Where to even start with this..
After yesterday's tragic and senseless shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, the crack journalism squad of Elizabeth Hasselback, and the rest of the cast of Fox & Friends, have figured out what's fueling the gun violence in this country.
“Is this about gun control or is this about a guy who has a history of drinking a lot, playing video games a lot and a few shooting incidents?"
It's about gun control. Oh, that was a hypothetical question... For a second I thought you wanted to have a grown up discussion. No? This should be great stuff then.
Hasselback went on to say that "the left" was trying to make yesterday's shooting about "gun control" and what we should really be talking about is how America needs a "registry to track video game purchases." After preliminary investigations revealed that 34-year-old Aaron Alexis had a history of playing first-person-shooters, the junior detectives at Fox & Friends decided that video games are most certainly to blame for all of this.
Happily ignoring the fact that Alexis purchased the shotgun, legally, before killing a Navy Yard guard and Washington DC police officer and takin their AR-15 and 9MM handgun. Yup, it was defintely Call of Duty's fault. The Pulitzer Prize D-Team then spent the rest of the segment parroting one another about how video games are to blame and single handedly dismissing the role firearms had to play in all of this.
Certain media outlets love to pillory video games as the cause of real world gun violence if that means that we are no longer talking about gun control. There is also the pesky issue of facts to contend with. Media Matters weighed in with their thoughts,
"The Washington Post's Max Fisher analyzed the data on video game sales and gun-related killings internationally, writing that, "Looking at the world's 10 largest video game markets yields no evident, statistical correlation between video game consumption and gun-related killings."
"This data actually suggests a slight downward shift in violence as video game consumption increases. Based on international data, video game consumption does not seem to correlate at all with an increase in gun violence."
Unphased by concepts like 'science', 'research', and 'reality' the Fox & Friends cast barreled ahead, openly contemptuous of anything that even remotely smacked of a realistic dialogue about gun control.
“One thing that happens often in a situation as tragic as this is we start to spread blame where it possibly doesn’t belong, right?” Hasselbeck added. “I think we all know where the blame truly belongs, and that would be right in Alexis’ hands.”
Yes, that's right. In the hands of the man that brutally murdered 17 people. Oh...you were making a dumb video game controller pun.
I just can't.. these people are getting paid to do this. Thoughts?
(via Rawstory, Mediamatters)
