“‘BRRRNNGG! BRRRNNGG!’ ... I quickly turn the alarm off my phone and ask myself why I’m up so freakin’ early. Then to the right of my phone, I see my Nerf gun: my baby, my love, my everything. All of the pain and aching from the early morning goes away, knowing that I’ve volunteered to go to one of the opponent’s house for the kill…”
- “A day in the life of a Paranoier,” Jonathan Lee, published in Glenbrook South High School’s newspaper, 4/22/16.
“Paranoia” is a yearly event performed by students at Glenbrook South high school, 30 minutes northwest of Chicago. Advertised as the “Great Glenview Nerf Gun Tournament,” around 60 teams of 5 South upperclassmen participate in this cash-awarded nerf gun tournament as a kind of rite of passage. Using the form of a huge bracket, teams face off one-on-one every week. The objective: “kill” (strike a player with a nerf bullet) as many players as you can on the opposing team, and the team with the most players “alive” by the end of the week advances to the next round. The game follows an extensive list of rules “to ensure the safety of all participants,” but the two most important rules are: 1) participants must tell their parents they’re taking part in the game so that no parents accidentally call the cops on an opponent and get them in legal trouble, and 2) no guns are allowed on the actual grounds of Glenbrook South or at off-campus school sanctioned events. Paranoia has gone on for so long that school officials and Glenview police can expect it: during the month of March in Glenview, our kiddos will go a little wild. And that’s been okay, as long as students still be vigilant of laws and school rules (guns, even toy ones, are not allowed on the campus).
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At least it has been more or less okay, until this year. After a student was involved in a car accident that was supposedly caused by the game, the high school took it upon themselves to publicly condemn Paranoia. I was surprised to hear from some of my former GBS classmates that an article about Paranoia had been published on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. The Tribune article related the different sides of the controversial argument about whether or not the game should be allowed, from my former principal’s urgent claim that the game involves high-speed car chases, guns that appear realistic, and team names that are "derogatory and distasteful,” to parents and students who believed the school was overextending its authority, and related the game to the Pokemon-Go craze (Healy). Until I came across this article, Paranoia had pretty much gone unchecked in my mind. I had understood Paranoia as an accepted ritual of our community. I even participated in the game, and never felt like I was in danger or being “bad”. As a fresh GBS alum newly awakened to the wonders of the sociological imagination, however, searing problems stood out to me upon reading this article.
For one, I noticed an argument being made that the school was being overprotective of otherwise “well-behaved, rule-abiding teens” (Healy). This claim that Glenbrook South students are typically “good” and this game was the only exception powerfully reminded me of the sociological study by William J. Chambliss on the Saints and the Roughnecks, and the social effects being labeled as “deviant” had on the Roughneck’s psyche. Glenview kids, despite their violent behavior in this nerf gun game, enjoyed the privilege of not being labeled “deviant” and therefore had been able to get away with carrying out the more questionable activities in Paranoia unscathed.
How did Glenview students acquire this privilege? If they were the exception for being exceedingly “good kids”, when does the situation become “bad”? For surely it’s not acceptable for kids everywhere to openly carry and play with toy guns in their community. It clearly wasn’t acceptable for Tamir Rice to play with his pellet gun in a public park in Cleveland, OH. The police were notified and, thinking that Rice wielded a real weapon, rashly shot and killed the boy on November 22, 2014 (Williams). Listen to the police surveillance footage, and hear for yourself how the officers repeatedly describe the twelve-year-old black boy as a twenty-year-old, hostile African American male (Williams). Are Nerf Wars just another example to add to the extensive list of white privilege that’s present in our country?
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I wanted to attempt to pinpoint exactly where this point of privilege came from. After spending some time looking online for other instances of high school nerf war tournaments (often with different names, like “Assassins” or simply “Nerf Wars”), I gathered a list of different towns whose public high school had some form of the game. In other words, towns in which kids possessed the privilege to openly carry toy guns without being perceived as a threat to the community. Using the QuickFacts tool provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, I compared the demographics of three Midwestern towns who had some form of nerf war ritual in their high schools (Middletown OH, Glenview IL, Lakeville MN) with the city of Cleveland to observe the most significant differences between the two situations and see if any explanations could be drawn.
The first demographic similarity that struck me between the three towns whose high school had some kind of Nerf War was that they all were predominantly white communities, with percentages of citizens who identified as “white alone” all marking over 80%. To compare, only 37.8% of Cleveland’s population identified as white alone. Interestingly enough, though, the three nerf-war-friendly towns showed some variety in their demographics about their citizens who identify as people of color. While Glenview and Lakeville both listed their African American populations as under 3%, Middletown’s African American population was closer to the national average at 11% (percentage of U.S. population that identifies as black is 12%). Cleveland’s African American population blows the rest of the towns in my little study out of the water, though, with its African American population marked at 53.3%. Similarly, the three nerf-war-friendly towns reported their Latino population to be in the single digits, while Cleveland’s Latino population is listed at 10%.
The next set of data I looked at was the listed median annual income levels. Again, Glenview and Lakeville were strikingly similar in this regard with median income levels being over $90,000. Middletown was significantly lower from its fellow nerf-war-friendly cities with a median income level at $36,374, and Cleveland rated the lowest at $26,150.
I really expected the main factor of difference between nerf-war-friendly towns and Cleveland to be economic, but Middletown's substantially lower annual median income makes this difference hard to prove. The only main points of similarity happen to be that the three towns that allow their kids to openly use Nerf guns all have a white majority in their population, compared to the black majority in urban Cleveland. This information suggests that there may exist a connection between race privilege and Nerf wars, but I recognize that I currently don’t have enough information to fully prove this fact. Ideally, I would have been able to compare more towns, but there’s just not enough published singular instances out there with toy gun games. More sociological research must be done in this particular subject area to fully understand it. It definitely brings up some interesting questions, though, about why these games imitating violence came to fruition in the first place in areas of privilege.
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Works cited
Associated Press. “‘Freaks people out’: Ohio police warn residents about Nerf gun wars.” Fox 8 News Cleveland, 6 March 2017, http://fox8.com/2017/03/06/freaks-people-out-ohio-police-warn-residents-about-nerf-gun-wars/
Healy, Vikki Ortiz. “‘Paranoia’ toy-gun among Glenview teens worries police, educators.” Chicago Tribune, 11 March 2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-paranoia-game-met-20170310-story.html
Knutson, David. “John Choi warns schools of ‘Nerf wars’ dangers.” Twin Cities Pioneer Press.com, 31 March 2017, http://www.twincities.com/2017/03/31/watch-for-kids-risky-nerf-wars-school-officials-warned/
Lee, Jonathon. “A day in the life of a paranoier.” The Oracle: The Official Website of the Glenbrook South School Newspaper, 22 Apr. 2016, http://theoracle.glenbrook225.org/opinions/2016/04/22/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-paranoier/
“Quickfacts.” United States Census Bureau. U.S. Department of Commerce, 2017, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045216/3916000,2735180,1729938,3949840
Williams, Timothy. “Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death.” The New York Times, 28 Dec. 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/us/tamir-rice-police-shootiing-cleveland.html?_r=0 .
Interesting display how something so meager can really exemplify the structural stratification between different groups of people. I think this could be connected to how "paranoia" trivializes gang violence since the point of the game replicates the "paranoia" a member of a gang faces. This trivialization hits really close to home to many, especially in a place like Chicago where gun violence is rampant
ReplyDeleteI thought you made a really interesting point about how the location and demographic of GBS and other high schools made this game more acceptable. It was a tradition at my high school for the senior class to play a game of "assassins" where students used markers to "kill" each other by getting the ink on someone's hand or arm. Because of the gang violence present in Chicago, the nerf wars or water gun wars that I've heard of at some schools would not have been allowed at my high school which is why students used markers instead. I also really liked the point you made about how this game trivializes gang violence and gun use. There's a fine line between kids just having fun and them trivializing a serious issues. I doubt the students participating in the game realize the issues with it and their intentions are just to have fun. However, there are probably other ways that the game could be played (such as with markers) that could help make the game a little more acceptable and less controversial.
ReplyDeleteI participated in Assassin my senior year. My school was predominantly white, and I realize now that my school's demographic along with its participation in the game was no coincidence. Students typically went out in ski masks and lurked outside other peoples houses for their attack. No one batted an eye, police even drove by and didn't question us. Your point about Tamir Rice made me realize how privileged you must be in order to able to casually participate in Assassin. Why were kids running around with water guns seen as harmless and fun in my community, whereas in other communities people assume the worst intentions? People defend the game by saying that the kids are "good", but how can they know that? You can't justify it without admitting there is racial bias involved. The winners were rewarded a cash prize of hundreds of dollars for "killing" the most people. This game definitely trivializes gang violence and issues that are very real in lots of communities.
ReplyDeleteI participated in a variation of this my senior year of high school. We played a game called spoons in which everyone was given a target and had to tap their target with a spoon. I also went to a private high school in a primarily white part of the bay so this was an accepted practice, something fun for kids to do in between class. It is interesting to see how this is acceptable in a white community but the minute it reaches an area considered the inner city, it become taboo.
ReplyDeleteI think this touches on a lot of interesting points that decide who gets to play these games and why. I think two additional points that show how priveledged the players of assasign are involve the cost of actually buying a nerf gun. Although they arent the most expensive things in the world, it is still not something that people in low socio economic classes can afford to splurge on. Additionally, the game become almost a mockery of gun violence, and thus degrades its importance as something that can actually take someones life. This also relates back to our obsession with violence in video games and nerf gun games in general that make us numb to the reality that people can be killed or critically injured from actual gun violence.
ReplyDeleteIn my high school we also had a similar game like this called AP assassins. Now looking back on it I realize the many things wrong with it. The fact that you had to be in AP courses created stratification between the students in AP classes and the ones that are not. I understand where the school was coming from to try to motivate students to take AP classes but I still think its wrong to do that. Also the game really undermines the real dangers of guns and violence. The area I live is not particularity bad with crime but its still important to understand the real dangers of violence and guns and the game can make those things seem less dangerous than they actually are.
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