Revolutionary Rant: Video Games Did Not Cause the Norway Shooting

Yup, it happened again. Yesterday Nick ranted about a sensationalist news story about a girl who "died playing Xbox." Today, similar idiocy is in our current events, but about a much more high-profile tragedy. If you've seen any news broadcasts in the last week, then you know of the terrible killing spree that a lone terrorist gunman embarked upon in and around Oslo, Norway. In addition to violently taking dozens of innocent lives, the rat bastard did what a lot of these sick puppies do before going out and opening fire: write in his manifesto about the video games that supposedly helped him do it.

Part of me wonders if these assholes point at video games deliberately, knowing that the opportunistic, soulless media of today will jump all over it and rain hellfire down every single fucking time. In a rant like this one, the guy who deserves the first and foremost fuck you is the shooter, of course. But here we are, a week later, and there needs to be something to pin blame on. I mean, it's not like the guy could have been just plain crazy right? Something must have done this to him!

So today word got out that Coop Norway, one of the largest retailers in the country, is pulling 51 games off the shelves. The higher profile titles among them include Homefront, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, World at War, Sniper: Ghost Warrior, and Counter-Strike Source. Oh yeah, and World of Warcraft.

Wait. WoW? As described in this article, WoW was pulled because the shooter mentioned it in his manifesto as a "perfect training tool". Yeah... I guess if you plan on going on a killing spree by shooting fireballs and swinging broadswords, it's pretty good. The actual reason he mentioned WoW has nothing to do with even playing the game at all—he merely used it as an excuse to disappear for extended periods of time to train himself in real life, attributing the absences to an imaginary raid schedule.

Apparently that's enough for scapegoat-hunters to rationalize stopping the sale of a fantasy-fucking-MMO due to one crazy guy's killing spree. The retail outlet said they're temporarily halting sales out of “consideration for those affected”. Lifting all those FPS games is at least somewhat understandable (if still entirely stupid), but WoW? I'm sure all those grieving families feel a lot better knowing that it's off the shelves.

WoW: Training murderers since 2003.

Coop Norway's director also went on record saying "Others are better suited than us, to point to the negative effects of games like these. At the moment it’s [appropriate] for us to take them down." If I were in a better mood I would point to any of the dozens of studies that find no correlation between violent games and violent crime, and maybe to some of the statistics that show that violent crime has dropped significantly overall in the last decade or so. But right now, I'm just going to give this ignorant dbag a great, big ol' fuck youuuuuuuuu!!!

It's the same old tired story: something bad happens, and the older generation has to find something that must have corrupted the youth (but the culprit is never, ever, their parenting skills). Before games, it was movies. Before that, it was music and comics. Hell, there was even a time long ago when it was books. Books! Can you imagine that today? "Young people are reading! It's ruining their generation! Let's close down that evil Barnes and Noble!"

The whole thing infuriates me; the fact that a murderer can do this kind of thing and then have the world focus on imaginary phantoms as the culprit instead of recognizing the truth and working to try to really prevent the same tragedy from repeating. And it infuriates me even more that I know it's just going to happen again and again.

[Source] [Source 2]