December 26, 2012
Family Guy
The National Rifle Association, which has arguably done more to eviscerate gun rights than to protect them, came to Ke$ha’s defense…somewhat. The organization issued a statement undermining the view that violent music inspired the school shooting. What we really need to blame, it explained, are video games such as Mortal Kombat, where human beings and cyborg ninjas fight to the death in the middle of magically complex realms.
Chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre took special note of a game called Kindergarten Killer. The 10-year-old Flash game depicts a rogue janitor who takes up arms against angry cartoon children who shoot back.
“How come my research staff can find it, and all of yours couldn”t?” he asked an intensely confused audience. “I mean, we have blood-soaked films out there…aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every single day.”
He was right about Splatterdays. At least the movie and television industries thought so. They, too, started doing some spring cleaning of their own.
Networks combed through scripts for Law & Order and American Dad and pulled episodes that mentioned schools, shootings, or any variant of the two. Family Guy aired repeats. Evidently the FX network didn”t get the memo about American Horror Story, which is still available on Netflix and features a school shooting as a major plot motif.
I watched the first season last week and have so far felt no inclination to involve myself in mass murder.
It is unfortunate that in a futile search for the external trigger of Adam Lanza’s murder spree, some people are willing to accept curtailing freedom of expression as collateral damage. Obscene or not, as Hustler founder Larry Flynt had to prove in court, this is a freedom without exceptions.
Every hollow self-correction we make in response to this shooting is a passive admission of guilt. We couldn”t have done anything differently, and we shouldn”t.
This massacre was no one’s doing but Adam Lanza’s.
