What do those three names have in common besides the fact that they’re overpaid talking heads? Well, two of them have placed the blame for the Virginia Tech massacre squarely on video games while one of them dismissed the idea, and it may not be the ones that you think.
Ok, Jack Thompson is the one that you think. That should have come as no surprise.
What did come as a surprise was TV quack, Dr. Phil. I was never a big fan of his to begin with, but I thought he had more smarts than this…
Well, Larry, every situation is different. The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me – common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high.
What came as even more of a surprise was radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh coming to the defense of gamers.
Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that, it may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers?
People have a tough time accepting a relatively simple explanation for something of this scale. But how many people are playing video games out there? How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns?
As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows.
