Two hundred years ago
If you were 14, you were pretty much military age. No battlefield simulators for you, just a quick lesson on how to load a musket, a pair of boots, and maybe a cushy job in the baggage train.
A hundred years ago, if you were an American, if you were 14, you were probably getting ready to go fight in WWI. Even more chance of both suffering and inflicting grisly death.
Fifty years ago, WWII; although they tightened up the regs, and made sure you at least had a convincing fake ID indicating you were 18.
The fact is that for nearly a thousand years, every generation has been less violent than the one which preceded it.
People that blame video games, or private ownership of guns, or easy access to violence in movies or TV, or James Joyce, or Karl Marx, or whomever you want to point at and declare, "That's what's tearing society apart!" is just glib, specious reasoning.
To wit: America (and, obviously, I'm an American) has a population of over 300 million people. Of them, let's assume a sixth of them have had at least some contact with video games during the course of their lives. That would be more than 50 million people "trained with murder simulators."
Also, guns: We'll get even crazier, say that about a sixth of Americans, if they don't own a gun personally, they know where to buy one, steal one, borrow one. Say another 50M people could arm themselves if they so desired.
So, between the gun owners and the game players (assuming some overlap), here in the states, we've got roughly 70M+ citizens who have experience with both video games, and actual weaponry.
By the logic espoused by many authoritarians, American society should look something like Grand Theft Auto at this point. However, once you peel back the shock journalism surrounding the issues of media and gun violence, you see that our murder rate is actually quite on par with the rest of the developed world, and quite a bit better than other countries which have unrestricted gun ownership. (Congo, anyone?)
Statistics on actual crime rates: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_01.html
Coincidentally, one will noticed that in fact, since the advent of really good 3d graphics cards, murder rates have declined by thousands per year, with the exception of the early 1990s, when George Bush Sr. was running the country into the ground.
A final thought, as well: Generally, it's been observed that the vast majority of perpetrators of murder have come from poorer social and economic backgrounds. Most murders are a product of theft, ethic or religious conflict, or organized crime. While there are notable exceptions (mass killings by students, or .00001% of American murders that have happened in the last decade), the profile type of a murderer is that of someone who could not afford, or would have no interest in, video gaming.