Do not tell me that video games have no relation to mass murder in the 21st century.
Video games are real to your brain. You can be cured of phobias and addictions by playing medically-authored video games designed for your illness. Smoking, flying, whatever. Its in the cybertherapy google space, see for yourself.
I have done a lot of real-world training with video games. Video games with real physics and realistic weapon response and Ph/Pk (probability of hit/probability of kill) are actually used to train people who need to hit and kill people with bullets and grenades and so forth. Nasty business, someone’s got to do it, that is if you subscribe to the right of violent self-defense, which I understand is not everyone’s cup of half-caf mocha latte frappucino. Me, I want to retire and raise goats, but that ain’t happenin soon. Why goats? They smell better than lawyers and they cut your grass for free.
So all these kids, growing up in this insane world, with all these insane pressures and media memes and cultural psychoses and family dysfunction…these kids can play games. Games like Grand Theft Auto…where you can pretend you have automatic weapons and go into malls and blow people away and blow yourself away and listen to music and get an adrenalin rush…and then what if you get depressed…small wonder these dissociated sick kids grab a rifle and think it means something to kill a bunch of people and then themselves…
…move along, nothing to see here…
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and I pray it does not happen again.
…is simply statistically untrue, as well as scientifically disproven.
Violent video games have a relationship to mass murder in the 21st century – that has been proven. They make mass murder less likely. Think of it as akin to the proven fact that kids who hunt are less likely to shoot another human being than kids who have never touched a gun before, or for that matter that a swimming pool in the backyard is one hundred times more likely to kill a child than a gun in a home.
Indeed, pointing out that this is “another” mall mass murder is misleading in itself. By definition, all mass murders take place in locations where there are a lot of people. Which means malls, schools, and the like. These events are those furthest out on the tails of the standard deviation of events that take place at malls or schools as to be statistically meaningless. Your odds of being at a shopping mall when there is a mass murder are akin to being killed by al Qaeda – lower than that of winning the lottery.
video games might be on the list of things that influenced him, but i doubt they bear the brunt of the influence.
Is this the latest installment of the Twinkie Defense? The details.
These random mass murderers seem to always be White folk–maybe it’s genetic (snark). This reminds me of something not discussed too often. Last weeks riots around Paris included shots fired at the police. Our insane gun policy plus continuing institutional bigotry is going to make the riots of the ’60s look very tame. Something about playing with fire.
Capitalism spends money (lobbying) to distort democracy–and will result in the final nail in America’s coffin. We’re broke, the military is depleted, our elections seem fraudulent, and there will be riots in the streets. Oh, and most of the country has been conditioned to be more paranoid than I am.
Like others before him, this shooter had a medical history that included legal, psychiatric drugs.