There can be very few people who aren’t now aware of the mass shooting that happened in Colorado at the midnight screening of The Dark Knight. However, as much as we do know, there is still much to discover about the suspect and his motivation for the killings.
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy the rolling news networks filled their broadcast with experts speculating on all of this. Unfortunately one cited video games as a possible factor, with EGM [Now] reporting CNN criminal profiler Pat Brown as saying live on air:
“[He] probably spent a lot of time in his apartment, playing one video game after the other — shooting, shooting, shooting — building up his courage and building up the excitement of when it’s going to be real for him.”
“And now we’re going to find, probably on [Facebook] or anybody who knows him will say, ‘Yeah, he did have a lot of interest in that. He was always playing the video games.’ And I’m not saying video games make you a killer. But if you’re a psychopath, video games help you get in the mode to do the killing.”
Ah, ignorance, don’t you just love it? To blithely and blatantly target video games as a determining factor in this case without any kind of evidence is shameful. Especially now that video gaming isn’t the minority hobby some people are stuck believing it is. The chances are that anyone of a certain age will have played video games at some stage in their life.
As it turns out there has been nothing yet discovered about Holmes’ love or otherwise of games, beyond friends saying he used to like Guitar Hero. which is hardly preparation for a sickening act of violence against dozens of people.
