It Was Games More than Guns
The New York Daily News has an article up by reporter, Mike Lupica, which makes the case that it was an obsession with violent video gaming and past mass killings that drove Adam Lanza to commit the Newtown slaughter. Guns were just the means to an end, means apparently facilitated by a fatally unwitting mother. According to an unnamed cop who attended a police conference in New Orleans back in December, one of the conference speakers, Col. Danny Stebbins of the Connecticut State Police, revealed that Lanza had long been planning a cold-blooded massacre and had an extensive spreadsheet of previous mass killings in which he apparently was tracking the high-scorers, as in video gaming. The unidentified source is quoted:
“They don’t believe this was just a spreadsheet. They believe it was a score sheet,” he continued. “This was the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills. That’s what (the Connecticut police) believe.”
The man paused and said, “They believe that (Lanza) believed that it was the way to pick up the easiest points. It’s why he didn’t want to be killed by law enforcement. In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that’s why he killed himself.
“They have pictures from two years before, with the guy all strapped with weapons, posing with a pistol to his head. That’s the thing you have to understand: He had this laid out for years before.”
As we responsible gun owners have been saying since this tragedy occurred and the gun-grabbing Democrats began using it as an emotional driver for their campaigns, the shooter picked an elementary school precisely because it was a liberal-declared, gun-free zone where he had the best chance of racking up a higher score. Go read the article then email a copy to your gun-grabbing state legislators, congressmen and senators.
Crossposted at American Thinker
Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists
Personally, I am now pissed that they are blaming everything but the person pulling the trigger. Let’s blame the guns, no the video games, no the heavy metal music, no Dungeons & Dragons, no it was ruffie madness…
When are they actually going to look at the idiot who pulled the trigger. I’ve been gaming since PONG and I haven’t decided to shoot anything up outside of a target down-range. I didn’t join the military in July of 2000 to score first-person live-action shooter points.
What happened was because the regulations and feel-good fuzzies of the state don’t believe that someone who is proven to be mentally unstable should be confined. Instead, they rebuked his mother for seeking assistance for her troubled son and told him that he was okay to be out in public. Even then, it is not the fault of the politicians as they couldn’t predict something this bad would happen.
Want to know who to blame? Blame Lanza. Oh, but he made a spreadsheet like a score card. Yeah? Really? Who made it? Exactly. He made it. It wasn’t part of a video game, wasn’t in some firearm manual, it was all him.
So, while they are blaming everything (one person included blaming the Principle/victim), in this society it seems better to blame everything but the person committing the acts. Want more proof? Look at the news reporting of those two convicted for raping the 16-year-old girl.
I have no problem naming all schools with underage students “gun free zones” — for the STUDENTS! That makes sense. The stupidity comes in where the schools fail to distinguish between children and the adults who might be required to protect them.
Our schools are no-judgment zones. We have grown men and women, called principlals, who cannot distinguish between children and adults, and between pictures, pastries, and guns. This is stupid.
Sick fucking bastard.
That kid was nucking futs and should have been locked away in a mental health facility long ago… but oh we got rid of those because it violates the rights of the nut…. well 26 others paid for his right to be ‘free” with their lives.
It is his pre-existing mental conditions/thought processes that led to this, the gaming aspect of it likely but it was not because of the games themself. it was his elevator not leaving the basement that got him to that school that day. It is why his mother tried having him put away.
How many copies of Call of Duty have been sold? How many have been linked to mass shootings? Repeat after me, correlation is not causation.
I play video games. I don’t go out and shoot people.
I played cowboys and Indians when I was a kid, with cap pistols. I didn’t go out and shoot people then, either.
Also, I saw “Natural Born Killers” on TV one night, and I’ve sat through “Kill Bill” many, many times, but I don’t go out and shoot people.
The reference to that spreadsheet, where Lanza was keeping track of everything that interested him, was nothing more than a means of focusing on his goal. There was plenty of warning ahead of time, and it was ignored (not by his mother), by people who should have known better.
The media go after this kind of even the way hyenas go after a lion kill. Someone needs to set up barriers to them, especially the flyovers. Those people all, universally, do more harm than good. The media occupation seems to be attracting more and more people who appear to be almost as sociopathic as the criminals who stalk their victims.
Interesting perspective on the mindset of the shooter. This explains why many shooters, when confronted by an armed response, immediately stop their rampage and often times, immediately kill themselves. Just like the Oregon mall shooting last year. As soon as an armed citizen pulled a gun on him, he immediately ran away, found a small corner to hide in and blew his brains out. Of course, Mother Jones doesn’t consider this a “mass shooting” because only two died so they get to keep their ‘no mass shootings have ever been stopped by an armed citizen’ talking point.
Funny how this story comes out when no actual facts or solid explanation has come out about the Sandy Hook shooting. I think it will be awhile before they sort it out, and the rest is just conjecture and speculation.
While I don’t doubt the “list” that Lanza made exists, the rest is speculative to me – but I suspect (like everyone else does) that Lanza was unstable, coupled with all his other issues that likely exacerbated his situation.
I’m still waiting on what actually happened in Banghazi, too – but I’m not holding my breath on that one either.
@6: Exactly. However, let’s look at this from the progressive full retard point of view. It’s the guns that make these people violent, not the video games, yet they want to say that cap pistols or pointed fingers are the early onset of violent tendencies. Well, if cap pistols and pointed fingers (or a pop tart shaped like Idaho) are doing harm; why give video games and movies a pass?
Poetrooper: agree. IMO, there are two other factors worth bringing up that contributed: legal “gun free” zones and the effective impossibility in some places of involuntarily committing the severely mentally ill.
http://valorguardians.com/blog/?p=34605
@7 Interesting. This is the first I’ve heard that an armed citizen intervened in the mall shooting.
See how much you can learn on TAH?
@9 – Hit the nail on the head, OT.
PintoNag: yep. MSM didn’t exactly publicize that aspect of the Oregon mall shooting.
http://www.examiner.com/article/media-blackout-oregon-mall-shooter-was-stopped-by-an-armed-citizen
http://www.kgw.com/news/Clackamas-man-armed-confronts-mall-shooter-183593571.html
EX-PH2, I would also like to add this: You can’t find any Tom and Jerry or Looney Tunes cartoons in their original form on tv, anymore, because they were deemed too violent by the nanny crowd. Most of the slap stick violence has been removed because of it. Yet, here we are having those same people dismissing movies and video games as possible causes? Which is it? No one has asked them so they continue on, going down both sides of the road.
@13 Thanks for those links, Hondo. It disgusts me, how slanted mainstream media coverage is. They’re as much — if not more — to blame than the politicians are.
But Old Trooper: but that slapstick violence in Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes was just wrong! It corrupted young minds, and created monsters! They must be censored!
In contrast, video games today are merely entertainment. Everybody knows they’re just games, so they’re perfectly harmless. Don’t worry about them. They’re not to blame for anything.
— break —
Hey, Sippy, Joe – how am I doing? You do realize that I’m being sarcastic as hell above, right? Maybe even sardonic?
Folks, I need to apologize to Hondo. I didn’t see his much more thorough piece on this topic that he posted here yesterday.
As for those of you who take issue with my saying it was games not guns, I agree that video gaming, in and of itself, isn’t the root cause of such violence just as guns, in and of themselves aren’t either. But it is a fact that many if not most of these young men who perpetrate these violent crimes tend to spend an inordinate amount of time playing violent video games. Check out this list:
http://conservapedia.com/Young_mass_murderers
Some minds are more easily influenced, even conditioned, by what they view, especially if that viewing is obsessively repetitive and the subject brain already is misfiring a few too many synapses. It is my opinion that this kid was playing a a real-life game of mass killing and that spreadsheet was his scorecard where he tracked the performances of other killers and was hoping to best them.
Old Trooper, you can still find them on the Cartoon Network if you look for them. All the Looney Tunes cartoons are still being run. They are simply not on the broadcast networks any more.
I think the real problem is that the people who make the most noise about the violence problem are also in the population demographic that desperately want to be on TV and have difficulty distinguishing between reality and fiction. So they object to a small child biting a shape into a poptart, not because he did anything wrong, but because the teacher misperceives what he did.
I don’t know where this starts, but my guess is that it’s some place in the K-12 teacher education classes.
An apology is neither needed nor apropos, Poetrooper. You focused on the gaming aspect as a potential cause; I focused on enabling laws and their interplay with Lanza’s obvious insanity. IMO the two articles compliment each other nicely.
It’s not just video games. It’s a culmination of things. People today don’t have the coping skills to deal with disappointment or how to adapt to social cues. We live in a permissive society where anything goes, and we’ve lost a lot of values. A lot of parents are fucking up their kids by not holding them accountable, and would rather be a “friend” to their kid all the time instead of being a parent, and teaching them right from wrong. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, but I think most of you will get the jist of what I’m going on about.
@18: Yeah, I watched the cartoon network and they are edited, at least the ones I saw.
Edited Warner Brothers cartoons?! That should be a fuggin’ crime in of itself!
@21 – Well, I know that they’re on YouTube and you can get DVDs of them.
Master Sergeant–try to find a Bugs Bunny cartoon ANYWHERE on TV these days. Hell, it’s hard enough finding Three Stooges shorts.
Then again, what do you think the response would be if someone tried to do a remake of Blazing Saddles? How quickly they forget that while Mel Brooks produced/acted in it, about 90 percent of it was written by Richard Pryor.
What if the next shooter is a transgendered Muslim minority that watched a marathon of Girls, drank a soda, and blogged about how climate change is a farce prior?
Would the media shit a brick or what?
Video games are awesome. I was heavily into first person shooters prior to joining the military. I’m a law abiding citizen…
So I’ll just put the link from my previous comment on how I dislike the tone of this story. http://valorguardians.com/blog/?p=34605#comment-801900 And I’ll add one other thing. While I personally think that violent videogames (and let’s not act like Pong and Super Mario Bros is anything like the hyperviolent/realistic video games out there now), especially in the minds of people who are already disturbed/prone to being disturbed, I also admit there’s not a really clear answer either way. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/report-slams-politicized-junk-science-done-violent-videogames But even if it does…so what? How is that useful to me in making a policy decision? Let’s say there is a link. Can I use that to screen and find potential shooters? Not really, because it’s going to have such a high false-positive rate that it’s useless. That’s the same problem you find with gun ownership, as well-millions of people manage to own scary black guns without blowing away a bunch of 5-year olds. Same with mental health (and another one that isn’t talked about a lot, psychiatric med use in these shooters)-lots of people suffer from/are afflicted by these problems, but DON’T have violent episodes like this (note: I’m not saying that mental health issues and how we as a society deal with them-or don’t deal with them, more specifically-don’t need to be addressed). Focusing too much on any one of these factors ignores that you need to look at all of these factors **together** to really be able to use them as a screening/warning tool. And I personally believe Even if the US government had the right and/or the need for such data to turn into some kind of systemt that would serve as a screening device to indicate potential shooters (I do not think they do), I highly doubt the government would have the ability to utilize that information effectively. A lot of this to me can be blamed on a desire/belief that we can manage/policy-make our way down to “zero”. Our society devotes way too much effort in my mind to trying prevent events that, to use the dreaded ORM scales, are “high-severity/low-frequency”, when it’s the other… Read more »
@24 – “Blazing Saddles”. That’s a funny fuckin’ movie!