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Finally, pop culture escapes blame

After the Virginia Tech shootings, pundits have mostly looked elsewhere for explanations.

By JOSH KORR
Published April 28, 2007

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot up Columbine High School in Colorado eight years ago, nearly every story hyped their alleged love of Doom and The Basketball Diaries. A wave of bipartisan moralizing about pop culture rot ensued, culminating in the faux outrage over Janet Jackson's nipple flash at the 2004 Super Bowl.

So it was refreshing to read coverage of last week's Virginia Tech shootings and not have to snort every couple of paragraphs at a lazy attempt to link Seung-Hui Cho's rampage to some pop culture influence. A few early stories did use weirdly irrelevant details to make cursory attempts at explaining the shootings: Cho was described as sitting silently in the back of a class "wearing a hat"; his parents' Virginia townhouse was described as "off-white." But aside from one mention - later removed - in an online Washington Post story of Cho having played the game Counter-Strike, there were few mentions of his pop culture habits.

Nonetheless, video game defenders quickly lamented the "knee-jerk immediacy of the assumption that video games must have been involved," as writer Heather Chaplin put it on the game blog Kotaku. The main person dredging up Columbine-era fears was Jack Thompson, a Florida lawyer who has made a crusade of blaming video games for real crimes and pushing states to enact laws restricting the sale of violent games.

Fox News might welcome Thompson, but the rest of us don't need to take him seriously. If a virus wiped out the world's mushroom crop, Thompson would go on TV blaming Super Mario Bros. for training a generation to kill virtual anthropomorphic mushrooms.

The other example Chaplin and others used to claim a video game backlash is Dr. Phil, who said this on Larry King Live after the Tech shootings:

"Common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. . . .

"We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murderers of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose."

Dr. Phil is insufferable and goes too far, but he's making a crucial distinction. He's not talking about video games and movies making normal kids violent. He's talking about video games and movies potentially affecting people who are crazy or violent to begin with.

Dr. Phil's comment is a sign of how far we've come since Columbine. The unspoken question behind those Marilyn Manson references was, "What caused two suburban kids to snap?" The assumption underpinning the Virginia Tech stories has largely been, "This is a crazy guy who snapped." The most heartening thing I've read was in a Washington Post story about the package Cho sent to NBC: "The communications sought to explain his actions but served mostly to display his anger and illness."

If you take Cho's mental illness as a given, then everything else - the teasing in high school but everybody's teased, his perceived grievances against rich kids (but how lame and cliched is that?), his "depraved" college screenplays (which are notable mostly for their unskilled, sophomoric stylings), the movies he saw (no matter what Dr. Phil says) - is ultimately irrelevant.

Even more than the current political atmosphere, this explains why the Tech shootings haven't led to an immediate national referendum on gun control the way Columbine did.

Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine was interesting in parts, but the movie failed as a whole because he simply exchanged one set of lazy claims about the school shootings (violent media was the culprit) for another (Lockheed Martin being Littleton's largest employer and banks that double as gun shops were the culprits). We seem to have gone beyond the Moore view and taken a more nuanced, serious approach to insane rampages.

You know there's been a change when Rush Limbaugh recognizes the Jack Thompson and Michael Moore views for what they are. On his radio show last week, Limbaugh cautioned a caller against blaming video games for the Tech shootings:

"We can find all kinds of societal problems and ills, but the fact of the matter is that whatever you would look at as a bad influence - video games, as you mentioned - it may desensitize people, but it doesn't turn everybody into mass murderers. . . . If you start blaming the video games, you may as well demand video game control because it's the same thing when you start trying to blame guns for this. You have here a sick individual, an evil individual who committed a random act."

Limbaugh's logic isn't airtight; millions of not-crazy people use guns for violent acts short of mass murder. But it's nice to hear a pundit, right or left, dispense with the scaremongering.

Accepting that there are no singular causes for a mass shooting can be hard. We want the small comfort a Doom anecdote provides; otherwise we're left confronting the cold void of a violently ill mind.

But let's give ourselves some credit. We're not to blame for Virginia Tech, and neither is any piece of art we've created. The real comfort is in knowing society has matured to the point where we can accept that with open eyes and clear consciences.

Times staff writer Josh Korr can be reached at jkorr@sptimes.com His video game blog is at blogs. tampabay.com/videogames.

[Last modified April 27, 2007, 09:33:52]