a virtual-reality video game that allows the player to track and kill opponents with an arsenal of firearms. "It shows it like real life. … My favorite gun is a 9 mm automatic. I grab two of those and I see a guy and I hit the trigger. I put all 64 rounds in one guy. He's on the ground and I just keep on shooting until he disappears. Or I'll take a rocket launcher and shoot at their heads. It's cool."
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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