The worst U.S. school shooting since Columbine took place at Red Lake High School in Minnesota on Monday. There's tragedy in any story of violence, especially when the suspect wasn't even an adult.
Our hearts go out to the victims and their families.
But the measure of a nation is how it behaves when it's under attack. Legislators may soon be telling America, as they did after Columbine and other youth-violence situations, that violent video games, movies and television are responsible.
This is almost negligent disregard for reality. Thousands of students on the OU campus alone have played violent video games like Grand Theft Auto or Halo and are frequently exposed to violence on the silver screen. No OU students kill other people. The same is true of young people across the country.
No study has found more than a correlative relationship between violent media and aggressive behavior; they've all had an alternate cart-leading-the-horse explanation.
Correlation certainly isn't proof. And even if we knew playing Doom led the Columbine shooters to do what they did, the actions of a few unbalanced individuals aren't enough reason to censor video games and television.
Unfortunately, enough Americans are shirking parental responsibility and expecting the government to pick up where they left off--suggesting, for example, that video game companies be culpable if their product contributed in any way to violence.
The government should never be called upon to sanitize media. The media are common to all Americans, so it's their own duty to keep themselves and their children from being exposed to what they don't want to see.
Once the government gets license to censor, it will be nearly impossible to revoke.
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