Rebecca Hagelin wants to ban video games… again:
Arrested on suspicion of car theft, Moore was brought in for booking and ended up on a bloody rampage. He lunged at Officer Arnold Strickland, grabbed his gun and shot him twice. Officer James Crump, who responded to the sound of the gunfire, was shot three times. And before he ran outside with police car keys he snatched, Moore put five bullets in Dispatcher Ace Mealer. Was this the first time Moore had committed such a heinous crime? Yes and no.
Moore was a huge fan of a notorious video game called Grand Theft Auto. As the title suggests, the goal is to steal cars. If that’s all there was to the “game,” it would be bad enough, but it gets worse: The way to acquire and hold on to the cars is to kill the police officers who try to stop you. And the sick minds behind the game give you plenty of choices – shooting them with a rifle, cutting them up with a chainsaw, setting them on fire, decapitation.
If you shoot an officer, you get extra points for shooting him in the head. It’s no surprise, then, that all of Moore’s real-life victims had their heads blown off. According to court records, Moore spent hundreds of hours playing Grand Theft, which has been described as “a murder simulator.”
But this time, his victims weren’t a collection of animated pixels on a TV screen. They were flesh-and-blood human beings whose lives were snuffed out in seconds. They had families who continue to mourn their loss – such as Steve Strickland, Officer Strickland’s brother. Tomorrow, he will testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property. Chaired by Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., the purpose of the hearing is to examine the constitutionality of state laws regulating the sale of ultra-violent video games to children. Three psychologists will testify about the potential link between playing violent video games and copycat violence, and whether the games contribute to aggressive behavior.
With the ever-expanding use of technology by our children, such hearings are critical. We must determine if Moore and other murderers like him are anomalies or if ultra-violent video games dangerously warp the psyches of our youth. Those tempted to scoff at the connection between video games and behavior should bear a couple of things in mind. First, video games are not passive or spectator media. While playing the game, teenage boys and young men – the largest users of video games – actually become the characters who cut up their victims with chainsaws, set them on fire, or chop off their heads.
The amusing thing is that this is absolutely nothing new. Remember how parents who bought Mortal Kombat pretended that they had no idea that a game with a title that means “fight to the death” could possibly be violent. And wait until Rebecca learns that you can – gasp – beat up women after hiring them for sex.
Heck, Big Chilly and I half-managed to convince Computer Gaming World that we were going to release Rape 3D back in 1994. Unfortunatly, Big Chilly pushed it too far when he started going on about how our next project would be “William S. Burroughs: the game”, which would be based on scoring smack, young men and playing William Tell with drug-addled women.
What is highly annoying is the way in which women simply won’t leave men alone to pursue their chosen forms of entertainment in peace. They’ve largely chased men away from television by turning it into a wasteland of stupid, soppy, male-denigrating slop; if it wasn’t for sports, I wouldn’t even bother to own a television. (Madden’s is better on a 40 square foot projection screen anyway.) Men, especially young men, like to blow things up and kill things, would you rather they blew off steam in a virtual world or in the real one?
Are violent video games a negative influence? You would think so, although the facts are that murder rates have dropped consistently as video games have become ever more popular and more realistic. (They’ve always been violent.) And while they’re demonstrably less damaging to society than divorce, can you imagine the collective hissy fit that would ensue if men called for a Congressional investigation of “Desperate Housewives”?
If we are to determine that anything should be banned from this incident, it’s quite obviously police guns. After all, if the dead police officers hadn’t been armed, Mr. Moore couldn’t have shot them. As for her insane points theory, perhaps poor dimwitted Rebecca should keep in mind that police officers often wear bulletproof vests, so if you want to kill them, it’s generally a good idea to shoot them in an unprotected area that will still prove fatal. An area such as, oh, I don’t know… the head?