I suppose I should offer up some sort of an opinion on all this video games and movies causing violent behavior nonsense being pushed around like cold peas on a plate by politicians and pundits that have never picked up a controller in their lives (and too bad for them for not broadening their horizons outside of that they THINK they know about gaming and gamers). Generally, I tend to keep out of these conversations because it seems that he who yells the loudest enough to drive everyone else out of the room clasping their blown out eardrums always considers themselves the “winner” of this sort of debate. So, instead of tossing out ideas or solutions (some of which have history behind them as working), I’ll offer up an observation or three just to get them out of my head because they’re messing up my mojo that wants to get back to writing about games and other fun stuff…

I’d bet that if you ask some of these folks ranting about how they feel Hollywood and the games industry are at fault for pushing violence on kids (despite a ratings system cooked up during the last anti-gaming crusade in the mid 90’s) of the tops of their hot little heads what some of their favorite films and TV shows are, you’d get some pretty interesting responses.

I bet you’d hear titles such as Dirty Harry, Die Hard, The Terminator, Saving Private Ryan, The Godfather, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, Good Guys Wear Black, The Searchers, The Green Berets, The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Delta Force, Rambo, 24, Homeland, Justified and many others get nods.

I bet you’d hear most of these choices defended as “good guy versus bad guy” entertainment as well as the person saying they wouldn’t let their kids watch or they’d let their kids watch an edited version or they’d simply get pissed that you were potentially questioning their parenting skills. I’d also bet the First Amendment would come up at some point (probably around the time the Second drops into the conversation).

The concept of freedom is a grand and necessary thing when it’s applied to most areas of living, but attempting to spread and enforce mass paranoia as a form of freedom is never good for anything at all, period. That said, I keep wondering why it is that we can only deal with some problems long after we’re primarily responsible for creating them in the first place. If anyone has a good answer to that, I’d love to know.