{"id":11048,"date":"2007-04-18T16:14:14","date_gmt":"2007-04-18T23:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2007\/04\/18\/rush-may-be-an-idiot-but.html"},"modified":"2007-04-18T16:14:14","modified_gmt":"2007-04-18T23:14:14","slug":"rush_may_be_an_idiot_but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/04\/18\/rush_may_be_an_idiot_but.html","title":{"rendered":"Rush may be an idiot, but …"},"content":{"rendered":"

… 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!<\/a>,” to judge from some discussion on his show<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
CALLER<\/strong>: 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.<\/p>\n

RUSH<\/strong>: (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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There’s more<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fourth-estate","category-gaming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5857,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/07\/09\/review_review.html","url_meta":{"origin":11048,"position":0},"title":"Review review","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 9-Jul-04 10:53am","format":false,"excerpt":"It's the Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game. 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On the other hand, the...","rel":"","context":"In "Comics & Comic Books"","block_context":{"text":"Comics & Comic Books","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-comics"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6586,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2004\/08\/16\/mutie.html","url_meta":{"origin":11048,"position":4},"title":"Mutie!","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 16-Aug-04 11:43am","format":false,"excerpt":"Everybody sort of makes fun of the normal people in the Marvel Universe who have such a knee-jerk repugnance towards mutants. \"They should be more open-minded, less bigotted,\" we say,...","rel":"","context":"In "Comics & Comic Books"","block_context":{"text":"Comics & Comic Books","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-comics"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":41012,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2014\/02\/06\/on-damage-on-a-miss.html","url_meta":{"origin":11048,"position":5},"title":"On Damage on a Miss","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 6-Feb-14 1:07pm","format":false,"excerpt":"It shows how out of touch I've been from the D&D world that I didn't realize this was a Thing until I ran across an article about it (or about some foofaraw about it) yesterday.Rob Donoghue, not surprisingly, does a great job looking at how DoaM is fantastic, awful, weird,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11048\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}