ChromeAlchemist said:
The thing is, there is no actual way of pinning this child's actions (while a tragedy indeed) to video games directly, and yet she pretty much did just that.
Bear in mind I'm from the UK, but what is it with American media and scapegoating (though bear in mind the Daily Mail is just as bad here, but it's print media only)?
But I digress, what are your thoughts on this?
Quite honestly what I've seen of our "great media" here in America is a lot of families, and more often a lot of adults that grew up in the days of Arcades being shadily run outlets with crappy food and kids throwing quarters at big booths have become the authority of the day. They're not used to the idea of the kind of media kids are exposed to, and since times have changed SO much since their day, they've no frame of reference personally for whether or not a child or anyone else could deal with this kind of information.
The evidence is everywhere. Look at any school shooting, under age suicide, hell sometimes even statutory rape can be blamed on it (local news covered a case like that once, but it was thrown out a day later when it turned out the gaming bit was a lie . . . thank you "honest reporter"). These adults don't have the same mindset as the younger generation because to them video games were ALWAYS something out of their world. Something someone else made for another group.
So they do what they think is right, ignore learning about it because it's too complicated to understand and blame it because it's a scary complicated thing they can't wrap their head around.
Because they can't frame it in their mind, or understand it, they don't want to. They are more then willing to try and get rid of it, but not necessarily for the spoken reason. The spoken reason is to try and grab the people that DO think about this, and wonder if they should bother to understand. Give them enough info that they thing they DO understand, and they'll believe it to the day they die (see also "the call of duty/counterstrike/Halo effect") it's all domino ed from someone not wanting to understand it, and still wanting to understand why a crime happened.
It would be similar I think, if there was a new faith that cropped up, a small group that's very close knit very openly advocates this new faith, a few years later it grows MUCH larger, but every once in a while one of the people int hat faith murder someone, or commit suicide, the people that were around before it, and don't want to understand it will blame it ON the faith. Even though they lack the information to accurately cement their claim.
It's exactly what we see every time someone blames a suicide, murder, rape what have you on video games. People without enough information assuming they know the whole story. This child in Texas, I'd ask if he even DID play video games before letting this psychologist go on about how damaging they are. And if the answer is "well, we don't have that information" then they're not allowed to call that a factor. You can't cite evidence you don't have.
