If you’ve been watching Fox News since the shooting massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, you probably already know that God, not gun control, is The Answer. But this morning, Fox & Friends made an attempt to dig a bit deeper than just blaming Godlessness. So they trotted out an unhinged Lt. Col. Dave Grossman who ranted that the pervasive evil of violent video games means Newtown is just the beginning!
Grossman was introduced as a “former West Point psychology professor.” But he seemed like he was in need of some mental health treatment, himself. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that our fighting men and women are no longer exposed to him.
Noting that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza was a loner who played “deadly video games,” guest host Kelly Wright asked whether that might have played a role “in perhaps, his psyche or his emotion?”
Grossman answered:
Look, guys, the kids that gave us Jonesboro in middle school, Columbine in high school, Virginia Tech in the college are now giving us Hell in every piece of the world. They gave us that massacre on the island in Norway. They gave us a mall massacre in Aurora, Colorado… This is just the beginning!
What you saw in Newtown is just the beginning! This is a sick, sick culture feeding sick movies and sick video games creating very, very sick kids!
…I predicted this was gonna happen. It’s a trend!
The guy was so off the rails that Wright had to interrupt to get “a word in edgewise” and to ask, “What do we do in terms of addressing these video games? …There are some games out there that really teach people how to kill, according to your reports and reports from military and law enforcement.”
Grossman’s answer?
We have got to enforce the ratings systems… This is just the beginning guys. Please! Don’t look at this in isolation… Look at (these mass shootings) as a growing, moving trend and it’s gonna get worse. …The video games are providing the training, the desensitization, and the conditioned responses… It doesn’t take a lot of skill to walk up to a child, shove a gun in their face and blow their brains out. What it takes is desensitization and conditioning to do it again and again and again and again.
…We have raised a generation of children who have learned to kill and learned to like it. When we get a sick kid in past years, they were chewing gum and talking out in class. Now we create a sick kid and they’re gonna come kill you. If you’re the parents who let your kids play these sick games, the blood is on your hands and, by the way, you might be the first one to die.
Wright seemed not entirely comfortable with this guest but he nonetheless said at the closing, “Very sobering thoughts and hopefully people are watching, taking heed of what you’ve said.”
Of course another thing all those massacres had in common were guns. But Fox would rather give a nut job like Grossman credibility than to offer up gun control as any kind of sensible solution worth considering.
