NRA blames decades-old game with no guns for gun violence
NRA President Wayne LaPierre decided that the best response to the Newtown massacre, in addition to creating an expensive police state in our shcools, would be to blame decades-old films and videogames, including Natural Born Killers and Mortal Kombat of all things.
Mortal Kombat is a video game series that began in the old arcades. It’s a one-on-one tournament fighting game with ridiculous, over-the-top fighting moves including, yes, killing blows. But no guns, at least in the first two installments. In later versions only one of the games many characters has a gun.
I used to play Mortal Kombat all the time in the arcades as a child. I downloaded the old-school versions for my Xbox about six months ago. There’s no sense in which these games make people more violent. Watching a video game character punch another video game character 20 feet into the air and off a bridge onto a bed of spikes may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it doesn’t lead people to buy or steal AR-15s and slaughter a bunch of children in real life.
What can lead to that behavior is this, combined with mental illness:
Ms. Lanza was a gun collector and avid shooter, friends said. She showed one of “her beautiful rifles, an old collectible she was very proud of” to Dan Holmes, a local landscaper who worked on her property and who would see her from time to time at a bar in town called My Place, where bands played.
Mr. Holmes said she and her sons “would go target shooting as a family.”
Jim Leff, a local writer and musician who says he knew Ms. Lanza, wrote on his blog after the shooting that she was a “big, big gun fan.”
That and big guns with high capacity magazines.
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