And I would STRONGLY encourage you to listen to at least the first ten minutes or so of this podcast, where Tony Blauer interviews David Grossman: http://knowfear.libsyn.com/lt-col-dave-grossman-ret
Grossman, who you should know from the book On Killing, has written a book specifically on first person shooters, called Assassination Generation, where he argues that we are making our children sick in the head: https://www.amazon.com/Assassination-Generation-Aggression-Psychology-Killing/dp/0316265934/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Grossman points out that murder rates are artificially lowered by the fact that improved medical technology allows people to live who would have died in the 1970’s.
He further points out that rates of violent crime are SKYROCKETING in Europe, which is supposed to be much safer due to how hard the governments there make it for citizens to compete with them. The increase is so bad Interpol has classified the data. And of course they don’t have a Freedom of Information Act over there, because they are not us. Only America is America. Never forget that.
I will note, as many have, that it was common for kids, particularly in rural areas, to bring guns to school every day. Nobody said anything, and nobody cared. The guns were used for hunting after school, and for target practice, with or without JROTC. The nature of guns has not changed. What has changed is how alienated people–particularly teenagers–have become from their feelings and from any meaningful sense of social connection and bonding. The video games BOTH separate people, AND teach them the effective use of violence. This is a witch’s brew, and if someone wants to assume the mantle of HONEST leadership, we need to seriously consider things like labels on violent video games similar to those on cigarettes, saying something like “this game may permanently fuck your brain up, and make you lonely, anxious, friendless, and constantly angry”.
The more I wake up, the more I realize most people are sleepwalking. Very few people want to do the WORK of independent thinking, of stating ideas which have not been in the mix for the course of their entire lifetime. Calling for “gun control” is not revolutionary. It does not take courage.
Stating the nature of real problems clearly, and in such a way that many people will take offense takes courage. I can’t begin to imagine the screaming we will hear if we start putting labels on video games, if we start teaching parents how damaging they seem to be. But can it be worse than the screaming following a shooting, which flows nearly linearly from the playing of the game, through minds made unstable for whatever reason, and out the barrels of actual guns?
If I might paraphrase Madison, we would have no need of guns if we had a perfectly angelic, perfectly competent, and perfectly reliable government. And if we ourselves were all uniformly angels, we would likewise need no guns.
But neither case applies. The FBI and other law enforcement clearly dropped the ball on Cruz (multiple somebodies saw something and said something, which is the way the system is supposed to work on the “people’s” side), and overall our world seems to be getting more violent.
Every attack on our common culture–to the extent we have one–is inherently a call for mass violence. I see no other way to view it. The Left truly wants a civil war. They don’t know why, but I will say I think it is because they have nothing left of their souls, and emptiness begets violence.