NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre spoke at a press conference held yesterday, in which he denounced the video games industry as a “callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people.”
In the wake of the tragic fatal shooting of 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, the spokesman for the US gun lobby organisation delivered its viewpoint of the cultural influences that lead to violent shootings.
La Pierre gave examples of “vicious violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Combat and Splatterhouse.” and showed the audience footage of a tasteless FPS indie game called Kindergarten Killers which has apparently been “online for 10 years”.
He claims that video games “portray murder as a way of life and then have the nerve to call it entertainment.”
In an effort to divert public attention away from gun ownership being seen as a contributing problem to violent crime in the US, LaPierre also apportioned blame onto “blood-soaked films like American Psycho [and] Natural Born Killers that are air like propaganda loops on ‘Splatterdays’” and “a thousand music videos [which] portray life as a joke and portray murder as a way of life.”
“They all have the nerve to call it entertainment. Is that what it really is? Isn’t fantasising about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”
“In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilised society by bringing an even more toxic mix of reckless behaviour and criminal cruelty right into our homes.”
Whilst there is undoubtedly some validity to these moral and social concerns, LaPierre’s lament that “the media demonises lawful gun owners” rang hollow given his hypocritical and ill-conceived calls to demonise the mental health sufferers with an “active national database of the mentally ill.”
“How have our nation’s priorities got so far out of order?” indeed.
Source: The New York Times
Main Image: NYdailynews.com
