Any number of dysfunctional violent tv or streaming shows. Guessing 70% of them have verbal or physical violence in them from what I can tell.

Don't you learn early on that you shouldn't hurt or ...KILL ANYONE?

gun and shoot his 1st grade teacher? To me it's beyond feasible.

Is that some of these kids have trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality. Video games maybe, makes violence seem like the answer to problems.

Does this make me sound incredibly old?

Many adults have trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality. I've observed this my entire adult life, and I'm now 74.

Here's a related observation. Years ago I realized that most of the time, some novel that everyone was reading was probably not worth my reading it. Because a lot of people only read one or two books a year, and so they'll read that one that's getting all the buzz. But because they read so little, they are really not very discerning about what a novel should be, nor are they at all critical of plot flaws.

I read A LOT. Last year I read 173 books (yeah, I keep count), about half of which are non fiction. The fiction half covers a very wide variety of genres. Between being old and reading a lot, I am not willing to stick with a book that isn't working for me.

Oh, and those who subscribe to conspiracy theory likewise cannot distinguish between fiction and reality.

promote violence as an answer to all problems.

The situation with the six year old but a 14 year old, I can think of a thing or two and they are very ugly.

I told my brother that I wanted to fall off the cliff like the road runner because it looked like fun.

He pointed out that it was just a cartoon and that in real life it would kill me. I never watched the cartoon after that because I knew the road runner was dying every time he fell off the cliff.

Children have a difficult time separating the imaginary from reality.

Thank You, again. ..And it also answers the question.

I (kinda) disagree. I think it may not make them violent, per se, but it desensitizes them to violence, makes it seem commonplace and normal.

Many years ago (early 2000’s) I worked a lunch shift, only, so was home in the late afternoon which was an unusual occurrence at that time in my life. I plopped down in front of the tv when I got home. It was a weekday, about 4:30 in the afternoon, so prime after-school tv watching hours. NCIS (maybe CSI, it one of those two shows) was on. There was murder scene they were working on. It was in an elevator and the body was gruesome. Graphically disemboweled, very gory. I vividly remember being shocked that not only was this being shown on regular tv in the afternoon, but also at how explicitly gory and accurate looking it was. TV wasn’t like that when I was growing up in the 80’s and 90’s.

There have been other changes that I think are desensitizing younger generations to violence. They may seem small, but all together, it’s a lot.

Remember how they never, ever killed pets in movies or on tv shows? Except Dan and Ann in Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller, of course. But that’s why those two books/movies are so memorable to people GenX and older. It was not common. It was freakin’ traumatic. Now they kill pets in movies regularly, just for the shock value. In fact, the shock value has worn off for most folks at this point. Desensitized.

The same with children dying in movies/tv. It used to happen offscreen. Now it doesn’t.

Video games have become so realistic looking. I was looking for a match up between two particular MMA fighters on YouTube and kept clicking on video game footage and not realizing it wasn’t real, actual footage. It was frustrating. I cannot even imagine how graphic some of the shooter games get.

The change of horror movies into graphic, drawn out torture porn. Bodies being shown on the news. The internet which allows access to anything you want to see. Kids are curious and I’m sure they are viewing some horrible videos of suicides and snuff films, whether real or staged. It’s so easy to access now.

Plus, the press coverage of every mass shooting. It’s a lot and it’s everywhere. And we used to only get local news so coverage of horrible, violent crimes was pretty much limited to what happened in your neck of the woods. Now, we get news from every corner of the planet, all day and all night long, and if it bleeds, it leads. We are inundated with violence and stories of the horrible things humans do to one another. I don’t think it has ever been like this before.

These are just some things I think about when I see news stories like the two mentioned above.
The kids are desensitized.

Edit to Add: Wasn’t going to put this down, but why not? It’s my past and I am proud to have gotten away from it. Desensitization is how I ended up being an IV drug user.

At first, it was shocking when I saw people using needles. Absolutely shocking. But as the days and weeks went by, as I saw the circle of people I was hanging out with shoot up, it became “normal” to me. No big deal. Sure enough, I started doing it too because it was no longer shocking, no longer abnormal. It’s just what people did, or so I thought. And I was the kid who literally hid from the pediatrician when it was time to get the tine test for TB or vaccine boosters. I was terrified of needles to the point the ER staff restrained me when I had to get stitches when I was 10. But after being around it and getting used to seeing it everyday it became “normal” in my head. I think this is what is happening to young people with violence and disregard for life.

Using the "blank space" between the frames a person can perceive MAGA made messaging could encourage people to "do it" and when the speaker encourages gun violence or "MSM is FAKE NEWS" to keep these people from real fact checking.

https://www.ijcr.eu/articole/330_07%20Maria%20FLOREA.pdf
The visual subliminal perceives 24 frames per second.
In this sequence succession there can be inserted the 25th frame, in no relation with the visible message, yet perceived
consciously by the human brain. The subliminal images are invisible at normal speed. The eye would not see them and the spectator would not question this image.


It's happened before:
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/10/24/subliminal-advertising

Among the albums that Belknap and Vance are believed to have listened to that day was Stained Class, the fourth album by seminal British metal band Judas Priest. As the sun slowly set across the small desert city just outside Reno, Belknap and Vance, who were 18 and 20 at the time, decided to visit a nearby playground.

It was at that playground that the two young men shot themselves with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Belknap and Vance’s families sued Judas Priest’s label, CBS Records, for $6.2 million (approximately $14.2 million in 2017). They argued in court that the pair had been driven to commit suicide by auditory signals concealed in Judas Priest’s cover of the Spooky Tooth song, “Better By You, Better Than Me.” The plaintiffs claimed that the song contained a subliminal message – “Do it” – urging listeners to take their own lives.





Subliminal messaging has also reportedly been used to further certain political agendas. During the bitter fight for the U.S. presidency between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, Gore accused Republican campaign managers of including a subliminal message in an attack ad focusing on Gore’s proposed healthcare policies.

Gore alleged that, in the video, the word “RATS” appears onscreen for a fraction of a second before the ad shows a visual featuring the word “Bureaucrats.” Personally, I think it’s impossible to miss, especially if you’re looking for it:

They have a poor idea of the consequences of their behavior.

They may not have good control of their impulses and emotions.

That's why its so important to keep weapons out of their hands.