For someone who likes video games, firearms and lives near Jacksonville, the situation that happened on August 26th is very personal. I could easily see myself visiting a gaming tournament like that in Jacksonville.
If you had not heard, some 24 year old lost a Madden Tournament in Jacksonville, killed 2 people, shot many more, then killed himself. It’s tragic and as always I have the families in my prayers.
To be clear being there for the victims is much more important for our society than “social activism“. But this is not a news network so the reason I’m writing this is not to report on what happened. I’m only throwing my two-cents into the discussions surrounding these issues mostly because thousands of other people already have (and they generally address the wrong problems).
First I want to talk about violence in video games. Obviously a minority of the Christian-right came out to blame video games on the increase in violence. As someone who’s been apart of the gaming community I haven’t seen this being the case. People without parents may be raised by the culture around them, but even our secular culture makes the distinction between reality and fiction. This claim should be based less on how violent a game is, and more on how much focus is put on it. I actually find violent movies much worse than violent video games. Because in many video games it’s just an objective, there is no plot behind these peaces of code you’re shooting at. Eventually you even remembered all the animations and tell how fake everything is. In movies many characters have a purpose, and still act, sound, look and display emotions like real people. The interactivity of holding a controller probably doesn’t make an individual any more violent in the real world. What isn’t different between games or movies is when the visuals get too graphic. I think making violence too-realistic desensitizes people to truly scary sights. That doesn’t mean it’s creating more violent people, but that violent people will be capable of going further before their conscience kicks in.
In a much louder response social liberals started claiming this was the fault of masculinity. Which is kind of a pointless effort since masculinity can only be defined based on stereotypes, and it’s not like those stereotypes are anywhere near as prevalent as before. Either way, this conclusion has been drawn because most mass killers seem to be males. But there’s no evidence that male characteristics, or being raised masculine, is what makes people killers. In fact there are a couple other common characteristics among many mass killers. They were raised in an unstable family or without a father, identified as a liberal atheist, and took psychiatric medication. Now I’m not saying everyone being raised by a single mother, identifying as a liberal atheist, or taking psychiatric medication is going to shoot up a place. But I’m also not telling people to vilify stereotypical male traits every time an unstable liberal male kills a bunch of innocent people.
There obviously needs to be some changes in our culture so that insane people are a little less insane. Historically even the criminals had some kind of line. They weren’t so spiteful that they’d shoot up a public event. However I fear that some of the real solutions might be contrary to what the social activists want. It’s a lack of personal accountability, religious principles, and a solid family example that has created such a violent culture. And it’s entirely possible that the reason why most mass killers are liberal males is because feminists have essentially taught them to hate themselves.