Grand Theft Auto, Video Games and Guns

Conservatives have been blaming violence on games since Dungeons and Dragons

I knew it was coming when another shooting happened. It was just a matter of time. The same old debate concerning video games and guns was about to rear its ugly head again.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, there is only one thing to fear. No it isn’t gun control, that topic is taboo and drives people crazy. And it isn’t safe to drive people with guns crazy. I am talking about what America really fears; Video Games!

There is nothing in the constitution that protects programming, drawing, or playing video games. This is, as the founding fathers intended, in their infinite wisdom knew not to protect video games. They knew there would come a day when video games would kill people.

At first, it was Dungeons and Dragons (now called “pen and paper gaming”). We thought it was just a roll of the 2d20 to see if a person would live or die. If you think this wasn’t a real fear, Google “Sally Jessy Raphael and DND”.

It was “scientifically” determined that playing Dungeons and Dragons caused a schism in reality for the player. With this in-ability to see what was real and what wasn’t, the player would then carry out their missions—given to them by the God replacing Dungeon Master—in killing demons and goblins with weapons they made or found around the house.

The players, so far from reality, would believe their classmates and neighbors were the demons and goblins they had to slay in order to advance a level. The games would then end in suicide.

Does that sound familiar with anyone in today’s gaming community? Does it sound familiar to you, Parents? The difference between today’s Grand Theft Auto V and Dungeon and Dragons of yesterday is games like Grand Theft Auto is played by a lot more people. Its cooler to play video games today than it’s ever been.

No surprise that video games are receiving more and more of the blame. So much so, that even video games that haven’t come out yet are targets. In the wake of the Navy shootings, Rep. Louie Gohmert blamed games like Grand Theft Auto V for the violence. Well, the incident happened the day before the game was released.

The non-gaming public can visually see a video game, meaning the news and anti-gaming groups can show clips of a video game, rather than demonstrate 6 people sitting around a table reading a piece of paper. The requirements for video games are actually a at pre-literacy level.

But, there’s scientific proof! That’s usually the battle call. We’ve seen brain scans and the killer played video games they say. Brain scans done by people paid to find something in favour of banning video games aren’t done by a scientific method. Google: “Brain Scans, Video Game Violence, and Bullshit.”

As for the killer actually playing video games, the answer can be identified with a statement of “he also wore clothes, watched television, saw the Bears play the Vikings, ate pizza, used Listerine, and was a Celtics Fan.” In other words, he did a bunch of other things that are common place.

The one issue that doesn’t come up is: He was a mentally disturbed individual with a history of violence and access to a gun, not a video-game gun from Duck-hunt, not a gun from World of Warcraft; not a bazooka from Grand Theft Auto V, but a real gun that shoots real bullets into real people.That is the issue here.

Is it just gun control? No. Is it just mental health? No. It is a combination of both. But quite simply, we choose to ignore these issues. We don’t see either of them because those would be real issues to deal with. Instead, we put our heads in the sand and hope something else comes along to take our minds off the problem.

We, believe in the fantasy world that video game violence is the demon and goblin to kill and if we finally kill it, everything will be better in our world. The news has replaced the Dungeon Master, and we are all rolling 2d20 to check our Sanity saves.

We have a choice here as a Nation. We can either step out of the comfortable game we constructed in lieu of reality and address the gun and mental health crisis or we can keep ourselves playing the game until more people die.

Hopefully, by then Duncan Jones’s Warcraft Movie will be out so we can shift the narrative to the movie violence instead of the very real violence we submerge our kids in by allowing this world of un-checked guns and mental health issues to continue.

As a gaming community, we can force this issue back to guns and mental health—where it should be. You are no longer the asthmatic loners getting together for pizza and rolling dice, you are the consumer public and a strong one at that. You are coming into power now, every hand-held phone device proves this in spades. Use your power, use your voice, be what we “pen and paper” players couldn’t be. Be heard.