A New South Wales police commissioner has blamed videogames for knife crime in Australia, claiming that games incentivize murder, vehicular damage, and rape.
“How can it not affect you if you’re a young adolescent growing up in an era where to be violent is almost praiseworthy, where you engage in virtual crime on a daily basis and many of these young people (do) for hours and hours on end?” the commish asked Telegraph Australia. “You get rewarded for killing people, raping women, stealing money from prostitutes, driving cars crashing and killing people.
“That’s not going to affect the vast majority, but it’s only got to affect one or two and what have you got? You’ve got some potentially really disturbed young person out there who’s got access to weapons like knives or is good with the fist, can go out there and almost live that life now in the streets of modern Australia. That’s concerning.”
Feel free to present the usual arguments, about how parents should be responsible, about how games are age-rated, and about how violent crime has gone down in the years since games became popular. The usual arguments that pricks like this routinely ignore, but make us feel superior for just a little while.
Game violence to blame for rise in knife attacks, says police commissioner [VG247]
