Do video games and rap music, violence on TV/movies, drug use, etc, Contribute to kids/people to acting in the same  manner?

I know the violence is used as a "tool" to desensitize soldiers but on the other hand playing Call of Duty has not affected me in any such manner.

Flipping the script again, I don't think it's odd that kids who list "Lil' Wayne" as their favorite "musician" score the lowest.
My personal question there is "Does listening to Lil' Wayne make kids stupider" or "Is it only the stupid kids that listen to Lil' Wayne"?

Source: http://voices.yahoo.com/new-study-says-if-listen-lil-wayne-re-stupid-2799666....


--Steve

Things sure have change since i quit playing PacMan many years ago.  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v6aVIDxZOw

What contributes to peoples "acting" similar is marketing of all sorts, which really just means the repetitive introduction to ideas in many forms.

Im not sure there are any answers but a great place to start is a joint and some time along in an isolation tank to really think about what it is we are doing. But you know, I could be biased.

I grew up watching the Coyote blow himself up, throw himself off of a cliff, etc., chasing the Road Runner.  I'm not a violent person because of it nor am I desensitized to violence.  I realize it's a cartoon and not meant to be real.

Volumes have been written on this topic by some very smart folks of all persuasions.
I grew up in the 1950s.  I had cap pistols, I had a BB gun, and when I became 14, my Dad got me a single shot, 20 gage shotgun for Christmas.  I have never murdered anyone as a result of having "toys of violence".
But I was raised properly - taught that my cap gun was a toy, not a harbinger of things to come.  I was taught that my BB gun was the first step in learning to handle firearms - how to realize that even it could hurt someone if handled improperly, how to carry it muzzle down, and the rudiments of target shooting at soda cans and paper targets.  We never used pictures or cut outs of people as our targets.
Both of my parents were smart people, although not formally educated beyond high school.  There were lots of intelligent people in that generation who never had the opportunity, nor the need, to go to college.  You could make a comfortable, middle class living then with a high school education.  But a middle class living then was different from what we call it today.  We had one car, not two.  We never had a boat, motor home, or other such luxuries.  We took a vacation once every several years, not multiple times per year.  We ate out on birthdays, not several times per week.  Our wants and perceived needs were far less than what many people think that they have to have today.
Not so today - look at the crazies who have committed the mass murders of the past few years.  I mean the kids in Colorado, and the one nut, Adam Lanza who shot up that grade school.  They were computer obsessed, played violent games that have the player "killing" people and blowing stuff up.  Where are the parents?  Who knows?  What are they teaching, or are they teaching at all?
I could go on for pages, but my main theme is that life is so screwed up now, from single parents "raising" kids, and married parents doing the same, shuffling kids off to a day care center for the most formative years of their lives, to be actually raised by the workers there.
How many young boys today belong to Scouts, CAP Cadet program, or other healthy, morals based groups?  Few, in my observation, while the great majority play on computers.

JOG -
Since I have no personal knowledge of what drugs were taken by whom, and further since I am not a physician nor a pharmacist, I don't choose to engage in speculation when discussing a serious topic.
I do feel that too many young people are needlessly medicated.  It's simply another example of parental disengagement - take a nasty kid to the doctor rather than take the time and effort to be a real parent.  It's the easy way out for parents who are too engaged in other things, over the welfare of kids they brought into the world.

JOG -
I wouldn't doubt it.  Another problem with modern life is that we are too tolerant of aberrant behavior.  In the 1095s, 60s, and before, we had several state mental hospitals where people like this were institutionalized. No more.
Now, they are loose, since we became so sensitive and politically correct - we can't lock someone up since modern medicine and therapies can control them and teach them to get better.
What a load of crap - these guys should have been locked way, and we saw what their freedom cost others, and cost society as a whole.