The Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre became a dark chapter in our history,when a bloodthirsty madman snuffed out the lives of many children and their teachers. It was and is an unbelievable tragedy, whose full impact we may never truly know.
After the smoke cleared, people wanted answers. Some politicians wanted to score political points by pinning the tragedy on whatever issue happened to rub them the wrong way. And chief among the scapegoats some politicians and talking heads proffered is that old timeworn hobbyhorse that they have been riding for years: video games.
It began immediately after the shooting, of course, in a bout of what one can only describe as the worst journalism in recent memory. Fox News and CNN reported the shooter’s identity incorrectly, naming him as Ryan Lanza rather than Adam Lanza. Ryan is Adam’s older brother. The two networks also used Ryan’s Facebook photo as the photo of the shooter. This immediately led to a firestorm of hatred being posted to an innocent man’s Facebook wall, with death threats and the whole nine yards. Of course, he deleted his Facebook almost immediately to escape the rolling tide of misinformed hatred.
But the damage had been done. Because before it went down, some folks saw that Ryan liked Mass Effect on Facebook. Now for those folks who don’t closely follow every ridiculous claim that Fox News makes, this may not ring a bell, but there was a time when Fox had a nice long segment decrying Mass Effect as the most repulsive, tawdry piece of entertainment to ever hit the market. Of course, their charges against the game were defamatory at best and delusional by any measure, but that didn’t stop them for one moment. When your research on a topic consists of clicking around on that thing’s website 15 minutes before your segment, you need rethink your life.
And now their craziness has come full circle with people seizing the misinformation that Fox itself had sown in the past to demonize an industry in the future. I would accuse Fox News of being a puppet master in control of our nation’s most fervently overzealous reactionaries, but I think I’d be giving the outfit a bit too much credit. Lord knows they’ve chummed the waters enough over the years; it’s about time one of their clunkers bears fruit.
Violent video games have been a contentious issue ever since Columbine. The whole thing has been hashed and rehashed ad nauseum. Naturally, Capitol Hill’s resident mercenary Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has jumped right on the bandwagon to demonize game developers and called for a commission to “examine the effect the entertainment industry has on our culture.”
“Very often, these young men have had an almost hypnotic involvement in some form of violence in our entertainment culture, particularly violent video games, and then they obtain guns and become not just troubled young men but mass murderers,” Lieberman said during his screed against video games.
To boot, various news outlets’ shock that the shooter was a big fan of Call of Duty has saturated the blogosphere. Unfortunately, Call of Duty games routinely sell more than six million copies in their launch months alone, so I suppose that’s a truckload of latent psychos out there getting ready to strike. It’s either that, or someone shooting a person in real life isn’t related to enjoying a popular war game in the slightest, and reporting that someone liked Call of Duty isn’t a bombshell at all. Do you think if Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who landed the airplane safely in the Hudson, was revealed to play Microsoft Flight Simulator, people would be in a rush to credit video games with his amazing accomplishment? Of course not.
At the deepest circle of this sideshow is none other than the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, who began bleating his fervent, convenient cry of outrage to anyone who would listen.
“There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people,” LaPierre said during a press conference after the shooting.
He went on to name Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto and Bulletstorm as some of the chief titles in this alleged fount of unchecked, distasteful violence. He also referenced a game called Kindergarten Killers as a reprehensible violent video game responsible for this sort of tragedy. Problematically, trotting out an old Flash game which was taken down four years ago as damning evidence of the video game industry’s perfidy isn’t exactly a bulletproof argument. The game was made by some guy from the U.K. That’s like saying that all art is awful because your neighbor’s 5-year-old made a crappy painting.
But LaPierre wasn’t happy to just blame the tragedy on video games and move on down the road. No, he opened his press conference by attempting to usurp the moral high ground for the NRA’s own purposes.
“While some have tried to exploit tragedy for political gain, we have remained respectfully silent,” LaPierre told reporters at the press conference. “Now, we must speak for the safety of our children.”
LaPierre seems to imply he wasn’t trying to deflect the growing chorus of outrage directed at the NRA or anything by ham-handedly repurposing the murder of elementary school kids to serve as an indictment of video games, thereby redirecting any calls for gun control into potential regulations of “violent video games.” I’m sure that thought never crossed his mind. It’s all about the children for LaPierre and the NRA.