It wouldn’t be a day ending in Y if incompetent “journalists” and opportunistic politicians weren’t using the death of children to forward an agenda of nonsensical fear. Cue in this week where an 11 year old in Mexico entered a school and shot a teacher and six others before killing himself. The culprit? Video games of course. Just check out the opening sentence on Reuters.
“An 11-year-old boy armed with two guns entered a school in northern Mexico, shot dead a teacher and wounded at least six others before killing himself, possibly under the influence of a violent video game, local officials said on Friday.”
Under the influence of a violent video game, like the kid drank a 40oz of violent games and drunkenly stumbled into school with a gun in his hand and rage in his heart. Notice the use of the term “possibly,” an easy out for when rational minds come in to call out the underhanded fear mongering. Meanwhile Governor Miguel Riquelme, who might otherwise have to take responsibility for violence occurring in his state, pushed the blame to video games as well.
“He was well behaved, but he told some of his classmates that ‘Today was the day,'” he said. “And what we can observe is that the boy was influenced by a video game.”
How was the kid influenced by a video game? Governor Riquelme doesn’t have the time, the resources, or the actual facts to explain. Just take his word for it and remember to vote Riquelme in the next election.
The game getting blamed is Natural Selection because the kid was wearing a shirt with “natural selection” written on it and we can only assume that Governor Riquelme had one of his assistants Google “Natural Selection video game” and came up with the first result. Of course nobody from Reuters took the time to investigate what Natural Selection is because they would have found a game almost as old as the shooter and could not conceivably have inspired the incident.
Or they did research it and realized that nobody would buy their narrative, so they hid the finer details. Natural Selection is a first person shooter/real time strategy hybrid that pits marines against aliens in various sci-fi locations that are not a Mexican school. It came out in 2012 and has a population of a few hundred people still playing it. Given the game’s age and small player base, it’s probably safe to assume that the kid had never played the game or heard of it.
“Experts have long debated whether there is a link between violent video games and aggressive behavior.”
Experts have also pretty unanimously sided with the conclusion that there are no links between violent video games and aggressive behavior, but that doesn’t make for a good story. Experts have also agreed that mass shooters like to copycat other mass shooters, and do you know who else was obsessed with the idea of natural selection? The Columbine shooters. And numerous other violent wackadoodles who believe that they are just culling the weak so that the strong can survive. I wouldn’t expect Dave Graham over at Reuters to be familiar with the Columbine shooting, since discovering that information would require outside research that wasn’t hand-fed to him for the article in question.
Oh and the shooter’s mom died years ago. But it’s the video games for sure. He was a perfectly peaceful, just like how the Columbine shooters were just peaceful loners.
What’s incredible is that it took five credited names to shove out this low quality work only to get outmatched by one blogger in probably half the time it took them to go to print.
MMO Fallout 