Show ONE example. Made-up crap does not help anyone. It just makes your lack of expertise all the more glaring. Go ask Dave Grossman, whom you got that nonsense from: he won’t have an example, either. He’ll just name-drop “Grand Theft Auto,” the game franchise that is third-person, has no possibility of the mechanics he describes, and which owes it’s success to completely faked controversy (nothing new, it was just the old William Castle scam of hiring fake Bible-thumpers to protest his movies). Also that game franchise named a character after Grossman, nudge nudge, wink, wink.

Some of the most brutal gun violence I’ve ever seen was in anti-war propaganda comics from the ’70s (where Sergeant Rock in the previous decade sold all the little boys on going to Vietnam with the most simultaneously sterile and virile images possible). It’s the context that matters, in any medium.

That warrants repeating: it is context that matters. In any medium.

That horse hockey Grossman pulled out of his backside about paintguns is just as asinine. Paint guns recreate the mechanics of real firearms far more closely than most vidja games, and provide a real physical means of pursuing sadistic violence against real human beings. Even if you claim strict supervision, and go for the PHOTON guns to remove the sadistic element, you’re still desensitizing players to the act of pointing guns at other real people. For fun!

How is that not worse than a vidja game?

Personally, I have never found shooting games interesting to begin with, and don’t see why anyone would not be quickly bored to tears and steer clear of them, regardless. They’re made by lazy studios because it’s the easiest thing to do. They tend to have very shallow context, if any, as a by-product of that same laziness.

Nonetheless, they’re not what’s making kids want to go on shooting sprees.

Aside from the drugs warping ther minds, kids have got this idea being fed to them first by the media, then by the schools, repeated every time another massacre happens. It all goes back to the hateful little twats, Harris and Klebold in Columbine, reinforcing one another’s atheistic resentment of their peers and violent creativity. After that, the schools took the need for creativity out of the equation — telling all students (including the little addle-brained anti-depressant poppers) all about what horrors could be done in their school halls with a big bad gun, and making sure they all know just what to expect from both security and potential targets.

Shutting the hell up and not further frightening a whole generation of children would be a huge improvement in policy.