Primary Cause Of Violence In America

In recent events, mass shootings and other violent acts have been taking a place all over the United States. From college campuses to the parking lots of supermarkets, they are not limited to one place. But why are these kinds of violence so common today? Many Americans claim that the portrayal of violence in the news is a primary cause of violence in America today. This topic became an interest around the 1960s when the first generation of children raised on television reached adulthood, coincidentally coinciding with a dramatic increase in violence in the United States. The twentieth century welcomed not only television, but the computer as well opening a much wider way for people to see just how violent the world really is. According to Anderson and Bushman (2001),it has been calculated that there are near 8,000 hours of television programs containing some kind of violence and that by the time a child has reached age ten they have witnessed near 8,000 acts of violence and 200,000 by the time they are eighteen. It should also be noted that children are not the only ones vulnerable to such desensitization, but also the mentally ill. Emmanuel Tanay, a former Professor of Psychiatry

Certain kinds of music has also been studied and proven to cause types of aggressive behavior or thought. In her dissertation, Stephanie Kaminski, a Long Island University graduate with a Master’s Degree in psychology, writes about studies that took place at two different Universities that involved hundreds of college students. As a study, the students were required to listen to various different songs, some containing violent lyrics and some that did not, and were then tasked with various exercises to measure their aggressive emotions. The results concluded that these songs did in fact increase aggressive thought which when set with social interaction would likely lead to more aggressive