Shooters, Drones and Video Games

Is the world going crazy?

Killing children is not so unusual in this modern world of ours. It hasn't just happened in Connecticut. It's happened in Syria, in Mexico, in the Congo; our drones kill children in Afghanistan--the Taliban kill them too--and also in America, in places like Columbine, Colorado--and Newtown Connecticut.

Can you imagine going haywire and killing defenseless kindergartners and first graders cowering before you?

But someone did, after killing his mother--and then, appropriately, killed himself. Too bad, he didn't do that first.

What's American about this story: the killer was armed with two, legally acquired, large magazine, semi-automatic pistols and an assault rifle. That's why so many could be killed in minutes. And then there's the likely influence of video games, a favored pastime of the shooter; there are no plots, no heroes, only anonymous fighters: about as moral as the Roman "games" at the Coliseum.

Modern life can create unbearable stress. Industrial noise builds stress; not knowing what you're supposed to be doing, not able even to find a job is high stress and it's stressful when you can't pay what you owe. There are people who have a low threshold for breaking from stress. In retrospect, we call them crazy: the whole society is going crazy. Fast.

It's crazy that we can't control guns and that even after the Newtown massacre, President Obama can't say the words "gun control," when he mourns the dead children.

It's crazy that we have a health care system in which we can't even talk about government negotiating Medicare prescription drug prices, even when Republicans talk of "reining in entitlement spending." And we still have insurer-dominated health care, even with Obamacare.

It's crazy that in a time of high unemployment and fragile recovery, when bond prices are high and interest rates are low, that the national dialogue is about a supposed fiscal cliff. The government should be spending, and promoting jobs, not cutting them. Cutting is appropriate once you have full employment, not before. Then, cutting spending prevents an overheated economy.

In a crazy world, you can smoke a joint in Colorado, or Washington state, but it's illegal, say the feds, for someone to sell it to you.

It's legal to have an abortion, but providers are harassed out of business, (or killed) and women are legally deceived, or blocked by onerous regulations contrived by the party that inveighs--against government regulation!

Our stress may be higher than for Romans when the world was falling apart in the fifth century and war bands roved the land, but video games give twisted people a model for action: kill everyone in sight.

The Coliseum's games taught Romans to tolerate violence; with video games, you learn to participate without a moral qualm. Remote drone pilots, many likely former video gamers, share that background with the Newtown shooter.