One unlikely radio talk show personality has come to the defense of video games in the wake of the shootings at Virginia Tech; the rightwing conservative, Rush Limbaugh. In a broadcast aired yesterday, Limbaugh reflected, "I will guarantee you, I’ll bet my last dollar in my pocket, that this shooter will be found to have been a compulsive video gamer," but continued his thoughts by saying, "…not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that. [They] may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers."
Limbaugh then went on to compare a call for the banning of video games to that of banning guns. "How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns? If you start blaming the video games, you may as well demand video game control because it’s the same thing when you start trying to blame guns for this. You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act. But if you want to start blaming the video games, this guy was this or that, well, then you’ve gotta maybe talk about banning them because that’s the same tack that’s taken with guns. You got one guy who used a gun, that’s it."
In the meantime, while the press and anti-video game factions scramble to sensationalize the events and causes which led up to the tragedy, perhaps they should instead be more sensitive to the families and friends who lost loved ones in the shooting, and do something else — grieve and mourn alongside them in support.
[via Joystiq]
