Update

You will remember that I reported in my editorial from April 29th about a German teenager running amok and killing 16 people.

Politics and media were very quick in blaming violent games since this teenager, Robert Steinhäuser, was an enthusiastic Counterstrike player. And while the public discussion is still raging, people from various fractions are demanding law changes, banning or further restriction of violence in computer games and media (as if Germany wasn’t restrictive enough) and even are considering to raise the legal age to 21 again (which was lowered to 18 in 1975) something very interesting has been found out very recently.

The police has worked on a profile on Robert to discover the reasons for his amok run. And after two weeks of research and profiling it seems that those violent games and heavy metal music played a very minor role in that tragedy and has apparently neither caused nor triggered the amok run.

Instead the profile shows that the relationship between parents and son was not good, but rather cold. There seems to have been a lot of pressure on the teenager in regards of his performance in school. There are indications that Robert went through a series of disappointments and defeats, which found a sad climax when he was expelled from school half a year before his final exams for forging attests. All that explains why Robert didn’t tell his parents that he had been expelled from school.

I can’t help but think of Joel Schumacher’s movie ’Falling Down’, in which Michael Douglas after being fired tries to pretend his life would still be normal until he finally snaps. I think that basically something very similar has happened to Robert, with just the major difference that he was focused on blaming the school and the teachers for what happened to him.

But I’m afraid that those new discoveries will not draw much attention and will likely be ignored by all the people already satisfied with easy solutions and determined to rot out the perverse display of violence for reasons of enjoyment.

The discussion about violence in games or media is already difficult enough and heavily attacked from various angles (though never from the most honest one: That people try to apply a censorship of taste). This was more food for the supporters of more restrictions, and as usual they abuse the most sensitive lever to achieve their goal: The protection of youth. Basically there’s nothing wrong with that, but the measures taken always have affected adults as well, and I expect this to get worse in the near future. And all attempts to label that as the censorship it is will be swept away by the concerns about the youth. And though Robert wasn’t even a kid anymore, with 19 he was still young enough to stand vicarious for those younger people.

And it will be all so pointless because all violent games and all the bloodthirsty movies in the world could never achieve a fraction of the effect that lack of love or lack of understanding by parents achieves.