Do you think that John Wayne Gacy started killing people because of a rat?Okay. I'm with him so far. Clearly the rats themselves didn't line up and squeak "please torture us to death" to this Gacy maniac. No rational argument can be made that it was the faults of the rats. On you go, Dan.
Here's why I ask.
When Gacy was a young boy he was entirely unremarkable. Save for one thing. He liked to capture mice and rats in a wire trap. Then he would dissect them while they were still alive. He was oblivious to their agony.
Years later Gacy was living a perfectly normal life. Or at least he seemed to be. He became a successful building contractor and he liked holding barbeques for the neighbours. His wife, however, couldn't help noticing a strange smell from under the floorboards.
And nothing Gacy did - lime, concrete, whatever, would make the smell go away. Hardly surprising. By that point he had buried more than 30 boys in shallow graves underneath his property.
In his (fabulous) new book How We Decide Jonah Lehrer tells the story of Gacy, the tale of the classic psychopath. His point was that we could see Gacy's future in his lack of emotion when dissecting the rats.
Anybody arguing that Gacy's violent behaviour with rats caused him to be a murder, would appear ridiculous. Obviously the same brain dysfunction caused both torture of rats and torture of boys.
Now what about Tim Kretschmer? After his shooting spree, his local paper naturally asks "Warum?" (Why).Gacy was a serial killer who probably planned to get away with it more or less indefinitely while Kretschmer was a spree killer who probably just picked a day to die and simply chose to take as many people with him as possible. But in spite of that important difference I was completely with Daniel Finkelstein right up to that last sentence. At that point the sense stopped and the bollocks started. He avoided the post hoc causation/correlation trap that people so often fall into but look, playing a lot of computer games doesn't have to be a sign of a psychologically unhealthy addiction. It's just as likely, if not almost certain in most cases that someone is playing a lot of computer games because they're fun. Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. The vast majority of people who play a lot of computer games will never commit murder because of them, so the fact that it might be a symptom of something in the cases of a handful of disturbed individuals isn't a lot of help. It's like clearing up after a drunk driver has crashed into a bus queue killing everyone including himself, and then going to the pub he came from and observing that a lot of other people in there are drinking. That doesn't help you separate the twats who are going to drive home from the responsible majority who are getting a cab or something. On top of that not all mass murderers play computer games, even if you only look at the spree killer types. For one (very obvious) thing the phenomenon isn't particularly new but computer games have only been common for two or three decades, and have only borne any resemblance to reality for much less than that. Some very cursory research (yeah, of course I mean Wikipedia) finds that there's no shortage of spree killers with whom computer game addiction has not been connected. Obviously the likes of Charles Whitman and Michael Ryan went off it too early and we'll never know if they'd have been into computer games if they'd been available. But computer games don't seem to get mentioned in connection with Seung-Hui Cho (Virgina Tech Massacre), Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane), Martin Bryant (Port Arthur) and Huan Yun Xiang (Monash Uni shootings). No doubt driven by similar levels of hate and perceived wrongs done to them but what warning signs there may have been don't appear to include games. I'm sure there'd be more if I kept looking.
And in the reports we get this:“He was completely unremarkable, there was nothing in his background to suggest this could have happened,” Mr Rech said.There have been quite a few mentions of this violent computer game this morning.
Fellow students described him as "quiet" and "reserved," although it appears that he had recently spent increasing amounts of time before a computer playing a shoot-em-up video game called Counter Strike.
Naturally, however, Kretschmer's game is no more responsible for his acts than Gacy's rats.
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson make this very clear in their review of the evidence on computer games - Grand Theft Childhood. Game addiction is a symptom of something wrong and not a cause.
So while with hindsight we can go "ooh look, this German kid played violent computer games just like the Columbine guys, so there must be something in it" we're kidding ourselves if we think that it won't lead to (a) examining loads of perfectly normal people who just like games and (b) missing the nut jobs who aren't interested in games at all. Bottom line, while it's not entirely facile to involve computer games in this it's not a lot of practical use. Well done for not painting computer games as a possible cause, but their use isn't much of a warning sign either if that's what was implied.
On a slight tangent it's pretty much guaranteed that some will be clamouring for tighter gun laws in Germany (and Alabama which had it's own massacre not long before Kretschmer's, and practically everywhere). I haven't bothered looking for articles yet but I'd bet my last cent that they're there. I'm no gun nut but I don't think more gun laws will help one bit, and I'll blog extensively on why not some time in the next couple of days.
