Was Teen Killer “Warped” By X-Box?
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| Photo by drdemento |
Some of you in my generation may remember a movie called Natural Born Killers. NBK - as it came to be known - told the story of a Bonnie-and-Clydesque pair of murderous lovers, taking to the road, leaving a behind them a trail of destruction, the police hot on their trail.
Some critcs loved the film, some hated it. Those that hated it felt that the movie was far to violent and that it glorified the characters’ chaotic behavior. Others agreed with the director, claiming the film was a satirical send-up of the way the media turns killers and outlaws into celebrities.
I have an ongoing argument going on with a pal of mine regarding the correlations between violence in the media and violence in the real world. I feel that a movie like NBK is reflecting - even predicting - cultural trends, and that it isn’t something that could directly “cause” violence. He disagrees, claiming that whenever you blow those images up on a screen and set them to a rock ‘n roll soundtrack you automatically glorify violence regardless of what you may be trying to “say”.
Like most things in life, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Which is to say that the media probably can’t create a killer, but it may be able to motivate a disturbed person to take a particular course of action. Charles Manson had The Beatles. Mark David Chapman had The Catcher in the Rye. And Daniel Petric, a young man accused of shooting both of his parents with a shotgun, had a copy of Halo 3:
A teenager convicted of killing his mother ‘may have had his mind warped by playing a violent video game’, a judge heard.
17-year-old Daniel Petric shot both his parents in the head with a shotgun after they took away his video game.
He then fled the house in Lorain County, Ohio, U.S., clutching his copy of ‘Halo 3′, one of the flagship titled for the Microsoft Xbox 360 console.
The father, Mark Petric, a church minister, survived the shooting, but Susan Petric died from the gunshot wound.
Prosecutors said Petric planned to kill his parents because he was angry that his father would not allow him to play the video game, in which players shoot alien monsters that have taken over the Earth.
Read more here.
