My heart is heavy with the news of the latest school shooting in the United States. (There's no point in pointing to a particular story as it's bound to be usurped by another shooting so soon that a link will become stale pretty quickly.) Even more curious is the effort to connect the shooter's taste in video games to his shooting rampage.
One cannot help but recall that ten years ago it was Dungeons and Dragons that caused demons to enter the bodies of children and turn them into killers. Before that it was Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne and rock music in general. Before that it was movies and television.
And long before that -- 1913 -- a woman murdered her children and then slit her own throat. Her fit of insanity was blamed by earnest folk on her habit of reading wild west stories and detective novels.
It's all drivel. And a cheap way of avoiding examination of the darkest recesses of the human heart that have existed since a brother lifted the jawbone of an ass to strike down his brother. There was no musical score or soul-numbing game or paperback prelude involved in that tragedy. Shallow people insist on asking why and touting superficial answers when the real explanation is so obvious that it hurts to contemplate it.
Rant over. :)
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