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first televised war.

When we kids weren't competing aggressively in ball games we were cowboys, chasing bandits or more often aping the genocide of the native American population; or we were British commandos fighting Germans, a nation with whom we were now formally allied. We watched war films on television, or westerns, we read war comics, or westerns.

By adolescence we entered a teenage culture where boys fought, often with knives, girls concealing our weapons about their person in order to evade police search. Rock music was blamed for teenage violence in the 1950's, but knives and the sword had been Scotland's heritage stretching back thousands of years into Celtic prehistory.

Young men had always been bred to blood themselves in battle, and if we couldn't fight the English, we'd fight with the youths in the next street. We'd fight for girls, for dominance, for prestige, for fun. Watching your fist smash into another youth's face is a far more satisfying adrenalin rush than zapping aliens on a computer screen.

Scotland is a country with a long military tradition and a history of struggle for survival against English invasion (and before them, the Romans, the Irish, the Vikings, the Saxons).

In the 1950's, we kids had little doubt that we'd serve in the military and put our lives on the line in some foreign field. Every parish had its war memorials, and we suspected that some of our names would feature on these in years to come.

And now our kids play video games, our military target the enemy on computer screens. Just before British troops in the first Iraqi war were killed in their personnel carrier by 'friendly fire', the crew of an American A-10 were heard on British radio explaining that zapping enemy tanks was just like playing a computer game.

A blip disappears off the computer screen and men die. The kids play computer games for fun, the military rigorously train their personnel to use exactly the same technology to make killing more efficient and longer ranged.

Television, the cinema, video games - you can test the physiological and psychological responses of young people engaged in watching and playing these, you can draw conclusions that they increase 'violence' - that they stimulate the fight or flight mechanism which we've evolved over millions of years.

Nobody tested us when we played cowboys, or ball sports, nobody tested us as we queued outside the dancehalls, eyeing up the girls and the boys we'd likely fight with sometime that night.

Nobody tested

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