14 DAY TRIAL // Jay Rockefeller, a United States senator representing West Virginia for the Democratic Party, says that the video games industry needs to reduce the levels of violence in its products in order to limit the possibility of more incidents that mirror 2012’s Sandy Hook.
The politician is quoted by Polygon as saying that, “In today’s world, where kids can access content across a variety of devices often without parental supervision, it is unrealistic to assume that overworked and stressed parents can prevent their kids from viewing inappropriate content.”
He adds, “The only real solution is for the entertainment industry to reduce the often obscene levels of violence in the products they sell.”
His statement comes after a new report about the Sandy Hook shooting suggests that the gunman was driven by the idea of beating the high score set by other criminals.
Immediately after the late 2012 incident, Jay Rockefeller introduced a bill in the Senate which mandated the National Academy of Sciences to study the link between violent video games and real-world behavior.
The bill died because it lacked support, but President Barack Obama signed an executive order which asked Congress to deliver resources to the Center for Disease Control to perform a similar task.
There’s limited data investigating the link between real-world violence and influence coming from the media and more money allocated to research might generate significant advantages in our understanding in a few years.
Politicians have focused on video game regulation after the Sandy Hook shooting, while an effort to introduce more controls for weapons in the United States has failed to make any progress.
The shooter was supposedly influenced by Call of Duty, the first-person shooter from Treyarch, Infinity Ward and Activision, and Dynasty Warriors, from Tecmo Koei.