Video games, the latest menace to society?

 It is a long running debate among people who don’t play video games and those that do that spending hours on a games console playing violent games can alter your behaviour and make you more aggressive in your normal daily life. This is something I whole heartedly disagree with. My opinion is that if a person is affected to that extent by playing a violent game then there is a problem with the person rather than the game. Most people can tell the difference between reality and a game and there is a huge difference between sitting on a sofa pushing buttons on a control pad and actually going up to someone and hitting them. You hear things time and time again where people go off the rails and do something stupid and it is all too easy to blame an external influence rather than look at the actual person that has done it. In the 80’s and 90’s there was a spate of “Heavy Metal suicides” where the music was blamed for kids killing themselves, others or both. This is another example of looking for someone to blame. In other instances a person’s obsession with a Movie has been blamed for an outburst, it seems that video games are just the latest in a long line of scapegoats that can be conveniently wheeled out as the latest menace to society. There is obviously some kind of psychological issue with anyone affected to this extreme by a game, film or piece of music. When a catastrophic event occurs people are so annoyed with themselves that they missed the warning signs (someone watching the same move 10 times a day, spending excessive hours on halo/Cod/Gears or playing the same song over and over) that they lash out at the thing that tipped them over the edge rather than the fact that this person was on the edge and they didn’t help them Let’s face it if one person plays a violent game and then wants to go on a rampage then can it really be the game that caused it when there are hundreds of thousands of other people that have played the same game?

 My point is that this person could just have easily had the same reaction from a piece of music, a film or even an article on the news. Does that mean that we have to censor every piece of media that is available on the off chance that it has some detrimental effect on one individual?