Imagine, if you will, in the wake of a tragic violent shooting, it was discovered the perpetrator had enjoyed reading in his spare time, and had especially enjoyed books like Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five, Of Mice and Men, and A Farewell to Arms. Then, because of the obvious subversive nature of the books, the town decided to get together and burn those books and others whose content was deemed violent or prurient. An obvious overreaction with crypto-fascist/repressive overtones, right?
And yet, in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, a neighboring community is planning a “violent video game buyback” and then snapping the discs in half and tossing them into the incinerator. So, while hardly the book-burning scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it’s still disturbing on many levels.
First of all, they’re doing it wrong. A group called SouthingtonSOS, made up of the local Chamber of Commerce, school board, YMCA, etc, is planning the event. They’re offering $25 (clarification: in the form of giftcards good for local merchants) for copies of violent games, which seems comical. Yeah, sure you can have my 3 year old copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops… since now I have Black Ops 2 to play. Thanks for the $25! I bet the folks at Gamestop are pissed they’re being so heavily outbid for used games. And people trying to unload the original Gears of War or God of War or Bioshock to be able to go buy new games are in luck.
Second, and more importantly, what a kneejerk reaction to tragedy that will not accomplish anything. The numerous studies done show zero link between video games and violent behavior. My favorite is this gem from the Washington Post:
For those who don’t get jazzed about reading statistics tables like I do, the chart shows that of the ten countries studied, the US is in the middle for video game playing but outpaces everyone else by far in terms of violence. In fact, the social scientist in me would draw a trendline for the graph that is nearly completely flat: zero correlation between violence and video games.
Regardless, this won’t keep biddie nation from trying to blame everything and everyone for this tragedy in order to satisfy some pre-conceived political narrative and agenda.
We’re going to cover this in depth a great deal more, with some cogent analysis coming from Wrath.o.tron, but wanted to put this out there sooner rather than later. What do you robots think? Are we overreacting to them as much as they are overreacting to games? Nazis or Not-zis?