By Shaun Burns
For the longest time, I’ve heard people say that playing video games will cause the subjects playing them to imitate what they see or to adopt it into their psyche. I bought this theory for all of about three seconds. By this jump of logic I should be a FIFA soccer player, an NHL goalie, twice made a run at the WWF title and race Nascars under the name “Dr. Ma-go-go.”
I remember the same argument used for violent television and its effects on young kids. I grew up on The A-Team. If you can find a show with more senseless violence during the 1980s, I’d like to see it. I grew up on Robocop, Terminator and such, and according to the sources, I should be a unstoppable killing machine who likes violence. Truth is, I freak out at the sight of blood (unless it’s my own), I get nervous around violent people, I haven’t had a fight in ages (nor do I want one), and I don’t think about solving my problems with a gun.
It all depends on the subject’s mental stamina and condition. Some people are just plain nuts to the point of where they’ll kill a group of people and blame it on a song or a band or a game to escape the responsibility. They’re already whack jobs. Chances are, if they could, they’d blame the rice krispies they had for breakfast for snap, crackling and popping the phrase “kill the innocent.”
People have to be taught that violence is not the answer to life’s problems (booze is, or to a lesser degree, American beer).