Banning violent video games A child is killing police officers. A teenager hires prostitutes to potentially kill them. Use weapons like guns, chainsaws and knives to kill and commit horrible crimes. Thousands of children and adolescents participate in these actions daily. As? Violent video games like Doom, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto are just some of the games filled with these terrible actions. An article in the Harvard Mental Health Letter states: "The Pew Research Center reported in 2008 that 97 percent of youth ages 12 to 17 played some type of video game, and that two-thirds of them played gambling games. action and adventure games that tend to contain violent content." Another survey showed that more than half of gamesSince these games promote violence, children and young people think that it is okay to use violence to solve everyday problems. Therefore, this contributes to one of the major problems found in the lives of young people: bullying. Most violent video games encourage role-playing by allowing the player to actually participate in violent actions. This may cause the player to use these violent actions on others. “The view supported by organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child & Adolescents Psychiatry is that exposure to violent media (including video games) can contribute to violent behavior in real life and harm children in other ways” (“Violent…and young” 1). Many young people today struggle with bullying from those around them. These violent video games could be a contributing factor to this problem. If violence is what these young people see on a daily basis, why wouldn't they start reenacting the violent behaviors they participate in while playing? Teenagers will begin to inflict harmful actions on others. Since all video games that promote violence seem to cause hurt and pain in the lives of many, banning them can prevent harmful situations. The perpetrators of this horrific crime were often found playing violent video games on a daily basis. This leads us to ask: could these games have caused the killer to kill many innocent people? For example, Adam Lanza shot many innocent children and teachers in Newton, Connecticut in 2012. Many attributed his actions to his love of violent video games, "seeing his way of playing so-called first-person shooters, in which participants take down enemies." from a first-person perspective, as a potential contributing factor to his crimes. It was also reported that Lanza played games such as Call of Duty in which the participant shoots opponents in a very realistic manner ("Violent Video Games"). There are many other cases like the one just mentioned. Many school shooters are simply reenacting what they see in the video games they play. These actions cost the lives of innocent people