A 24 year old man from Alabama is attempting to defend his murder of an 80-year-old by claiming video games made him do it. Gamers should be quite used to such negative press by now. It seems at least once a month such a story makes headlines and the gaming community gets up in arms. What’s interesting, however, is that these defenses never seem to quite work. Suppose you can hand it to lawyers for persistence.

Unfortunately, such claims are hurtful in multiple ways. First, and most obviously, they are disrespectful to the family of the victim. Trying to write off a cold blooded murder as someone’s delusional bonus level of Grand Theft Auto doesn’t really give them the respect of simply admitting the murderer was just a bad, bad person. Second, such defenses hurt the gaming community. Look, gamers can cause themselves quite enough problems without having other people help them look bad. Lastly, true cases of videogame inspired crime are hurt by others trying to cash in. It’s similar to how depression isn’t taken as seriously since everyone is on anti-depressants now.

The actual case involves a young man breaking into the home of an 80-year-old widower; apparently to rob a vault he believed to be there. If you’re squeamish, now might be the time to turn away. He then proceeded to stab the man 70 times and gouge out an eye. Some of this was even apparently recorded on a desperate 911 phone call made by the attacked. The 80-year-old did manage to fire off a gun and hit the attacked with one round, though he did survive the attack. The old man was not quite so lucky.

The young man’s lawyer argued that he was a computer geek whose love for video games caused him to live “a different world than you and I.” That’s not really a defense, as anyone who brutally murders someone else lives in a pretty different sphere of reality than most. Still, such a brutal murder is hardly the place to start crying that the video game made you do it.

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