A Connecticut Town’s Plan on Collecting and Destroying Video Games: A Sign of Moral Panic

(Originally posted for The Voice of Heard on January 4, 2013)

Last night, I read a Gamespot article that briefly describes how community leaders at Southington, Connecticut are planning to have volunteers give away violent video games, CDs, and DVDs for destruction in exchange for “a gift certificate to a local restaurant, the Lake Compounce amusement park, or a bowling alley.” This is in the wake of last month’s shooting at the neighboring town of Newport that left 20 children and 6 adults dead. While they are not directly linking the games to the tragic incident, the organizers said that this is “suitable time for parents to engage their children in discussions about whether or not playing violent games is appropriate” when “there’s evidence that [they] cause increases in aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and desensitization about actions of violence.”

So far, I have spotted comments on that article in which a few authors engaged in an intellectual debate about violent video games, the flawed research that tried to find a link between video games and aggressive behavior, gun control, mental illness, and the responsibility of parents for the well-being of their children. A few other comments have called the actions in Southington, which is set to take place eight days from now, “hilarious” while a few more compared them to book burnings. From my perspective, this reminds me of the comic book scare in the late 194os and early 1950s when it was feared that comic books featuring superheroes, monsters, crime, and any other objectionable content were “poisoning” young minds with delinquency and aggression, which in their view led to moral bankruptcy. Driven by such fears, some American communities rallied children and teenagers to gather comic books that city officials, Catholic churches, and schools deemed unacceptable and place them in bonfires. These comic book burnings were disturbingly reminiscent of book burnings that took place in Germany on May 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party took power. Most of those burnings were done by young students, driven by their leaders to remove all “un-German ideas” from their communities much in the same way that some young people in America were driven by their communities to remove all objectionable comic books in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

The American comic book scare period and the planned destruction of violent video games by a Connecticut town have signs of what is called “moral panic,” a social psychological response to perceived threats to a culture, way of life, and values. I have covered moral panic in greater detail in an earlier version of my blog more than three years ago. Therefore, I will go over the five signs of moral panic here:

The Press: A moral panic is starting up when the media addresses a story about wrongdoing with exaggerated attention, exaggerated events, inventions, distortion, and stereotyping. The story can contain repeated phrases like ‘epidemic’, ‘dangerous’, ‘sudden’, or ‘widespread’.

The Public: A moral panic will boil based not only on how the public reacts to the media, but also rumors that are spread by word of mouth alone and not reported or even mentioned in the media.

Law Enforcement: When public attitudes pressure the police and the courts to take action against the perceived threat, a moral panic is brewing. Efforts are made by officers in both departments to broaden the scope of law enforcement with increased intensity. The actions are justified on the basis of the enormity of the threat.

Politicians and Legislators: Once the moral panic gets enough attention from government authorities, they end up jumping into the act. In order to curb the supposed threat, a series of bills can be made by legislators and signed into law by members of the executive branch.

Action Groups: Action groups emerge in the heat of the moral panic moment to cope with the newly existing threat. To sociologists, these groups are called moral entrepreneurs, who believe that existing remedies have no effect against the threat to be removed.

The recent scapegoating of video games, which I have covered in one of my other recent entries, and the recent developments I just covered show tell-tale signs of a moral panic brewing. While a few people may consider Southington’s plan to collect and destroy video games to be funny, I find this to be far from a joke. Although intentioned to bring families together in a constructive way, this is just a cheap remedy to ease the after effects of the Connecticut shooting. Video game violence is actually nothing compared to the real issues that actually contributed to the tragedy: gun control and mental health. Whether some people like it or not, the fact of the matter is that blaming video games and destroying them will neither make problems with gun control and mental health easier to solve nor prevent further shootings at other public schools, movie theaters and shopping malls being committed by people whose social psychological problems are more complicated than the mass media is willing to make them appear.