That time before there were violent video games…

I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed this week and happened upon a photo of the Three Stooges. I didn’t stop to read the story, but it did make me stop and think about all the hours I spent as a kid watching those guys on Paul Shannon’s Adventure Time, which came on TV every weekday after I got home from school.

I was just an impressionable young boy back then, sitting alone on the living room floor watching Moe Howard poke out Curly’s eyes, smack Larry Fine silly and hit both of them on the head a thousand times with his fist or objects such as hammers, shovels, bottles, pipes, mallets, plates…and basically anything else he could get his hands on. I watched Moe slap Larry and Larry turn and slap Curly. These violent acts were what passed for slapstick comedy in the middle- to late-1950s, and kids like me ate it up with a spoon.

In between episodes of the Stooges, I watched the Road Runner abuse Wile E. Coyote, blowing him up with dynamite, dropping an anvil on his head, forcing him off the edge of a cliff or tricking him into slamming head-first into a fake tunnel he had painted on the side of a rock.

Other times I watched Bluto pound the bejeezers out of Popeye before the hero chewed a wad of spinach and then knocked his arch enemy into the middle of next week. So many of the other cartoons were violent, too…Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, even Bugs Bunny and a lot of the Looney Tunes gang, including Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd and the Tazmanian Devil.

When I wasn’t watching cartoons, I was watching cowboy shows where the “good” white guys rode through the West killing “bad” red Indians and “bad” brown Mexicans and a whole lot of other bad people with…wait for it…pistols, rifles, shotguns, cannons and anything else that could be ignited to plant a projectile into another human being.

I watched these shows all through my formative years and yet, remarkably, after I grew up, I never walked into a school, a theater, a night club or a Walmart with a military-style assault weapon and murdered a dozen or more innocent people. Nor did anybody else I know, even though that’s what we all watched in the 1950s before anyone had invented video games or the devices needed to play them on.

Now before I go any further, I have to admit that I have never played any of the violent video games that get blamed every time there is a mass shooting in America, games such as Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Death Race or — god forbid — something called Super Columbine Massacre, which Wikipedia describes this way:

Super Columbine Massacre…recreates the 1999 Columbine High School shootings near Littleton, Colorado. Players assume the roles of gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and act out the massacre, with flashbacks relating parts of Harris and Klebold's past experiences. The game begins on the day of the shootings and follows Harris and Klebold after their suicides to fictional adventures in perdition.

Seriously, I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to recreate the tragedy of the country’s first major school shooting by designing a video game that could, in practice, be played by children of all ages and mental capacity, and I probably don’t really want to know. And as I said, I have never played any of these games or any of the dozens of others that I found on Google (but have never heard of), so I can’t say definitively what impact, if any, they have on the people who commit mass shootings in this country.

But I do want to make one point:

Just like people my age were able to grow up from childhood to adult while watching violence on television without murdering anybody, I’m reasonably certain that millions of people all around the world are playing violent video games like the ones I mentioned above without killing anyone or committing any crimes whatsoever.

Why do you think that is?

I think it’s because it’s not the games alone that create mass killers but a combination of factors including the mind of these shooters, their home environment, outside influences that plant and cultivate the seeds of hatred and the need for attention and, certainly, the ability of these individuals to legally acquire the weapons needed to carry out the slaughter of innocent men, women and children.

It doesn’t help that our nation’s leaders are encouraging violent behavior and giving a platform for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Confederate-flag-waving cotton belt rednecks who still think the South is going to rise again; or that right-wing conservative Christian organizations are claiming discrimination against the god-fearing white man; or that anti-immigration xenophobes are adopting rallying cries like “the great replacement” theory which argues that menacing forces are trying to destroy white, Christian “homelands” by flooding them with other racial and religious groups.

(Someone please tell me how the “great replacement” differs from the “final solution,” if you know what I mean.)

And it certainly doesn’t help that the National Rifle Association and other well-funded gun rights organizations are pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of prominent politicians to ensure that no sensible gun legislation is ever passed in this country.

So while I’m conceding that a white guy who walks into a Walmart in a predominantly brown city like El Paso, Texas, and shoots a bunch of Hispanics is a product of his environment, and that our collective environment does include such things as violent video games, mental health issues, drug addiction, poor parenting, bad movies and TV shows, rap music and all of the other excuses we use (other than guns) for why someone commits mass murder in America, I’m still going to argue that all of those environmental factors exist in virtually every other country in the world, but that only in America where guns outnumber people are those factors secondary to a culture that makes mass murder so easy to accomplish.

Simply being exposed to violent video games is no more the cause of mass shootings than standing outside a school building is the cause of measles, colds and flu. 

I never watched Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto but I did watch Moe, Larry and Curly. In that regard, I’m still waiting for the day when a 69-year-old man walks into a Walmart store, slaps several people in the face, hits a few more on the head with a mallet and tries to poke out someone’s eyes. Then, and only then, will I believe that simply being exposed to violent behavior in our society is the reason why so many good people have to die.