NRA President Wayne LaPierre decided that the best response to the Newtown massacre, in addition to creating an expensive police state in our shcools, would be to blame decades-old films and videogames, including Natural Born Killers and Mortal Kombat of all things.
Mortal Kombat is a video game series that began in the old arcades. It's a one-on-one tournament fighting game with ridiculous, over-the-top fighting moves including, yes, killing blows. But no guns, at least in the first two installments. In later versions only one of the games many characters has a gun.
I used to play Mortal Kombat all the time in the arcades as a child. I downloaded the old-school versions for my Xbox about six months ago. There's no sense in which these games make people more violent. Watching a video game character punch another video game character 20 feet into the air and off a bridge onto a bed of spikes may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it doesn't lead people to buy or steal AR-15s and slaughter a bunch of children in real life.
What can lead to that behavior is this, combined with mental illness:
Ms. Lanza was a gun collector and avid shooter, friends said. She showed one of "her beautiful rifles, an old collectible she was very proud of" to Dan Holmes, a local landscaper who worked on her property and who would see her from time to time at a bar in town called My Place, where bands played.
Mr. Holmes said she and her sons "would go target shooting as a family."
Jim Leff, a local writer and musician who says he knew Ms. Lanza, wrote on his blog after the shooting that she was a "big, big gun fan."
That and big guns with high capacity magazines.
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