Public outrage has erupted in response to a new video game that reportedly “encourages players to open fire inside classrooms and auditoriums” against a heavy metal music soundtrack and it is scheduled for release on June 6, according to NBC News and other agencies.
“Active Shooter” is developed by Revived Games and will be released by Steam, a “digital marketplace.”
But buried in the coverage and controversy over the new game are a couple of interesting points.
First, according to the NBC report, “The game is being marketed days after the 23rd U.S. school shooting of 2018.” But KIRO-FM broadcaster Dori Monson in Seattle has taken that figure to task by analyzing the reported school shootings.
One of the incidents involved the shooting of a man who was apparently “targeted” while he was attending a track meet as a spectator. Another incident reportedly involved a dispute between two men on a college campus, and a third was the negligent discharge of a firearm by an instructor who was “teaching a course about gun safety for his administration of justice class.” That round went into the ceiling.
These are not the kinds of incidents that people generally think about when they hear the term “school shooting,” Monson noted.
Another revelation came from Andrew Patrick, media director for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, as reported by the New York Daily News. While the video game may be offensive, Patrick said the “bigger issue…remains how easy it is for people to obtain guns in America.”
“We’re not going to blame the access of video games for gun violence,” Patrick reportedly told The News. “We blame the access of guns.”
That observation amplifies a point made recently by Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. He openly wondered when gun prohibition lobbying groups will start blaming criminals for violent acts, rather than law-abiding gun owners and the Second Amendment.
There is an on-line petition urging the producer to not release the game.
