Violence in games and real life

This topic cropped up a while ago but something happened here, last week, which makes the debate more focused.

Four year old Russian boy in my wife's class at school has been getting more and more aggressive over the year. He is currently obsessed with shooting dinosaurs. Anytime a cartoon is played, he shouts out 'shoot them all, with a big gun' which is bit disturbing for all the other kids who like watching anthromorphised dinosaurs. He has also been noticed being very aggressive in the playground, pretending to shoot everyone and what not.

Kid eventually brought in a toy gun to school and was duly told off for doing so and Mum was contacted. Mum admitted that he plays a video game, about shooting dinosaurs, obsessively, at home and that she agreed it was probably making his aggression worse. Mum agreed to wipe the game off the computer.

The next week, kid asks Mum if he can go out to play with the other kids on the block, she agrees and about 30 min later an Egyptian parent has frogmarched the kid back to his Mum. The parent says she found the kid surrounded by other kids, all of whom were shouting at him and threatening him, different ages, 4-7 year olds. The Egyptian parent grabbed the Russian kid, thinking he was the victim of racism or something but finds the kid hiding a massive kitchen knife behind his back threatening to 'kill anyone that came near' hence the other kids shouting at him.

Turns out kid loves watching violent movies with Dad which Dad considers quality time with his son.

What a frigging mess, just because parents can't behave properly and understand the reasons for age appropriate games and movies. This family is super lucky that one of the 'older' kids didn't just grab the knife from him and stab him with it.....

Four years old is much too fucking young for shit like that.

I think that kid's problems are far beyond fiction or a poor understanding of it.

The "fiction and his poor understanding of it" are acting as a multiplier to his problem. It's very easy for well-grounded people to look at something on their TV and discard it as make-believe. Kids with significant ADHD have difficulty understanding their potential future consequences of their actions. Throw in some level of schizophrenia and you have a child that has been taught how to carry out catastrophic actions.

I'll be the first to step up and say this is primarily a parental issue. This kid needs mental health intervention and the parents are likely an impediment to that occurring. But there's a lot of material available to kids not under the control of parental oversight that can exacerbate problems in people that live closer to the edge.

I just got Comcast and one of the features is to put a password on mature content. I've been very surprised how often it goes off, and not just at 10pm. I bumped into a show running on TNT at 7pm last night with a TV-MA rating on it. It appeared to have received the rating for violence, not skin.

S.