Violent crime down, but thriving in suburban rec rooms

As thoughtful parents of the 1990s who fought to keep our young kids away from violent movies, games, imagery and the like, we didn't fully realize what an awesome force we were up against until our toddler twin boys chewed their breakfast toast into the shape of guns and opened fire on each other.

Before long we allowed them short stretches parked in front of our home computer trying to defeat the evil Lord Voldemort or engaging in lightsaber duels with a Lego version of Darth Vader. Those games were rated E, with a touch of mild violence and comic mischief suitable for "everyone."

Then we tolerated the receipt of a hand-me-down game system that led to the T-rated (teen appropriate) Star Wars Battlefront game where our kids mowed down clones by the bunches.

We entered the M-rated (recommended for ages 17 and older) video game world only after one of our 14-year-olds wrote an essay in support of buying the blood-spurting, head-exploding, zombie-slaughterfest "Left 4 Dead" video game, his argument including snippets from a review in the New York Times that noted how the game encouraged teamwork, organization and other noble traits. Then my kids pointed out how much history and geography they learned through bloody W.W. II war games.

Now, my kids have even more ammunition.

The FBI announced this week that, even with so many people unemployed and idle, violent crime is down. One controversial theory about the surprising drop is that young males who normally commit most of the violent crimes are playing violent video games instead. The Economist notes that Harvard economist Lawrence Katz "suspects that video games and websites may have kept the young and idle busy during this recession, thus explaining the surprising lack of an uptick in crime."

An earlier study by Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital debunked many of the theories that violent video games made young people more violent, and gave some credence to the concept that those games may reduce stress for some people.

My kids don't seem aggressive (even while playing their games), never get into fights at school and seem completely nonviolent to me. Still, I question my parenting skills when I see my children casually playing realistic war games in virtual environments where Americans just a few years older than my boys are being killed while fighting real wars.

When our youngest son was part of a focus group in Oak Brook for an educational website, he told researchers that he enjoyed playing video games with well-defined goals and rewards, instinctively knowing better than to say that he liked a game where consecutive head-shot kills would earn him the right to call in an airstrike.

Walking through the aisles of a suburban GameStop, I find a wealth of M-rated games. Some are fantasy games with dragons and such. Some depict real-life criminal acts and seem misogynistic or racist. Ratings don't seem to tell the whole story. A Civil War game featuring hand-to-hand combat is rated T, the same as the Guitar Hero games. The Tiger Woods game, which deals only with his exploits on the golf course, is rated E for everyone, as are those John Madden football games where bone-crushing injuries can be replayed in slow motion.

We limit our kids' game time, and talk with our sons, and parents of their friends, about the games they play as we try to figure out if we are doing the right thing. But I keep in mind that my childhood included times where I played war (sometimes featuring torture with water and fire) with my G.I. Joe collection, laughed at violent cartoons, watched TV violence on shows such as "The Rat Patrol" and "Combat," and routinely wore six-shooters to the grocery and even pointed a gun at the clerk's head until she handed over the Animal Crackers. And I turned out to be a peace-promoting, gun-shunning, law-abiding, anti-violence liberal who lets his kids play violent video games.