About 83 percent of the kids in the study found the gun, and most of them played with it. Of the kids who found it, 27 percent immediately gave it to the experimenter and the experimenter took it out of the room. Of the remaining 58 percent of kids who found the gun, 42 percent played with it in various ways. Importantly, almost none of the kids who watched the movie clip without guns ever pulled the trigger. The kids who watched the movie that contained gun footage were more likely to pull the trigger of the real gun; on average, they pulled it about 2 to 3 times, and spent 4 to 5 times longer holding it when compared to kids who watched the movie with no gun footage. What’s scarier is that some of these kids pulled the trigger more than a few times; in fact, they pulled it quite a lot. Some pulled the trigger over 20 times; one child pointed the gun out the window at people walking down the street; and another child pressed the gun to another child’s temple and pulled the trigger (Dillon, & Bushman, 2017).
2018-01-22