Well I’ve started off the new year silently at Red Skies. It’s nothing against my readers, but the new year has brought a ton of change into my life (good change) and I’ve just been occupied giving my attention to all of that. I haven’t forgotten about this place and I’ve definitely had a lot of things to write about it. Just not a lot of time to do it.
Still, I’ve kept an interested eye out as much as I can to see what’s going on around the sphere. Of course, we’re all still talking about guns and violence the world over. I think it’s great that the dialogue has been so constant for the past month. Here in America I can tell you there have been at least half a dozen more public shoot outs since the Sandy Hook incident. It’s making the news on average once or twice a week and that’s just from my personal browsing of the news. The most recent is a man who has taken a 6 year old hostage in an underground bunker. How did he get him? He walked onto a school bus armed with the intention of taking 2 children. The bus driver attempted to stop him and was shot 4 times, fatally. Some kid passed out from the scene and that was the unlucky boy to be kidnapped. As of tonight that kid is still with the shooter.
The debate on gun violence won’t be stopping any time soon in America and that’s for sure.
Spinks believes it’s worthwhile to do more research on violence in video games, though I agree with most in the community that it’s highly unlikely there’s causation in this kind of thing. No one wants to admit it’s the culture. That would be admitting there’s something wrong with the way we’re doing things here and we’re not having that!
The latest Cat Context also has an open discussion on the issue of gun violence and video games that’s worth a listen, especially for it’s diversity of opinion. We all love it when Canadians chime in 
The most interesting question raised during the podcast was the one of responsibility. This is the heart of the matter: who is responsible? Obviously the gunmen are responsible, but this is happening all over society. These aren’t isolated one-offs. This is a recurring pattern of violent behavior spanning decades. We like to think it’s just a few people snapping here or there, but the frequency of gun violence just makes it a bit too obvious that it’s much more than that. We’ll see where the dialogue ends up in a month. In the U.S. we’re trying to pass legislation to limit access to automatic weapons and military style ammunition.
I have my own opinions of course but I’ll save them for a more thorough analysis. I need to let this all marinate a bit more. In the meantime, enjoy the upcoming holiday of love!
