Over the weekend, anti-game activist Jack Thompson debated game developer Lorne Lanning at a gaming convention in Philadelphia. Like clockwork, Thompson tried to blame video games for school shootings. GamePolitics on the other hand, took issue with the fact Thompson doesn’t blame guns.
Regarding school shootings, Thompson repeated his mantra about kids going to school with guns for 200 years in this country in order to shoot their dinner on the way home. This was by way of saying school shootings cannot be traced to easy gun availablity. Cite a reference, please, Jack. Which kids? Which 200 years? It sounds apocryphal from here.
As I posted in the comments at GP: Jack is correct on the facts. His cause and effect theory is dodgy, but the timeline is about right.
Before the 1934 National Firearms Act, a kid (or anyone else) could buy a machine gun at a hardware store or through mail order, cash and carry, no questions asked. Until that point, the only known school massacre was the Bath School Disaster in 1927, in which an adult blew up a school with dynamite and killed 44 people and himself.
Before the 1968 Gun Control Act, one could still buy non-automatic rifles and handguns via mail order or from a store with no questions asked. Until this time, there were only a few school shootings, almost all of which involved adults at college. See also: Charles Whitman.
Before the The Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990 (which was ruled unconstitutional and replaced by a new version in 1995), kids could (and did) carry rifles to school. Be it for hunting after class, or for varsity shooting teams. Up through the late ’70s/ early ’80s, even New York City had shooting teams in public schools. In a number of States, faculty and adult students could also carry handguns to school before the Federal law passed. And until this law, school shootings were still quite rare. Most of which, again, involved adult shooters. In all but a couple of incidents, no more than two or three people (including the shooter) died.
Long story short, it wasn’t until schools became “gun-free zones†that the shootings became a common occurrence. The timing just happens to coincide with the rise in violent games like Doom and Mortal Kombat. This is where I cease to agree with Jack though.
In my honest opinion, the main reason for all the shootings is that schools are a soft target now, which is quite attractive to people who want to kill lots of people. To me, this is obvious. Banning guns in single buildings in the middle of a city/state/country filled with guns is like tossing a cotton ball into a bath tub and asking it to stay dry. Much like the air pockets in a cotton ball create a void which the laws of physics demand the water to fill, a “gun-free zone†creates a power vacuum which attracts sociopathic losers.
Israel experienced a similar phenomenon, only in reverse. They started with ban on guns at schools, and after a number of terrorist school shootings, they armed the teachers and parents in the mid ’70s. And school shootings promptly ceased to exist; terrorist or otherwise.