It's hard to say how much worse things really are nowadays or if it's mostly our perceptions being changed by the availability of information. Many years ago a lot of this stuff happened, too, but we never heard about it. A good example is police beatings- have they increased in recent years, or is it really that now there are millions of camcorders out there? It's safe to assume it happened at least as much before we could catch it so frequently.
The internet & the explosion of cable also influences these perception. I saw a study once that showed people who watch a lot of TV news tend to think most problems are far worse than they & getting worse - that is to say, they tend to think all catagories of crime are up, even the ones that stats clearly show are not, etc. Part of this is likely due to the increasing negativity of the networks and their desire to "trump" their competition with ever direr coverage. It seems the coverage tends to focus almost exclusively on the bad, rarely citing anything positive. As Don Henley sang, "give us dirty laundry."
I'm not sure what credible evidence links violent games with violent kids. With the laxer broadcast standards, very liberal rules for TV & print and the dissolution of the nuclear family, how could we be sure how much of this long term problem is games? At any rate, at least for older players, the constitutional guarentees of free speech seem to trump any other concern.
I strongly think that at the end of the day, every person is responsible for their own behavior and must be held accountable for their actions. I also believe that entertainment mirrors the public psyche more than it influences it, ie Hollywood is just creating what the public wants to buy.
