On Saturday morning I woke up, checked the news, and was surprised by the headline “Boy, 8, fatally shoots 90-year-old relative after playing video game...”. “Great,” I thought to myself, “I wonder what game is getting the blame this time.” Surprise, surprise, it was Grand Theft Auto 4. The story described how this 8-year-old kid played GTA 4 in the evening and then shot his 90-year-old caretaker in the head. My opinions on the Grand Theft Auto games are fairly clear, so why an 8-year-old was playing GTA 4 is a bit beyond me. But I feel the need to make something abundantly clear: None of the Grand Theft Auto games have ever given instruction as to how to use a firearm nor where to obtain one in real life. Characters in the GTA games either pick up random guns in back alleys, buy them off a back alley dealer, or go to a legitimate gun shop and purchase a virtual arsenal which becomes readily available to them that very instance (with all the ammunition they can carry in their clearly oversized pockets). Two of the previously mentioned things are 100% impossible in real life, and the third involves finding a back alley gun dealer (something that most 8-year-olds are not able to do).
The real issue with this story is the one that isn’t even mentioned until the 6th paragraph. The story states that it is still unclear how the boy got the handgun. Who keeps a loaded handgun in their house with the safety off? No, seriously, 8-year-old aside, who keeps a handgun fully loaded and ready to fire and doesn’t even bother to engage the safety? Anyone who has been around kids for more than two minutes knows that those rugrats get into everything. EVERYTHING. My parents put child safety locks on the medicine cabinets so that I couldn’t get into pills. And the medicine cabinet was well over five feet off the ground! What happened with this story is tragic, but this is the reason I would always keep firearms well out of reach of children. They have seen guns used before, whether in real life, in television, in movies, or in video games. They know you pull the trigger, there’s a loud bang, and someone falls over. But 8-year-olds don’t understand the permanence of death. They don’t understand that you only ever point the gun at something you want removed from existence forever. The fact that the kid played a video game right before he did this is irrelevant. He could have watched a movie or taken a bath or had dinner and the result would have still been the same. The fact is that there was a firearm with ammunition nearby that the child could grab and use. But I’m not worried about this story affecting video games. Aside from the fact that Grand Theft Auto has survived unscathed from much worse publicity than this, even the writers of this story knew that whatever loose correlation might exist was absurd. If there was any real correlation, they would have printed it in bold text and cited it every three sentences. But the only thing mentioned in this story is that the kid played GTA right before using the gun. There isn’t a link there and they know it. Anyone who keeps a gun in their homes should have everyone in that home memorize these rules.
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The Legendary Carmine
Andrew Clayton (a.k.a. The Legendary Carmine) is SSG's Executive Editor. He toils at the stone to make sure this site brings its readers valuable content on a daily basis. Like what we do? Want to see more? Donate to the site using the button below!
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