Well, I think the problem here is fairly complicated.
What we're seeing here is a case of video games being used as a boogieman. In this case the purpose of the video games seems to be to prevent people from looking too closely into this case. It's better to have the guy viewed as a "madman" and a "video game addict" than to have people looking into his motivations too closely.
While what the guy did was doubtlessly wrong (and I am saying this right here, so do not misinterpet the rest of what I had to say), it seemed perfectly rational. The guy was a "right winger" who was upset over the goverment's policies, especially their immigration policies. When the story first broke I remember reading something about how it was some kind of "military youth camp" he opened fire on (or something like that), and thought that the story was going to get pretty interesting when we found out what the goverment was up to that inspired this guy to perform a complicated multi tier attack, and what was going on at this camp that made it a target as opposed to a police barraks or whatever. For whatever reason I can't find the initial reports I read, or really much about the guy's motivations. Even the whole "political nutball" thing seems to be being downplayed right now in favor of "the guy is a madman who played video games".
I understand that Norway doesn't have the same free speech rights as the US, and even here we have trouble with this kind of disclosure (big time), but really I find it disconcerting that right now our media and goverment is so far gone, not to mentiont he people, that we allow video games to be used as an explanation. Had Heemeyer drove the "Killdozer" through town hall yesterday, I'd imagine we'd be hearing he did it due to playing too much "Twisted Metal" as opposed to having acted because the town cheated him on a real estate deal (basically took his land from him to give to a private company) and he had no recourses. Right or wrong, that's an understandable motive, and most real cases like this include one.
I think the pressure needs to be taken off the video games, and the media needs to give up it's paticular paticular biases, and seriously dig into stories like this. This guy obviously wasn't a moron given that this was a fairly sophisticated, multi-tiered attack. Of course I doubt that will happen both because the media doesn't generally push the left wing when they have a clear, right wing bad guy. What's more I for some reason get the impression that while this guy was wrong in doint what he did, that the goverment is being so tight about things because the Norweigan goverment would hardly come accross smelling like roses if the specific details in the guys motivations were known.
It's probably too late now, but what we really needed was some US cameras going through that youth camp. It seems to me that some people at least thought it was a "military youth camp" I don't know if that mean a military school, or like the left wing norweigan version of The Hitler Youth or what, but as bad as the shooter was, I get the impression something pretty sketchy was going on there that probably had nothing to do with video games. Even madmen have some internally consistant delusion usually, and "well I'm going to blow up a goverment building, and a random youth camp" doesn't exactly make sense... I think if people find that connection there will be an interesting story here that has nothing to do with "World Of Warcraft".
That's my thoughts at any rate.
