Friday, December 21, 2012

It's Not The Guns, It's the Video Games

I remember sitting waiting for my kid's Aikido class to start once, six or seven years ago -- the kid was eight or nine, I think -- and the little boys in the class were talking about Call of Duty, and how cool it was to shoot the people in the game until their ribs were torn away and their "guts fell out" and other such delightful details.

These were kids about my kid's age, eight or nine years old.

I remember a few years later, when my kid was eleven and her best friend started playing X-Box, some game where you could chat online with other people while you played, how upset my kid was at the casual misogyny of the gamer world -- how often and how idle the rape threats were that her friend (also eleven) was subjected to.

So I'm not exactly shocked by Wayne LaPierre's comments on video games in his speech to the NRA this morning.

But does he seriously want us to believe that video games are more responsible for what happened at Sandy Hook than the gun culture that his organization has helped to foster in this country?

I mean, how fucking stupid does he think we are?

1 comment:

Contingent Cassandra said...

Or perhaps at least part of the answer is that shooter-focused video games are *part* of the gun culture that the NRA has helped to create, and that bears at least partial responsibility for events such as Newtown -- and that that gun culture is very different from the traditional rural culture which the NRA loves to nostalgically evoke, but which is in fact very different, because, while it includes use of guns for certain practical purposes -- e.g. hunting, protection and sometimes euthanasia of livestock -- it does not fetishize them?