Okay, timeout here. Did either Senators Rockefeller or Grassley actually read the article? Lupica's story, available here, says that Lanza had compiled a 7 foot by four foot "scorecard" of actual mass murders and attempted mass murders. The scorecard contained 500 names, complete with the number of people killed, and the exact make and model of each weapon used.
"It had to have taken years," said Lupica's source. "It sounded like a doctoral thesis, that was the quality of the research."
Two things here. First, Adam Lanza was crazed, immoral bastard. Second, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, it clearly wasn't the violence on video games that "inspired" Lanza to go on a shooting spree, it was the violence that was real, coupled with Lanza's own moral depravity.
I personally don't care much for most these so-called "shooter games," although I did play more than my fair share of Nintendo 64's GoldenEye back in 1998. It's not that I am a fan of these video games, it's that behavioral science does not validate claims that video games actually cause an increase in violent behavior. The opposite, is true in fact. And really, let's think about it. In Games like "Call of Duty" and "Medal of Honor," the shooter is an American soldier. How many of these "gamers" enlisted in the U.S. military after playing the game?
But that's not how certain people see the issue. We heard the same story about Eric Harris after Columbine. He played Doom. He also believed that humans should go extinct, and that he wanted to kill more people in a bombing of a public building than Timothy McVeigh, and that if he didn't follow through with his blaze of glory, he would have been a serial killer. All of this information was revealed in Eric Harris' home videos, made public in Dave Cullen's Columbine.
So let's really examine the science here. In both cases, a truly disturbed individual* went on a shooting spree. In both cases, the perpetrators of said massacre were inspired by real-life violence. In both cases, the shooter(s) played video games. In both cases, the shooters had access to semi-automatic rifles that were legally purchased.
How sad that someone in a place of actual power and responsibility could see the evidence and arrive at the wrong conclusion.
It's always been hilarious to me that people have been killing each other for thousands and thousands of years, and even serial killers have been well documented since at least the late 1800s, and yet video games get randomly blamed for violence when they've only been around for a few decades. Which came first? -Ben
ReplyDeleteGood point, Ben. Of course, perhaps the serial killers of the 19th century had criminal minds so advanced, they were playing video games one hundreds before their invention!
ReplyDeleteOr not. If only more theoretical astrophysicists studied criminology as well.