As a 13-year-old male living in America, I am expected to adore first-person shooters and movies filled with explosions. Instead, I believe they harm society.

Before this violent media was introduced, the atrocities that games like "Call of Duty" and "Modern Warfare" promote were considered terrible events. Now it is not uncommon to see a 9-year-old murdering hundreds of people virtually. Violent media should be banned to children under a certain age because children are impressionable when their brains are still developing.

These games and movies convey negative and violent messages, numbing our children and future leaders to global issues.

If you look in most family homes in America, you will find a toy gun and in many cases violent video games or first-person shooters. Children enjoy these violent games because they feel in power. Children learn that people who carry weapons are powerful, and it sticks in their undeveloped minds. When they play with these toys, children do not realize that what they act out is a terribly gruesome reality for many people throughout the world. What are we teaching them by allowing these violent toys and games? We teach them that slaughter and wasting of human life is fun and enjoyable. We teach them that life is something to play with.

It is a fact that children are often very violent. We fight each other, we scream and shout and whine, but where did we learn to be like that? All of the games we play and the movies we watch are about a problem and then characters working to come up with a solution. In this age of entertainment, that means a fight between good and evil. We see the hatred for an evil character and how the problem is resolved through violence. Violence is the way we are taught resolution, so how can anyone expect a child to come up with a different solution to a problem? These violent media just have a more blatant and strong statement: violence equals resolution.

A movie or game is made popular by violence. "The Avengers," a recent record-shattering blockbuster movie seen by millions, spent the last 45 minutes destroying Manhattan. Walking out of that film, no child said, "Oh that was sad." Instead, we are so numbed to violence that we can watch as a city is decimated and walk away laughing. Children are so obsessed with this violence that the entertainment business has been forced to turn to that type of story line to turn a profit. It is a vicious circle of supply and demand.

Children think that murdering someone in a game is fine because it isn't real. Parents don't care that their child is downstairs in a virtual war zone where he is "murdering" thousands. Then we wonder why tragedies of gun violence occur all across our nation while we allow our children to commit homicide. Do we want to live in a future world run by hypothetical murderers?

We must teach kinder, more forgiving messages to the next generation until they are developed enough to teach those messages on their own. The first steps in doing that are limiting or even banning some media that numbs our children to acts of violence.

William Donovan of Denver is an eighth-grade student at the Denver Center for International Studies.