You Can Have My Video Game When You Pry It Out of My Cold, Dead Hand

Please, let's all get this straight once and for all: Video games do not cause violence. People cause violence. A video game has never shot a gun, pulled a knife, exploded a bomb or ordered hundreds of thousands ofAmericans to Iraq based on a lie. Video games just sit there until the end of time unless somebody picks them up and plays them. The same goes for movies, TV, Rock music, magazines, books, pornography and most any other form of information that you can think of. I'll concede that they influence people, sometimes to violence, but it still takes a person to decide to act on that influence in ways they know are wrong.

Could you tell me what video games Genghis Khan and his hordes were playing when they laid waste to most of Asia? None, right? Yet, somehow he and his murderous armies figured out how to rape and kill and burn and loot without a single blessed Playstation or X-box in sight. How was that? What do you think could have caused their violence?

Well, what about those Columbine killers? They played a lot of video games. Didn't they? They played Doom, a first person shooter. Don't tell me that it didn't have anything to do with their spree of violence.

And my answer is that, yes, it had something to do with it. But millions of people have played Doom - millions of high school students, even - and for some reason we haven't had corresponding millions of high school shootings so the relationship is far from proven. I'll bet you those boys went to church sometime in their lives, like most brutal murderers. That's a correlation. Church must have influenced them, wouldn't you think? For that matter, we all know that the Bible is responsible for untold violence throughout history. Let's ban that. Or at least put a parental advisory on the cover.

If anything, there's a negative correlation between violence and playing video games. Hasn't the crime rate gone down in the last few years in direct proportion to the rise of video games? There's a very good reason for that, you know. Video games make kids too fat and lazy to go out murdering.

Some of the games I see, I'll confess, are just sickening. No, I wouldn't touch them. Fortunately, there's a law that says I don't have to play those games. I can let the people who want to play them, do so. That is, people who are the correct age, which it says somewhere on the cover.