Video Games Kill?

Charles Cooper writes

A recent piece on CBS' "60 Minutes" explained how the video game "Grand Theft Auto" supposedly inspired an Alabama teen to murder three police officers. Interesting hypothesis, but how about this alternative: Sometimes stupidity is the best explanation. Instead of blaming the tragedy on the video game publisher, the CBS producer might have done well to examine whether this kid was simply a sociopath in the making.

Whenever somebody does something really bad, we want to blame someone. But, for some reason, we often don't want to blame the person who did it. It has been common for years to blame violence on movies, music, and now video games. The problem with those arguments is simple: what about all the people who don't become psychopaths? Millions of people have played GTA (it's an extremely popular game), one went out and shot some policemen. If the game is responsible, then why have the millions minus one who also played not shot anyone? It just doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't take a degree in psychology to understand that something was wrong with this kid. But lawyers aren't going to get much money claiming the kid was messed up. Politicians won't get too much TV time saying the kid is responsible. We need someone to blame (for purposes of lawsuits, TV coverage, and generally to feel better about ourselves), so we blame the people who made a game.