As a game developer, I honestly took a long hard look inward and tried to assess our medium and its cultural impact. And I found that games, more than any other media, are plagued with brutal violence. More than movies, more than comics, more than anything. Graphic slaying is the norm in our industry.
After the Newtown attack, I want to help make sure any event so tragic never happens in US history again. If entertainment is the problem, I'd say censor it. If mental health care is the issue, raise the taxes. Nothing should be off the table when discussing losing multiple thousands of lives every year to gun violence.
But game studios splatter blood over virtual lives throughout the world. In fact, all of the aforementioned media is not only present everywhere on the planet, its prevalent. That's when I ran across this Washington Post article by Fareed Zakaria. In it, he analyses the three main reasons given by media, the government, and corporations that explain this tragedy: entertainment, mental health availability, and gun laws. The article is short but packed with details and statistics, and Zakaria concludes, and I agree, that the one differentiator between the USA and every other first-world nation is its gun laws. Those laws are what make gun violence so tragically high in the US. Not movies, not games, not hospitals, but guns. He even gives Australia as an example of a country with rampant gun violence in its past, who enacted a set of strict regulations, and saw their gun violence numbers plummet.
So when Joe Biden says "We know there's no single answer", I have to argue that. There is a simple answer because this is a simple problem with examples throughout history and the world. Guns are made to kill people, especially assault weapons, and they're damned well designed.
Newtown was a wakeup call. People kill people. And people with assault rifles are better at it.
Its time for the government and everyone else to do what Sam Jackson taught us:
Wake. The fuck. Up.
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