“These are young people who have
dead-end lives, who have no real goals, who have no educational
objectives,” Jeff Gardere noted bluntly.
The clinical psychologist indeed didn’t wear kid gloves in his discussion regarding the spike in the so-called “knockout game” — in which gangs of youths randomly hit strangers on the street in the hopes of rendering them unconscious with one punch.
“They’re doing this to get a thrill,” Gardere said in an interview with CNN, “to prove their manhood or womanhood. Certainly they are followers…and not leaders.”
He added that the practice of posting
the assaults online gives these violent “voyeurs” a sense of
“immortality” and “some real excitement.”
Most tellingly, Gardere noted that the
kind of violence they have been used to seeing in the media and in video
games just isn’t doing it for them anymore — in fact, they’re
“desensitized” now and need a bigger and better fix, as it were a drug.
“Now we get to see it in real life and
in real time,” he said, adding that the “knockout game” is indicative of
a “dangerous trend that gives positive reinforcement that these young
people are looking Watch the clip from CNN interview with Gardere:
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