Sunday, May. 24, 1998

Violent images pervade children's lives

Aaron, a 9-year-old Cub Scout, aims his red laser at the enemy, a small boy of about 8. Sarah and Chris, teen-agers playfully swinging with boxing gloves, tease each other that they love to kill. Ducking as a monster shoots at her, Martina annihilates the creature as she fires from her plush leather chair.

Young people don't flinch when a man is stabbed in the face in Scream 2. They laugh as they rip heads off characters in a video game. They'll cheer today when a Dallas Stars player crushes a Detroit Red Wings opponent into the boards.

Children are greeted with violence everywhere -- at the mall, on the highways, at home and at school. And we almost don't notice, until a classroom is blown up by a shooter.

When you stop and listen, however, violence is the background noise to children's everyday conversations and pastimes.

They look like stealthy little droids, with red and green lights blinking from their headsets and laser guns clasped in their small hands.

White tennis shoes gleam under fluorescent strobe lights. They scuttle between dark dividers, peek from behind corners, and stalk one another while holding their guns up by their ears.

"Let's rock!" a young voice shouts as Queen's We Will Rock You blares from speakers inside a laser tag store in Northeast Tarrant County.

Aaron, a 9-year-old from Colleyville, is dressed entirely in black and is almost invisible in the darkness. He kneels, closes one eye, takes aim and shoots a red laser at his 8-year-old enemy.

Then he spins around on his knee, ducks a shot from across the room and extends his arm for another aim.

"It would be easier," one of his buddies remarks later, "if the trigger was on the bottom."

Aaron, it turns out, is a laser tag fanatic -- and his team's most valuable player.

"I was on the other side of the room, and I aimed at a guy three feet from the wall and shot at him, and I got him," a breathless Aaron says after the match. "You have to aim at their headphones, where the lights are blinking."

Aaron has two laser tag sets and an "arsenal" of toy guns at home, his mother says. But Aaron and his brother aren't allowed to point the toys at anyone's face, or to use the word "kill" in the house.

Broach the subject of the real thing, and the blue-eyed boy bristles.

"I don't think any kids or parents should have guns," Aaron says. "The only way they should be able to buy guns are if they're a policeman, or the FBI, or the people who guard the president, the CIA, or if they're in the Army."

At the Virgin megastore in Grapevine Mills mall, a teen- ager looks at the stack filled with the newest books about music. Books including The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, an autobiography of shock rocker Marilyn Manson, who appears covered in blood in photographs in the book.

Customers, mostly teens, put on the earphones to hear the latest gangsta rap -- songs such as one in which the singer, who uses racial slurs, imitates machine gun fire to "take out" somebody.

Rows of video games such as Pray for Death and Resident Evil brag that they pack "more gore, more violence, more horror." A small sticker on the back of each warns: "Animated violence, animated blood and gore."

Drew, a 14-year-old from Arlington, says he likes Resident Evil because of the realistic graphics.

"You just walk around and kind of go around killing people," he says. "It's just for fun. It doesn't affect me."

Jesse, a 16-year-old wandering through the store with his friends and 11-year-old brother, Dwalyn, says rap and rock music are more brutal than when he started listening in the late 1980s.

"You listen to rap from the '80s and early '90s, and it wasn't really that violent," says Jesse, a student at Trinity High School in Euless. "Now, violence sells."

Lyrics are more realistic than 10 years ago, says his friend Kojo, adding, "They almost tell you how to kill someone."

Sarah, a sassy 16-year-old from Marcus High School, yanks on a boxing glove, then squares a punch across the chest of her friend Chris.

"I love to kill," she says, a smirk on her face. "My favorite movie is Natural Born Killers."

Chris, 17, eager to retaliate, seizes a second set of red Spaldings and strikes back.

"You're crazy," he says.

A third friend, Ryan, enters the mix.

But he's hot on the Ninja defense sword, a saber-type weapon that expels extra blades at an arm's twist.

"This is cool," he says.

Meanwhile, 10- and 11-year-olds are bouncing across the floor on pogo sticks. So goes the play Friday afternoon at K*B toys in Grapevine Mills mall.

At the front of the store, a pile of sale items attracts shoppers ducking in. The Pillow Punchers, the size of an adult's head and labeled for children 5 and older, are stacked out front and sell for $9.99. Nearby, the Water-Combat- Ultimate-Water-Gun-System looms. Forget those rinky-dink water guns. This colossal water gun sports a Rambo-size cylinder. One aisle down, children view its competitors: the Mighty Cannon, the Hydroblaster and the Power Soaker.

A half-hour later, a torrent of 14- year-olds who will be freshmen at Marcus High School in the fall spills in, enjoying the first day of summer vacation.

"I love violence," says 14-year- old Bartholomew, a freckled redhead who loves the shock value of the expression. Flippantly, he adds, "I want to be a murderer when I grow up."

Francesca hits a button on her computer screen, and up pops a set of directions on how to build a miniature bomb.

"I must admit," the page reads, "I have a strange fascination with FIRE. ... I can not begin to describe to you what this bomb is like. It's so loud it shakes your whole body."

Francesca, a 17-year-old from Hurst, surfs the Internet during downtime at her job at an area coffeehouse.

"I'm pretty sure I could look up stuff on bombs and build one," she says just before she finds the bomb page. "If you go searching for it, you'll find anything."

Not that she really wants to. But not that, sometimes, she has a choice.

"I find a lot of weird things on the Internet," she says. "You can be searching for something, and by chance something else comes up. Anybody who wants to make a Web page can do it."

It doesn't bother her too much, Francesca says with a shrug. Most businesses that have access to computers have the more violent pages blocked, she guesses. And most young people who look at that stuff probably don't follow through.

"The young kids, the teen-agers that are trying to be cool will try to do something crazy," she says. "They'll look things like this up, get a kick out of them, print them out, but they probably won't do anything."

"First Attack!" "Air Combo!" "Hit!"

The atmosphere at GameWorks in Grapevine Mills mall is a pounding of music and a staccato of missile fire.

A 14-year-old student stands glued to a video game starring Spiderman, Wolverine, Captain America, a green monster the likes of Incredible Hulk, a vamp in a skimpy blue outfit and an assortment of villains brandishing muscular pectorals.

The teen's left hand is wildly tapping a set of buttons while his other maneuvers the joystick. Each tap throws a vicious punch or wipes out a creature.

Games dot the floor: Solar Assault. Wave Runner. Time Crisis. House of the Dead, where the exterminated characters die a graphic death, and blood and the yellow- brown or greenish bile are splashed onto the viewer's screen.

Nearby, 6-year-old Christopher sits in an oversized chair on a platform that faces a war zone of enemy M-1 tanks. The Flower Mound child shoots a barrage of bullets as his tank spins across the combat zone. He hits a tank, and a cloud of smoke and fire and a screeching noise rise from the fuselage.

"Shoot!" says his grandfather Roberto, who is helping the boy steer. "Shoot! Turn!"

The game of Tokyo Wars ends.

"I like it when I'm shooting," Christopher says.

His grandfather likes the racing games better.

"I don't like to participate in this one," he says. "I don't like the sense of war."

Martina sits back in a large chair with cushioned armrests as she prepares to be annihilated by creatures that look like ferocious polar monsters. The game Quake starts.

"This is the best game to play," Martina says. "You run around, and you get people to kill you.

"For little kids it's scary, but I'm 15 years old," Martina says. "I'm old enough that I can handle it."

A fan of rap and alternative rock music, 15-year-old Rhonda says that the violent lyrics often portray the gritty reality of life in some neighborhoods.

"I think they're singing from their own life. It has nothing to do with me," the Arlington High School student says as she plays basketball with dozens of teens at an Arlington recreation center.

"I think if a kid is having a problem and they hear a song about getting even, it might push him over the edge. But he had problems to begin with. He had that mind-set to begin with. It's not what put the thought in his mind. It's not the music's fault. It's the kid that was put in the situation."

Family values and peer pressure have a much greater impact on young people's behavior, say friends Kacie, 17, and Tami, 15.

"We know right from wrong," Tami says. "Music doesn't make us turn bad."

Rows of huge water guns line the walls like multicolored machine guns at the entrance of Toys R Us in Hurst. Michael, 5, and his younger sister pass by them on their way to the video game section.

They also glance at the swimming pool section, where the Surf Slayer 38, a gruesome creature with claws, leers at them from a boogie board.

Searching the aisles, the Watauga boy runs his fingers lightly over the toy store wonders -- and informs his mother that he wants this one, that one, this one, that one.

A huge purple plastic Uzi grabs Michael's attention. The Vortex Tornado shoots "fire rings" up to 70 feet. Michael stands in silence before it for a moment.

"Guns," his mother, Maria, says as her wide-eyed 3-year-old, Melinda, stares up at her. "That's all he wants. Whatever he sees on TV, that's what he wants."

"Surrender now or I'll kill you!"

A barrage of gunfire follows the barked words, and the intended target, a male teen, raises his hands in defeat. The "bullet" has struck him. He is out.

On a Friday evening at the Ultimate Paintball on the south edge of downtown Fort Worth, such shouts and spurts of gunfire-paint are commonplace. So is the participation of young children.

Shields, 48, watches his 11-year- old son, Chris, and his friend, 12- year-old Andrew, as they crouch behind a paint-spattered car and attempt to shoot the approaching "enemy."

Shields says he doesn't believe that letting the children play paintball teaches them violent behavior.

"We played cops and robbers when I was little," he says. "It's just something to keep the time."

Chris and Andrew say they aren't learning to become violent, but the sixth-graders wonder about children who already have a "sick mind."

"It might cloud up your conscience if you persist or keep fighting," Andrew says. "It's fun to play, but you don't want to get too involved."

Rosa drops off her 15-year-old son, Samuel, and his two friends at Ultimate Paintball. Parents, she says, need to explain that it is only make-believe. But taking away a teen's freedom to join such activities will only leave time for trouble.

"Otherwise he's going to run the streets," she says. "He can pick it up anywhere. It doesn't have to be at something fun like this."

When she was 14, Kelly turned up the volume on a radio to block out the sounds of her uncle beating his wife.

Kelly took refuge in the other room of the suite that the trio had shared at the Rising Sun Motel on West Division Street in Arlington.

"He would get drunk and he would hit her and slap her around and cuss at her," Kelly says. "She'd just sit there and let him do it.

"He drank a lot and brought people home from the bars he didn't really know," says Kelly, now 17. "I was in a bad situation there."

No longer in their guardianship, Kelly sometimes has nightmares about those two years in the motel. Kelly doesn't go to movies often because the violence makes her uneasy.

"Those movies are bad," she says. "They give people the idea it's OK to shoot or stab people. People see somebody else doing it and think it's OK."

A person who lives with violence doesn't necessarily become violent, Kelly says.

"It depends on what you are like, who you hang out with and what kind of environment you're in," she says.

Kelly is as mystified as everyone else when it comes to trying to understand the recent rash of school killings. But she also is convinced that young people are learning to react with violence.

"They can see it anywhere, on any TV," she says.

Kelly knows what she would like to see happen to violent scenes.

"Poof, be gone," she says.

Jeanne Graham, Marisa Taylor, Deanna Boyd and Jessamy Brown contributed to this report.

Yamil Berard, (817) 685-3813
berard@star-telegram.com
Karen Brooks, (817) 685-3806
kbrooks@star-telegram.com

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