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Be sure to read Part 1: Setting the Stage.
Is it accurate to say that Lanza had become a computer game addict? Since he destroyed his computer just before he began the shootings, we may never know precisely what his video-gaming habits had become. Yet it does seem fair to say that he was an avid gamer, one who had few friends in real life and relied on these games for connection to the outer world—if the world within a video game can truly be likened to the outside world at all. And he probably, like Brevig, was training himself for the murders using these video games in the weeks and days leading up to the event.
How can I posit this? As experts in the field of the effects of violent video games on children have noted, playing video games does improve one’s eye-hand coordination for other actions such as opening a soda can, handling a camera, or sadly, shooting real human beings with a gun in a theatre (as in Aurora), or at a youth camp (as in Brevig’s case), or in a school. So video game training is in fact actual training when it comes to the acts of aiming and pulling a trigger as efficiently as possible, then moving on to one’s next adversary.
But more important, as suggested by numerous scientific studies, playing violent video games desensitizes the player to actual pain suffered by others. And a very recent scholarly article pushed the matter even further, documenting via EEG apparatus connected to the players' skulls that in a certain part of the CNS (the locus-coeruleus norepinephrine system to be exact), activity becomes suppressed when these youths are playing violent games but not while playing nonviolent ones. This system of the brain is also implicated in eliciting empathy in humans. So with this portion of the brain’s activity suppressed, the violent, video-game-playing human is shown to be less likely, per the same study, to feel empathy for any who suffer, including his own victims. In a word, he has become desensitized to the pain of others.
This study and others demonstrate this loss of sensitivity to the feelings of others via researchers in a laboratory setting, giving the youths involved an opportunity to hurt others with blaring noises that will potentially hurt their ear drums. We can extrapolate from this that Lanza was similarly working to desensitize himself for other, more sinister purposes. Either wittingly or otherwise, he set out to diminish his own sense of empathy for a time when he would later be pulling the trigger of a real gun in the classroom at Sandy Hook.
In another recent article, the researchers in a laboratory setting induced kids to play violent video games for only twenty minutes per day but for three consecutive days. They found that the more days in a row the children played, the less empathy they manifested, and the more likely they were to demonstrate aggression in a laboratory setting.
Where does this leave us with Lanza? We find a young man already socially isolated, perhaps in the early phase of a paranoid disorder, spending his days hiding in a basement room and incessantly playing video games, quite possibly for more than three days in a row, and most likely for more than twenty minutes per day.
How was he playing the game, solo or with others? As a few of my patients have clarified, one can play these games on Xbox live with others. At times these fellow players can be foul, sexist, hostile and violent in their language. Could they have egged him on toward actual violence? Or simply heightened his own sense of taking pleasure in killing? Or encouraged his own anger?
Though my conjectures may never be clarified due to his destroying his computer, we know that what little social surround still existing for him was collapsing at the time of the murders. His parents had divorced a few years earlier, and in retaliation, he cut off all contact with his dad once he’d remarried, and with his brother a year earlier. We find a boy with no friends, except perhaps a few “friends” made through his game playing, living alone with a mother who relates to him by giving him shooting lessons.
At least per newspaper reports, the mother feels she needs to continuously keep him near her in order to cope with his anger. She is also working on plans to disrupt his secluded life and move him to the West Coast, either to enter college or a therapeutic school.5 In short, we find a young man isolated, trapped, and fuming with rage over a variety of hurts and fears.
In the same room where he plays the violent games stands a cupboard padlocked and brimming with real guns, including an automatic rifle. Per his mother’s unwitting assistance, he has transferred some of his skills culled from playing video games into real life via shooting experience.
Not surprisingly, fantasy play spills into reality, and anger begets violence. Though first contained within the confines of game playing, his swirling wrath mingles with imagery of violent fantasy, and ultimately leads to his conjuring up a plan—not unlike one of his black ops figures in Call of Duty, or Brevig in Norway—to go on a binge of mass destruction himself.
The plot unfolds with his first two victims: his mother in her bed receiving four bullets to the face, followed by his own computer, which had played the role of a mentor, a trainer, on his soon-to-be-enacted killing spree. The question remains: was he simply trying to destroy evidence when he riddled the computer with bullets, or was he actually enraged at the games themselves and his fellow players “met” via his gaming, for how they’d affected him?
Dr. George Drinka is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and the author ofThe Birth of Neurosis: Myth, Malady and the Victorians (Simon & Schuster). His new book, When the Media Is the Parent, is a culmination of his work with children, his scholarly study of works on the media and American cultural history, and his dedication to writing stories that reveal the humanity in us all.
