During yesterday's Meet the Press, violence in video games and the media was brought up as a possible cause of gun violence in America and I couldn't disagree more. The rate of gun violence in Japan, England, Canada and so forth is a mere fraction of America's rate, and yet they have the same level of violence in their video games and television shows.
There's a gun culture in America that worships these firearms as part of Americana, and it has to end. This crisis is about guns, first and foremost, and the mental health of the people who attain them.
My concern is the gun fetishists will use their power to skew the trajectory of this debate in the wrong direction, like always, and any new gun control laws will be watered down in the process of looping in laws about video games and media, not to mention surveillance-state post-9/11 laws involving profiling and over-the-top security measures (like arming school officials) that will invariably be proposed by Bush era PATRIOT Act zealots.
It's the guns.