Last week, a mass shooting at Oxford High School, Michigan left four students dead. Six others, including an educator, were injured.
15-year-old Ethan Crumbley has been arrested and charged for murder and terrorism, and his parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter following allegations that their son had easy access to the weapon used in the shooting.
The pair have also been widely criticised for not responding to the signs that Ethan was planning the shooting. When the school reprimanded Ethan for searching for ammunition online, his mother is said to have told him he she wasn't mad at him, and that he needed to "learn not to get caught".
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Mass shootings happen with an alarming frequency in America, as I'm sure you know. A report by the New York Times finds that The Gun Violence Archive counted more than 600 shootings in the US in 2020, a significant leap from the 417 in 2019. And there have been hundreds more so far in 2021.
Unfortunately, this endless cycle of violence and death shows no signs of slowing down. Rather than address the country's terrifyingly relaxed gun laws or rampant online radicalism, the US media has once again decided to pin violence on video games and call it a day.
Inside Edition's report on the shooting blamed "gory" video games, and played a clip of Fallout 4 in which android detective Nick Valentine says, "now I am become death, destroyer of worlds".
In actuality, this infamous quote is attributed to the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who recalled the line frim the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the first-ever atomic bomb blast. Nick Valentine's reading of the line in Fallout 4 is a reference - and a pretty obvious one, at that.
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Either the people putting together Inside Edition's report knew this and ignored it on purpose to make it look like it was from a video game, or they genuinely didn't know where the quote originated from. In either case, everyone involved should be embarrassed and ashamed.
Featured Image Credit: BethesdaTopics: Fallout