Inconvenient truths about guns, games, and gore
"CONCEAL & CONTROL"
by Eponymous Rox
read it for free @ Crime Magazine
A public debate is raging now in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, with the primary focus on three main issues: gun control, violent media, and mental health.
Even the National Rifle Association, overwhelmed by hate mail and in hiding for nearly a week after the December 14th 2012 shooting deaths of 20 first-graders and their six unarmed female teachers, has finally agreed that the level of violence on display this century is unparalleled in American history.
Not since the bloody gangster wars of the 1930’s—and our government’s bloody war on those gangsters—have so many public shootings occurred on U.S. soil.
And criminologists hasten to point out that the worst of these have happened within only the past fifteen years, and have nothing whatsoever to do with organized crime or inner city gangs.
The NRA blames graphic videogames and movies for the steep rise in public shootings by the public, not handguns and not assault rifles. They’ve even gone so far as to suggest that if more people were carrying concealed weapons, particularly in schools which are fast becoming the targets of armed madmen, then these bloodbaths would come to an abrupt halt.
It’s an expected position for this powerful lobby to have taken, of course, and, just as expectedly, one that’s enraged not only the gaming industry and some of Hollywood’s most bloodthirsty writers and directors, but gun control advocates worldwide.
However, despite the admittedly ugly specter of schools becoming heavily policed fortresses in our near future, there’s some indication that the NRA might just be right…
