Guns are to blame for school shootings? Whodathunk

I think people were worried about her other *ahem* assets before they worried about her guns.

Wouldn't you know it; someone is actually blaming guns for school shootings rather than video games.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said:

We are seeing more and more of these gun incidents, from a kid waving a gun around right up to the level of mass shootings. Amazingly, no one keeps official statistics at government level about shootings in schools and colleges, but we can see from news reports and research that it’s increasing. One of the main reasons is that it is so easy for the wrong people to get hold of guns in this country…

It tears me apart. It’s become such a common occurrence and I keep asking why we allow this to happen. I’m not sure that psychological factors or violent movies and video games are any different here than in other countries - the difference is how easy it is to get a gun.

What's most interesting about his statements is that he says there are no official statistics at the government level on school shootings. That baffles me. There is a study on everything known to man and one of the biggest news headliners in the past decade doesn't have an official record? That's for another blog on another day.

Seeing as this is a video game blog I feel I must point out that he's right about the violent movies and video games being the same in other countries. And yet they aren't having the same types of mass school shootings that we are. Have you ever watched an uncut Japanese anime cartoon before (see Akira)? If you haven't, those cartoons make some of our rated R movies look like G rated movies. And yet, when is the last time you heard about a mass school shooting in Japan.

Look, I'm not going to get political on this video game blog when it comes to the question of should we ban guns or not ban guns, but just like the Virginia Tech shooting, no one was responsible for all the horrible deaths of the innocent students other than the person pulling the trigger. If guns didn't exist, people wouldn't get shot. But since they do exist, how about we focus more on how the gun got in the child's hand and why the child did what they did, rather than focusing our attention on video games, movies, and gun laws themselves. As always, feel free to leave feedback.

-Jeremy aka Adridius