Living in Connecticut seldom does a day go by without hearing about the recent shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Actually, considering the news media are still lingering around the place that may be true for the rest of you as well. It doesn’t help that Sandy Hook has essentially become Ground Zero in the latest political war over guns and entertainment. Now BW Media Spotlight isn’t a political blog, but let me get these thoughts out of the way if I may.

• Guns: It’s one thing to talk about how many more people can be killed by a gunman than, say, a guy with a crossbow. It’s another to act like an inanimate object is making people kill. Reading the words of the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, additions to the Constitution demanded by the people of the day, were in part to keep the Government in check, something the Constitution and the Bill of Rights does a lot and you can’t really blame them considering what they fought against. Now I would like to hear the other side make a stronger defense of supposed “assault-style” weapons and body armor beyond worried about slowly taking away our gun rights (and I could point to a few examples that supports that worry) because I don’t understand the need for them either, unless you are that afraid.. That said, considering the majority of gun owners aren’t going on a killing spree I don’t believe in punishing them for the acts of few, especially when I hear stories of people stopping bad people from hurting them or their kids with those very same firearms.
• Mental Illness: I’m probably less able to discuss this than I am guns, but while it’s good to see this become a concern it is for the wrong reasons. From what I hear many forms of mental illness do not lead to the sufferer going on a killing spree. All this will do is make people even more scared of a small section of the population who are not a threat and are just trying to survive from day to day wishing they could do things most of us take for granted. But if people weren’t being over-reactionary I could be talking about something more pleasant. Or I’d just be complaining about the latest rumor about the Man of Steel movie, so at least this topic matters.

The third “source” of everything that’s wrong ever, so we’re told, is violent media, specifically violent video games. (So at least they don’t sound like they’re blaming Pac-Man or Angry Birds anymore.) Now this is something I can talk about, because storytelling media is all I ever talk about on here anyway over the past five years. Naturally I take an interest here and naturally I have an opinion on the matter. That opinion is: all three positions are getting it wrong!

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