Games, shooting spree and strategy for an election win

GamePolitics alerts me of this article in Spiegel Online translated from German to English by Google. It reports Germany's Interior Ministers have asked their parliament to ban all violent games. The move is in respond to shooting spree by a youth who plays shooting games during his free time. If you read further, it also reveals that the move is orchestrated with the hope that the parliament will approved the ban before the coming election. So it is more likely that call for the ban is political motivated than a serious attempt to go to the root cause of the violence.

This is somewhat similar to incident in Thailand which I have made a commentary here. Serious attempt to understand why teens kill have to go beyond from looking how they spend their leisure time, into investigating their socio-background to find the root causes what motivate them to have the instinct to kill. Ken Hardy and Tracy Laszloffy, family therapy scholars, warn us from blaming simple environment factors like video games and guns, but trace the roots of teen violence to four things: devaluation, erosion of community, dehumanized loss, and rage. I have a commentary of that here. Fascination to link media with violence will there all the time and if we read in between the lines, we can see that much of the euphoria is because playing the blaming game is easy, taking advantage public paranoia, than to uncover social ills as a result of bad political governance and our own neglect.