"It's Not The Game, It's The Parents"

This is now, has always been, and will always be the case. When I was a kid, before the days of home PC's and Console Game ubiquity, my friends and I played Army, Cowboys & Indians, Cops & Robbers, etc.

We shot, stabbed, and/or beat each other to death on a daily basis. To my knowledge, none of my childhoods friends, nor I, have grown up to become serial killers. Just normal folk. What we had was parents who were, you know, involved with us and who made sure to let us know what they thought was right and wrong.

Our society seems to have fallen in love with blaming the symptoms rather than blaming the disease. When someone gets shot, we start suing the gun manufacturers, even though they didn't pull the trigger. Somehow it is the gun's fault, and not the homicidal idiot who decided to use that particular weapon (instead of a knife, baseball bat, his hands, etc). But, there was a time when we didn't even have guns, and we were still very adept at killing each other without them.

So, back when I was a kid, there was still violent crime amongst the under 25 crowd. In fact, I believe the violent crime rate now is actually lower than when I was a kid (the Reagan years were bad). Yet the biggest video games of that period were stuff like PacMan. San Andreas PacMan is not.

When we see kids becoming violent, we have only one place to start looking for where things went wrong, and that is with the parents. Parents have become too accustomed to letting other people raise their kids (schools in particular), and too eager to have legislatures pass 'tough' laws that do absolutely nothing, rather that suck it up and take responsibility for the children they brought into the world.