All that has changed is the technology

Anders Behring Breivik is accused of killing nearly 70 people in less than 90 minutes.

Breivik said he used meditation, video shooting games and steroids to prepare for the slaughter.

There has been a loud public outcry against video games, and many new stories are indeed pointing to video games as a 'scapegoat' for this fiasco.

I think maybe we should outlaw meditation, instead.

Okay, sarcasm is probably not the most productive response here, but this is an argument that keeps coming up, and I feel it misses the point entirely.

What caused Breivik to kill so many people?  The video games? Was it his simply owning the weaponry and he had no other place to use it?  Or does he have a political agenda that many would label as sick, and he seeks to eliminate persons with belief systems that differ from his own?

Wait, that sounds familiar.

I recently began watching a documentary called Guns, Germs and Steel. This documentary traces humanity's journey over the last 13,000 years, and was so succesful, that PBS created and maintains a website for it.

Guns, Germs and Steel is based upon Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, published in 1997.  Within the pages of the book and in the second hour of the film, we hear the story of the Spanich conquistador Francisco Pizarro González.  It tells of how he decimated the Incan royal entourage in the Battle of Cajamarca on November 16, 1532. 

Pizzaro went into battle with:
106 infantry
62 cavalry
4 cannons
12 harquebus

The final damages?  One of his soldiers was wounded, and a slave was killed.  And on that day, in that one battle, Pizzaro and his men killed over 2,000 Incans and took over 5000 prisoners. 

How many hours a day do you think Pizzaro played Call of Duty in order to prepare for such a battle?  I wonder if his man de Soto 'tore it up' on World of Warcraft.

The only thing that has changed in 500 years of human history is the technology of weaponry.  Video games don't kill people.  People kill people because of divisivness caused by fear, greed, and seriously misled and self-damaging belief systems.

So this is my blog post where we are to connect two different websites. I know... it's not much of a leap from guns to guns.

And that's kinda my point.