Next month is the one year anniversary of the shooting at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb. April will mark the second anniversary of the massacre at Virginia Tech and the tenth anniversary of the rampage at Columbine High School.
In each of those cases, along with many others in the intervening years, questions were asked about what turned the boys involved into murderers, and far too often there was a leap to judgment and part of the blame was put on violent video games. In our national desire to find a scapegoat cause for everything, conclusions were reached, hands were wrung, and laws were passed regarding the sale of those games. Unfortunately, there's no evidence that the shooters were any more obsessed with those games than the people of both genders, by the millions, who have played them and never shot anyone.
That's what Professor Christopher Ferguson of Texas A&M, who conducted extensive research into the subject, told me yesterday on my WLS/Chicago show. You can listen to our conversation here, then click here to subscribe to these podcasts via iTunes!
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