As the civilian disarmament industry’s hopes for federal gun control fade, they’re doing their level best to use whatever post-Newtown leverage they have left to push assault weapons bans and other draconian measures on the state level—using emotion rather than logic. It’s a strategy that’s bound to succeed in blue states where gun control has destroyed the gun culture, as it has in New York. Fortunately, today’s release of new information about spree killer Adam Lanza has taken some of the attention away from the firearms the deeply disturbed gamer used to commit his heinous acts. Although many gun guys would prefer spree killers remain anonymous, this is one reason why they shouldn’t.

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43 COMMENTS

  1. I think we can all agree that what happened is very sad but instead of wanting to feel sorry for these people they are disgusting me with this propaganda.

    • I demand action!

      Dissolve the ATF.
      National Constitutional Concealed Carry.
      No Short Barreled restrictions.
      No Silencer/Suppressor restrictions.
      No 922r restrictions.
      Capital punishment for suggesting registration, mag size restrictions, ammo restrictions, background check fees, etc. ad naseum.

      I demand inaction!
      I and 150 million other gun owners will leave you alone if you leave us alone. We do, we have, we shall continue to do so.

  2. This is just sad. Using these poor victims for their personal power gains. Not just waving the bloody shirt, but lying to these people about making kids safer. This (among other things) makes me mourn a once great nation.

  4. spree killer Adam Lanza has taken some of the attention away from the firearms the deeply disturbed gamer used to commit his heinous acts.

    Seriously, Rob? Millions and millions of people play plenty of video games and never kill anyone. It’s both irrelevant to why he did what he did and it is an insult to millions of gun owners. Claiming video games cause violence is just as absurd as claiming guns cause violence.

    • The guy was deeply disturbed and also a dedicated (not to say obsessive) gamer. To say so is only to identify the person, not to claim causation.

      • The gamer part has no more bearing on his actions than saying he was a high school student or had brown hair. It has no effect on someone’s behavior.

        But sadly too many gun owners such as you and Wayne LaPierre want to play the anti’s role and blame something other than the person responsible. As someone who plays a lot of games (when I have the free time), I can tell you many gaming websites that never had a position on guns became VERY anti-NRA after Wayne said that crap.

        • Dude, you need to get off your high horse. Nobody here said video games make people violent and RF is not Wayne LaPierre or some other old, out of touch man in a suit. I am a hardcore gamer, many thousands of hours logged in many violent games. They run the gamut from fantasy to contemporary and sci-fi, online and offline. I currently have close to 500 hours logged in Skyrim, hacking people to death and burning them alive.

          Lanza was allegedly a hardcore Counter-Strike player and I met many unhinged people playing that game. CS in particular always made me feel on edge when I was done, because of the intense match based play and the fact that you stay dead for the match when killed. CS in particular encourages tactical firearm fetishism among a segment of gamers, many who have never touched a firearm – it made me fall in love with the SIG 550 series. Adam clearly preferred the M4 and he was likely living out his CS fantasy when he shot up that school.

          The games do not make you crazy, but they do desensitize you and they do encourage homicidal ideation in people who are primed for it by their mental issues, there is no denying this. “Gaming Websites” are notoriously idiotic, not to mention bought and paid for by publishers, and most gamers do NOT own firearms and many would NOT be responsible gun owners. There is no such thing as gaming culture, it is a myth, gaming is a hobby that most people engage in by themselves. Gun culture on the other hand is real, because you actually go out and do things with real firearms and meet people offline.

          We need to address the rapidly growing mental health problem in this country and the state should leave both guns and games alone. That said, there is nothing wrong with pointing out the relevant fact that Adam Lanza was obsessed with FPS games and his mother indulged him with his own gun safe and plenty of firearms to use as toys.

        • One of the first things one must do to create a military killer from a young recruit–to remove the natural inhibition of killing one’s own kind–is to ‘turn off’ the recognition of the target being human, and make it just a target. To do that, the military uses certain training techniques, and one of those techniques is video gaming. If video games are a good military tool, useful for turning young people into killers, they can also perform a less-healthful role in turning the marginal and weak-minded of the civilian world into uncontrolled, non-military killers.

          Colonel Dave Grossman, THE expert in the field, has an on-point paper on the subject of teaching kids to kill here:

          http://www.killology.org/article_teachkid.htm

          I realize that you are sensitive about this, but I submit that you are not being objective. Simply because YOU are well-adjusted enough to differentiate game from life does not negate the fact that the weak-minded and defective may be affected by violent gaming. Ignoring cause-and-effect does not make it go away.

        • @Fug

          “Lanza was allegedly a hardcore Counter-Strike player and I met many unhinged people playing that game. CS in particular always made me feel on edge when I was done, because of the intense match based play and the fact that you stay dead for the match when killed. “

          Oh, so it’s not video games, it’s just Counterstrike that causes you to murder people. Give me a break. A game that’s about 15 years old and MILLIONS of people have played without ever going on a killing spree had nothing to do with it. Games do not desensitize you to violence any more than watching NCIS desensitizes you to seeing a dead body. Even the most realistic movie or game have no effect because, unless you’re a very young child, you know it’s NOT REAL.

          Quit blaming inanimate objects for Lanza’s choices.

          @ John

          “f video games are a good military tool, useful for turning young people into killers, they can also perform a less-healthful role in turning the marginal and weak-minded of the civilian world into uncontrolled, non-military killers.”

          No, the military uses them to teach tactics. That is the only thing you can apply between games and real life is learning how to co-ordinate a team or certain tactics that (if the game is realistic) would be effective, such as throwing a smoke grenade to provide cover for crossing a hallway.

          Sorry, but your “expert” is anything but. Plenty of actual experts in Psychology and other scientific fields (doing what your commanding officer tells you to do is not a scientific field, it’s the exact opposite) have researched it to death and repeatedly shown that video games have no effect on a person’s likelihood to commit violent acts.

          I am being objective because I’ve spent the last 15 years seeing anti-video game people like you make absurd claims (just like gun grabbers) and then have the facts prove you wrong again and again (just like gun grabbers). Why do you have such a hard time accepting that there are people who are such utter scum? Is it because your religion tells you that “all people are are inherently good”? That’s a load of crap and choosing to listen to some factless religion over science and logic is no way to make decisions.

          • There is no need to Bring Religion into this argument my friend. I myself am a Christian, but I am also a gamer who had played many violent game. I agree with you, there is no correlation found of games and violent crimes. His assessment is very much the same as the gun grabbers.

        • The NRA is fighting a rear-guard action to protect our rights. In doing so, they threw gamers overboard in an attempt to deflect attention from the gun. Since Wayne LaPierre represents the National Rifle Association and not the National Gamer Association, this was an easy choice to make.

          I would agree that there is no clear-cut connection between gaming and homocidal behaviour, since there are millions of gamers who never do anything violent in the real world. But the introduction of violent video games into this issue does serve to confuse things and muddy the waters. Muddied waters are good for the NRA, so this strategy looks like a win.

          Over the long term, the NRA owes the gaming community an apology. Hopefully that will be forthcoming, and the gamers and the gunners can join forces, because we will all be fighting the same people, who want to throw our freedoms away in the name of proecting the children.

    • As much as I hate to say it, I agree with Toten. Your language places the fact that he was a gamer in the forefront, thus attributing his behavior to that facet of his life. That’s just as bad as using inflammatory language to attack gun owners. Please don’t seek to preserve the 2nd by attacking the 1st.

      • Unfortunately, I believe that in this specific case, the beast’s gamer status had great bearing on the outcome. We will never know if this monster would not have been created if not for violent gaming, but we can take an educated guess.

        I concur that we cannot violate the 1st Amendment by banning violent video games to adults, but we CAN ban the pornographic ones to those who are NOT adult. Yes, I said pornographic–there IS nothing more obscene than violent, personal killing, is there?

    • HOWEVER, violent FPS games paired with Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors seems to be a bird of a very different feather altogether. And we know Lanza was on psychiatric drugs, but the press won’t go there. I would bet my left nut, which I’m not using anyway, that the drugs were SSRIs. Go online and look up the possible side effects!

      • William, I play M-rated FPSes, I was on SSRIs for many years, and I got all my vaccines.

        Ooga Booga.

    • Some studies on the effects of video game violence here:
      http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abstracts/2010-2014/11BWA.pdf

      and on attention problems, here:
      http://www.pediatricsdigest.mobi/content/126/2/214.full.pdf

      If we are going to be talking Truth About Guns, we need to be open to the facts, and having a frank conversation. I don’t think Mr WLP did a very good job opening up this can of worms, on violence in the media, and we can all obsess over that NRA PR critique, infinitely, if we choose to do so.

      Or, we can agree that its clear that Adam Lanza was a deeply disturbed individual, and if we can get past the finger-pointing here, maybe we can get the conversation pointed at what matters, how to help identify kids like him, before its too late.

      • There you go again, clouding the argument with facts.

        If we ‘feel’ that violent video games have absolutely, positively NOTHING to do with aberrant violent behaviour in those disturbed people addicted to same, because WE aren’t affected, then that’s good enough, isn’t it?

        Let’s move along–nothing left to see, here.

        • And couldn’t this just be one of those classic “correlation does not equal causation” conundrums? I find it much easier to believe that people of violent disposition might be drawn to violence in entertainment than I do the notion that violence in entertainment creates violent people.

          Say what you will about “feelings.” I just know that my entire life experience is a direct rebuttal to every theory I’ve ever come across that attempts to link video games & violence. I’ve been a gamer for 3 decades, I play games of all subject matter, I’ve put more hours into XBox than almost anyone you’re likely to encounter, I’m approaching 20 years as a computer engineer with the same employer, I haven’t been in a fight since elementary school and I hug my friends. Oh, and I own guns. 🙂

          So, for me at least, it goes far beyond “feelings.” I have enough personal experience with gaming to question anyone doing a study on them, and the course of my own life has only led me to become more tolerant toward others and less comfortable with violence. These studies strike me as sensationalist junk (hey, how about a theory that viewing attractive Israeli women leads to increased gun ownership!), or maybe I’m just immune to the “risk factor” of violent video games thanks to mitigating factors like an education and a work ethic.

      • Yes, and I can find a bogus “study” proving that guns cause you to murder people. Quit projecting your “feelings” into things and using bogus studies to justify them.

        • Your defensiveness is striking. You insist on claiming no causation, ever, not possible, no WAY. Because you are a Gamer, and disagree, these psychologists, psychiatrists, and scholars’ work is all ‘bogus.’ That is ridiculous. You ignore the obvious and proven: vicarious violence breeds insensitivity to real suffering.

          Further, your firearms argument is a straw man: guns do not ’cause’ one to murder, but they surely make it easier to kill. I submit that violent gaming is a POSSIBLE link in the chain to pulling the trigger.

          I assume, from your continued argument, that you would gladly perform an experiment for us: Find an ‘odd’ young male loner, let him sit in YOUR basement for hours on end playing violent and realistic first-person-shooter video games, and then after a few years give him access to a few self-loading firearms and copious ammunition. While you and your family are there.

          I’ll wait.

  5. I’m surprised Bloomberg hasn’t been smoked out yet. Don’t people realize he’s not going to act in anyone’s best interest?

  6. “Although many gun guys would prefer spree killers remain anonymous, this is one reason why they shouldn’t.”

    I’ll go one further (and it will provoke much ire): It has been said that in order for us to have the RTKBA, a sacrifice is necessary – to wit, the occasional spree killing/shooting. Or so the argument (loosely paraphrased) goes.
    The one thing I wonder is this: what is a more acceptable sacrifice for our society to make: A) the occasional defenseless 5 to 30 innocents getting killed, or B) a few thousand (potential) Loughners, Chos, Lanzas and Holmes (sesses) having their civil liberties restricted through due process?

    • If it were *only* that at stake, and if it were actually possible to do part B properly (which it’s not), the answer would be obvious: protect the innocents.

  7. Call me paranoid, but how is it that a state employee (Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky III), plans it so that his release of all this information occurs at the near-terminus of the Connecticut legislature’s deliberations on gun control? After all, this inventory-type info released today would’ve been known within hours, and certainly a day or two after the shooting.

    Could his release of this information have been designed to provide maximum support to the Democrats in Hartford? Me thinks so…

    The political vultures are feeding off the corpses of the Newtown dead…

  9. I’m sorry to tell you CT folks, but if the color map of your assembly seating chart is majority blue, the laws will be put on the books no matter how much opposition we can muster. It’s going to take a couple of years to get any kind of solid ruling from the Supreme Court on any of these issues. Given the 7th and 4th Circuit split, the first of those issues is likely to be whether we have a constitutional right to “bear” arms outside the home. Not holding my breath after Roberts’ rumored about-face on Obamacare.

  10. Part of the reason gamers get so defensive is, just as gun owners tend to cringe and lose patience whenever phrases like “control”, “common sense”, and “I support the Second Amendment, but…” pop up in conversation, gamers are used to getting stigmatized and demonized. Whether is was being declared Satan-worshiping occultists for playing Dungeons and Dragons, weathering cries of being pasty-faced anti-social dorks on the verge of mass murder, or the assumption that anyone with an X-Box Live account is a pre-pubescent rage monster, gamers get a lot of grief, most of it undeserved. Just as there are tools at any gun club you can speak of, there are little asshats who send me rather unflattering X-Box Live messages describing me and my ancestry. Just as murderous gun owners that do nigh-unfathomable acts are the distant outliers among gun owners, murderous gamers that do nigh-unfathomable acts are the distant outliers among gamers. We rightly get pissed when lumped together with murderers, same as gun owners do. Do not be surprised when you touch a nerd, err, nerve when you paint with broad brushes.

    As to the claim that gaming culture is a myth, I’ll be polite and say that does not line up with my experiences, nor those of the friends I game with, nor those I have met at conventions, nor those I discuss various gaming topics with online. Just because a game is single-player doesn’t mean I don’t have awesome achievements (small “a”) or tall tales to tell my friends. Tabletop gaming and pen-and-paper RPGs, genres alive and well today, pre-date the advent of computers and required, then and now, groups of people to come together around a table and roll some d6s, tap some mana, or rush some corn. Back in the 80s and 90s, sales of video games were heavily dependent on word of mouth. That exploded with the Internet coming into its own. The development of marketing and advertising departments in the industry may have had a slight impact, too. (That was an understatement, by the way). Yes, the signal-to-noise ratio may suck, but gun culture has been rightly described as a grade school rumor mill, too. Not everyone on here is a Medal of Honor recipient, an IPSC Grandmaster, or a professional gunsmith of many decades.

    I’d also say that the 60,750 attendees of the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo in Washington State (http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/09/12/exclusive-pax-2009-brings-in-60-750-attendees/) would disagree about gaming culture being non-existent. Oh, and the attendees of the second PAX convention that was held in Boston this last weekend may have some opinions, along with con-goers at the other two PAX conventions (http://east.paxsite.com/).

  11. Gaming isn’t a problem…now, if ALL you do is play games and you had no parents…that’s another story..just like if all you did was watch tv and never went outside…etc…

    Anyway, there are always going to be psychopaths…there always have been and always will be. You can either give up your freedoms and cower in the corner like a bitch, or you can make some laws that protect people from psychopaths (like arming teachers). You can’t eliminate or screen out psychopaths. Just not possible, some will always exist, sorry.

    Now, that said, there is an eerie deal where as far as I can tell, all the younger shooting spree people in the last 15 years that I can find, were all on SSRI drugs (where the data has been released). Can’t find any info on Lanza yet. This does NOT mean that going an an SSRI turns you into a killer. Correlation does not equal causation. However, this is something that should be looked into. It won’t be, because the pharmaceutical lobby and industry are HUGE. Compared to it, the NRA is not even a grain of sand. Guns and other inanimate objects don’t have the ability to cause people to flip out and go on a killing spree. Simply not possible. Something that dramatically changes a young persons brain chemistry, on the other hand…well, it’s not likely, but it is at least within the realm of POSSIBILITY.

    I would not be the least bit surprised that Adam Lanza was on an SSRI as well. Some of them flat out are *proven* to increase suicidal tendencies in young people. This does not necessarily mean they would do the same to an older person. *shrug*.

    I would not be a bit shocked to find we have drugged up suburban kids causing problems on one hand (legal drugs) and on the other hand you have the drug war (recreational drugs) being the root cause of much inner city crime. On one hand the pharm industry, on the other hand the cartels, both enabled by the government. Yay.

    • The most likely reason many spree shooters are found to be on SSRIs? Because they are handed out like freaking candy when you go to a pshrink. They are a first line tool in treating a wide variety of disorders/illness/moderate discomforts/crazy because they tend to have far fewer side effects than the classes of anti-depressants that came before, although they are used for other issues as beyond depression, on- and off-label. I know from personal experience that the side effects can be annoying as all hell, but they generally don’t kill you if you eat the wrong food like MAO inhibitors could, problems with scuicidal adolescents notwithstanding.

      • Correct, as I said, correlation does not equal causation. But, unlike an inaminate object which can’t really influence someone’s behavior, psychotropic drugs do at least have the possibility to. Some SSRIs now have black box warnings for suicide because they are scientifically shown to massively increase suicidal tendencies in younger folks.

        It is something that needs looked into. And does this mean that SSRIs caused the shooting spree? No. But it SHOULD be investigated and looked into. Unlike guns, games, etc, SSRIs given to young people are something that *directly affects brain chemistry when that person’s brain is still developing*. It should be investigated. Does that mean people on SSRI drugs should be demonized? Hell no. Does it mean that they are legit drugs that help a ton of people? Hell no, again. I’m not against medication, i’m not against psychiatry, any of that. But it should damn well be looked into imho.

    • I agree with your disagreement. I would HOPE that nobody, including ME, is implying that they are singling out games for blame as a unique factor. Not SO, Sirs!

      What I ALSO hope is that those who immediately got their flanges off the rails because I and others have pointed an accusing finger at violent video games as having ANY possible effect will step back and accept, however grudgingly, the wild off-the-wall possibility that violent video games in the ‘hands of the wrong people’ may be a factor as a causality, one among others, to mass killings.

      I do NOT want to ‘ban’ anyone’s games. I DO want to know if these games are capable of warping further the nasty twisted little minds of already-warped late-teens/early-20’s white males with bad hair and wild eyes who live in their parents’ basements in the dark, as seems likely.

      Wouldn’t you?

  13. What bugs me in this case, is that everybody ignores the fact that he(the murderer) killed his very own motherto get his hands on her guns. I dont think restrictive laws would have prevented someone that dedicated.

  14. The situation we have here is a young man who killed his mother, then went on to kill others at a location that he and ALL others know that by being gun-free was easy fruit for the taking. In this nation of ours we have those who are pro-2a and those who are anti-2a,. We pro 2A types would like all angles of the event to be looked at-not just the fixation on the weapons used, as obviously there may well be other factors involved. The antis have a myopic view that doing away with firearms will move us on to a Utopian state of being. The facts are that countries where firearms are rare or essentially non-existant for the general public do not necessarily fare better than we do when it comes to violence. This is because Humans are violent. In every part of society, irrespective of race, religion, economics, education, or for that matter any other descriptor, we will find violence. Whether that violence arises from crime, passion, or any other reason is irrelevant. The point is violence is a part of human nature. This does not mean that every time a person becomes angry or upset they will resort to violence, however the knowledge of that probability is what pushes many of us to support 2-A laws. Doing away with our 2nd amendment rights will NOT do away with violence, as contrary to the antis belief guns are not the only way to dispense violence, yet often the firearm has been the item that through use-or display alone has been able to STOP the attempt. We as a nation need to look at many factors that bring on violence, and accept the fact that amongst our millions of people there will always be those who cannot be redeemed, some individuals are simply monsters, this we cannot change, making others pay through loss of rights because these monsters choose to use a particular implement when THEY decide to bring mayhem is just not right.

  15. It’s time we hold Bloomberg’s mayors accountable.

    If your mayor is part of the cabal, demand they disclose who the alleged “gun owner” is in the ad that’s now running in many states. About time we demanded they stop exploiting the pain and grief of Newtown as well.

  16. Of course video games cause violent behavior. Every time I play, I have an overwhelming urge to find a couple of little Italian guys with bushy mustaches and beat the cr@p out of them.

  17. I’m always always leery of gun-grabber’s propaganda (or anybodies propaganda) that tries to win appeal merely by emotion rather than logic. It’s like when 14 year old teen age girls want to “hook up” with their 16 year old boyfriends. They FEEL they are in love. Oh sigh! You can try to get them to look objectively at the consequences, till you are blue in the face, but in the end, they just won’t listen.

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