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It's a situation that often pops up on news and talk shows. "Video games promote violence and are causing our children to go on murderous rampages! They must be banned and and the children protected at all costs!" bellows the populist TV pundit, followed by "Coming up after the commercial break, twenty reasons why we should go bomb the hell out of *insert name of other country here*!"

It always amuses me to see these contradictions pop up. Talking heads, politicians, crusading lawyers they all know they can score easy points with concerned moms if they take on the "burden" of protecting everyone else's kids from what they deem evil. Meanwhile, they have no problems justifying and supporting all sorts of other atrocities.

The game DOOM sent players to Mars to battle fictional aliens and demonic monsters. The Bible features people "dragging away" innocent children and "dashing them to pieces" while "ripping open pregnant women", often at God's command(Jeremiah 49:20-21, Isaiah 13:15-18, Hosea 13:16, etc.). Guess which of those upsets the so-called moral crusaders?

Mortal Kombat featured ridiculous fighters performing impossible moves and causing utterly unrealistic violent mayhem. Professional football players are paid millions of dollars and raised to the status of heroes to children everywhere for hurting each other as thoroughly as possible. Guess which receives more scorn from concerned parent' groups?

The Grand Theft Auto games feature pixilated characters shooting each other and stealing cars. The news, both in the papers and on television, featured the President of the United States stating that a preemptive war would be the only way to save us from some non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Guess which of those upset the pundits?

There is violence everywhere. The real kind is often considered perfectly acceptable, even heroic, while silly video games and movies are targeted as the main causes of violence in today's youth. It's true that a child with no moral guidance might latch on to a violent video game and commit violence. That's where the parents come in. Your job, parents, is to explain to your child the difference between right and wrong and the difference between fiction and reality; then to decide if YOUR child can handle a violent video game not if everyone else can handle it.

True, there are disturbed individuals out there who may be set off by video games. But maybe they'll be set off by the violence on the news, or the bloodshed in religious texts, or maybe it's just a sudden disturbance in their own mind that can set them off. But it's both shameful and pathetic to take the easy route, to point the finger at video games to score points with the masses while ignoring the actual root causes of violence and abandoning those who might have a violent mental illness.

I'll end this with a personal note. I've been playing video games for as long as I can remember. I started with the fun stick-figure games of the Atari 2600 and have played games of all varieties. I loved blasting alien monsters in DOOM, I enjoy destroying humanoid zombies in Resident Evil 4, I have fought in simulations of real-world battles with Medal of Honor, and I have shot people and stolen their cars in Grand Theft Auto games. According to the logic' of the alarmists, this pretty much means I'm doomed to become a deranged bloodthirsty madman. Funny thing is, I'm one of the most peaceable people I know. I detest real world violence and war. I despise anyone who thinks a fight is better than a debate or conversation to resolve an argument.

But then, I was raised to understand the difference between reality and fictional video games.

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