As I was wandering around the web this past weekend, I stumbled upon a reaction to the events in Aurora, Colorado from a special guest on CNN, criminal profiler Pat Brown.
“He’s probably prepared for this for a long time, just obsessing over it, gathering his weapons. [He] probably spent a lot of time in his apartment, playing one video game after the other—shooting, shooting, shooting—building up his courage and building up the excitement of when it’s going to be real for him. And it’s made his day.”
“This has been something he has really been into. And now we’re going to find, probably on [Facebook] or anybody who knows him will say, ‘Yeah, he did have a lot of interest in that. He was always playing the video games. And I’m not saying video games make you a killer. But if you’re a psychopath, video games help you get in the mode to do the killing.
So it is a problem in our society with teenaged psychopaths, that they do get inspired by this and want to make it real. So it is a danger but it doesn’t make you a psycho.”
Pat Brown has a masters degree in Criminal Justice from Boston University. She’s regularly featured on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, and numerous other networks as a special guest for these kinds of things. She is, by all accounts a credentialed professional in the field of criminal profiling.
Now, she specifically states that video games don’t make people into killers. For that, she deserves some credit. However, it’s not even the least bit relevant to her case. Of course James Holmes played video games. He’s 24 years old. I’m almost 30 myself and I still play video games, as do quite a few of my friends. She might as well have said “James Holmes was always going to movies.” or “James Holmes was always reading a book.” or “James Holmes was always eating fast food.” This is stuff we all do that doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with our capacity or willingness to inflict tremendous suffering on our fellow human beings.
I’ve played some of the most violent video games ever created. In the twenty odd years I’ve been playing video games, I’ve never once had the urge to pick up an assault rifle with high-capacity magazine, a shotgun, and two handguns, wrap myself head to toe in Kevlar body armor, booby trap my apartment, and go to a crowded theater and open fire on innocent civilians.
There is evil in the world. There are people that have severe mental and emotional problems that cause them to inflict the kind of horror we saw in Aurora on their fellow human beings. They are not driven to do so by violent video games, television, movies, or any other form of media. They are driven to do horrific things because they are defective; they lack the moral controls that keep everyone else from doing equally horrific things.
James Holmes walked into a crowded movie theater with an assault rifle with a high-capacity magazine, a shotgun, two handguns, tear gas, and head to toe Kevlar body armor, and opened fire. Right up until the moment he pulled the trigger, everything he carried with him was 100% legal. He bought everything from local brick and mortar stores or over the internet.
People like Pat Brown like to point fingers at violent images in the media because it keeps us all from pointing fingers at the real problem: the fact that mentally unbalanced people like James Holmes can buy ridiculous amounts of firepower 100% legally.
Now, I’m not going to indulge some kind of hippy fantasy where we round up all the guns and suddenly no one kills anyone else anymore. As long as there are two people alive on this planet, someone will want to kill someone else, and melting all the guns down into a giant statue of two doves humping or whatever isn’t going to change that. I live with two responsible gun owners that keep their weapons locked with both trigger locks and in safes, as well as unloaded. I know more than a few other people that have firearms. Hell, I’ve been to the range myself a few times. There are legitimate reasons for owning a firearm, like self defense and sport. Responsible gun owners shouldn’t be penalized for the actions of a rogue few.
But do we, as a country, really have to make it easy for anyone and everyone to buy a gun and stockpiles of ammo? It’s harder to get a license to drive a car than it is to purchase a gun.
So, having pontificated enough, what’s my solution? Just apply the same standards we have towards cars to guns. Mandatory gun safety training classes. Mandatory hours at a shooting range before you can purchase a weapon. Banning high capacity magazines and assault rifles. Gun licenses that expire annually and require a mental health evaluation from a licensed professional before renewing.
These are not hard things to implement. But, groups like the NRA, which having achieved everything they ever set out to do legislatively are now out to ensure that every single one of us is armed and dangerous at all times, whether we like it or not, keep that from happening by scaring members of Congress to death with the threat of a less than perfect grade on gun rights. Not only that, but they scare their members to death with talk of how anyone to the left of Sarah Palin is out to take their guns away.
At some point, we as a country need to come to terms with the monster we’ve created in the gun lobby, and find a happy medium between supporting the rights of gun owners, while ensuring that crazy people can’t get their hands on guns.
Until we do that, let’s try and keep from blaming every form of media in existence for every terrible thing that happens, okay?
