Hell, Frozen.

Nothing has been said here yet about the events that occurred at Virgina Tech yesterday, because it's really not the focus of this blog... Not until Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil started beating themselves off for the media about how video games are a serious factor in this tragedy.

Then, it's our thing.

The whole situation there is a mess. If teachers could Baker Act students they thought were legitimately unstable, if the police and campus police had reacted differently after the initial shootings, if if if... I want to see what experts who study the psychology of people who do shit like this have to say before I start pointing fingers at anything. You know who else does too? Rush Limbaugh.

I was shocked when I saw this over on Kotaku. I don't particularly like Rush, and I don't agree with him most of the time. Maybe getting off the drugs helped him a bit. Any way you slice it, I think it's... surprising to see a fairly major pundit saying things like:

• "Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There's more to this than that. 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."

Things that are actually logical. Video games are pervasive in modern society. They come on your computer, they come on your cell phone... There are even cameras with games on them now. It all comes down to spotting people with severe problems like this before they become a real threat to others.