… he’s not as big an idiot as some of the knee-jerk “The Virginia Tech Shootings were Due to My Pet Society’s Greatest Ill” crowd we’re seeing, e.g., “‘Twas All Video Games, You Betcha!,” to judge from some discussion on his show.
CALLER: What I really think is an issue is video violence, video gaming. I will guarantee you, I’ll bet my last dollar in my pocket, that this shooter will be found to have been a compulsive video gamer, and when people are living that kind of lifestyle — and college students do this a lot.RUSH: (sigh) Let’s say you’re right. Not every video gamer goes out and murders 33 people on the college campus though. There’s more to this than that. We can find all kinds of societal problems and ills, but the fact of the matter is that whatever you would look at as a bad influence — video games as you mentioned — it may desensitize people, but it doesn’t turn everybody into mass murderers.
I know it’s natural that everybody wants to throw their theories into this, and perhaps come up with perhaps a unique explanation or to understand, and I think it’s natural, because people have a tough time accepting a relatively simple explanation for something of this scale. But how many people are playing video games out there? How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns?
You can argue that Rush is really just defending guns (he notes that if we accept the argument then we need to ban video games, the same way some folks want to ban guns), but it is a small breath of sanity from some of the overheated rhetoric. (Insert “a broken clock is right twice a day” reference here as you prefer.)
Of course, while denying the video game connection, he’s still (or now) claiming that the VTech shooter was, essentially, a liberal.