One thing that I have noticed some of you say, is that the greiving mother should be blaming the parents of the killer for buying and allowing the kid to play Manhunt.
I don't see why she should blame the parents for that...
What she
should be blaming them for, however, is the constant beating, verbal violence between spouses, general aggressiveness, possible mental illness ( such as ADD etc ) and/or encouragement to be violent for the kid.
Like has been said, no "normal" kid in today's society simply grows up to be a murderer with game's influencing them ( sure, if they were locked in a room since birth with Manhunt and a PS2 for 17 years, fine, but that just doesn't happen ), it is the society around them and the people they know/interact with that promote violence in their lives. If this kid had been shown compasion, and loving by his parents, and they had given him rules as to what he could watch on TV/play on the PS2/particapate in with relation to violence then I'm 80% sure he wouldn't have repeatedly bashed his skull in with a hammer, and stabbed him...
( the other 20% is accounting for mental disabilities ).
And to prove this, if you think about it, about what he did to the other kid... He got a hammer, and hit him with it. Think of what that would be like, Peronally, I can't stomach things like that, and I feel quite ill if I dwell on it for too long, but just give it a thought, the kid looked at him, raised his hand with the hammer in it, and brought it down, crushing whatever it hit. The sound, and the blood, etc etc, would be enough to make me curl into a ball.
But, this kid didn't stop there, where a "normal" person would be thowing up all over the place, no, he kept going, and got a knife, and broke his skin with it.
A game doesn't show you the brutality of this.
Sure, it's "gorey" and it looks "realistic" but, it doesn't smell, it doesn't sound right, and polygons don't fall off a real person when you beat their heads in with a hammer.
The game cannot be to blame for this, nor can the game creators ( who, btw, quite clearly placed a warning on the box, and then it was even public knowledge about the severity of the violence involved [ media ] ), it is the parents who introduced their child to violence, you didn't teach their kid that punching someone is wrong, and should not be done.
It is they who should be blamed for what
thier kid, the person they "raised", did.
*ahem*
Sorry for the long post.
***** In Summary *****
It just annoys me the way people do this.
I'm with you lot
Jess.
Team EOD :: Programmer/Logical Engineer/All-Round Nice Guy