From:
Eric 'StarFury' Bakutis
Subject: 'Gamers Against Violence' Press Release
Dear sirs,
I am writing this e-mail to brief you about a cause which I feel
strongly about, and which I feel that you will be very interested
in. Please read this proposal carefully and feel free to send any
thoughts or replies to me at starfury@shawneelink.net
I'm sure by now we have all heard about the horror that happened
in Colorado a few days ago. First, I will tell you what we are doing
and the specifics of why I am writing to you today. Once that is
established, I will go further on to lay out why I feel that this
is necessary.
A message in Blue's Mailbag
inspired me to write this letter and to get you, the members of
the Qmunity, involved... I believe it is time that gamers, as a
group, came together and made a definative statement to America
and the media, a statement which says that we do not support or
condone this type of behavior, and that we never will. That gamers
as a whole are some of the nicest, most nonviolent people you will
meet, and that we cannot let the media and other groups partition
blame and the focus of improvement to prevent something like this
from ever happening again onto peripheal issues which have little
to no influence on it.
In order to do this, I and the rest of Phantasm, as well as several
other promiment members of the Qmunity, are starting a fund to donate
to the victims and survivors of the Columbine HS shootings, which
we have tenatively entitled 'Gamers Against Violence'. What this
fund will do is to collect donations from various groups in the
Qmunity, as well as gamers in general, into a fund to be donated
to the victims of the incident at Columbine HS, and to make a statement
to the media and America in general about what those who play these
games and work in the community based around them are really like.
I am going to need your help to make this fund a reality. Clan Phantasm
is making an initial donation of $100 dollars to the 'Gamers Against
Violence' fund, and I hope that other large gaming related sites
on the Internet are willing to do the same. In addition, these sites
will get our message out to the members of the gaming community.
If every person who plays a videogame and is even remotely involved
in the Qmunity contributes just $5 dollars to this cause, we could
raise a truly substantial amount of money that would do much to
help the survivors of this horrible tradegy.
Right now this fund is still in the initial stages--what we need
is a core base of sponsors to sign on and support this fund, as
well as get it around the Internet. We also need an independent
source where contributions can be sent. My father, who runs a local
law firm in Ft. Worth, has already offered to set this up if we
should need it, but I know that some of you in the Qmunity already
have connections that may help us to do this, and if so I would
ask you to use this connections on behalf of this fund and help
us get established. The sooner we can get this out on the Internet
doing some real good, the sooner we can get a substantial contribution
to those in Colorado who need it.
What I want from you is your help in making this fund a reality,
getting it known around the Internet, and getting it known to the
media and America as well. As I've said, by putting together this
fund and donating it, we can not only help people who've been involved
in something truly horrible but also make a definitive statement
that will, hopefully, get the media and others focusing their attention
on where it needs to be to prevent a tragedy like this from ever
happening again. I look forward to hearing your opinions and replies
on this matter.
Now, a few words about why I feel this fund is necessary.
As those of you who have been keeping up with the news may know,
suggested 'causes' for this event have been everything from industrial
music to the videogame Doom. The sad thing is that, as the media
is prone to do when faced with a tradegy, it is stretching out in
all directions searching for a scapegoat, and I fear that games
such as Doom and Quake may be the next in the line of convenient
scapegoats that are focused on by the media in lieu of the actual
cause.
I feel there are two major issues involved in the Colorado shootings.
Regardless of what 'influences' may have been involved (so these
kids listened to KMFDM... so they play Doom... so do millions of
others) I think it _should_ be plainly obvious to the media and
America where the biggest problem, or influence in this case, lies...
what we had here were two seriously unbalanced kids without any
sort of moral compass, and they did what they did because they had
either never been taught better or were simply maladjusted. Regardless,
attempts to shift blame for this onto any outside industry (whether
it be videogames, movies, or music) is pointless.
The blame for this tradegy, and the focus of further work to prevent
this from happening, again needs to go one place--into the home,
onto the parents of these children. These are the issues that the
media should be focusing on, and they are not. No matter how busy
a parent may be with work or other issues, they have a responsibility
to make sure that their children know the difference between fantasy
and reality, the difference between right and wrong. The two boys
who instigated the Columbine HS shootings could not make these distinctions,
and this is not because of Doom or Natural Born Killers or Rammstein.
It is because, at the core, they did not have the knowledge or the
innate sense of right and wrong that 99% of human beings possessed,
and as a result they were able to do what they did. Though it is
a hard thing to say because we know how much pain everyone involved
in these shootings has endured, it is a sad but true fact that the
majority of the blame has to fall onto the parents of these children,
and can not be conveniently partitioned off to outside influences
which have only a passing grip on their view of life. Parents are,
without a doubt, _the_ single biggest influence in a child's life.
I am not saying that we need to hound the parents of these shooters
or throw them in jail (they have suffered as much as anyone in this
tradegy). What I am saying is that the issue of parental involvement
in the creation of their children's morality, their view of right
and wrong, is what needs to be focused on by the media, not violent
videogames.
The second issue involved
in this tradegy is, of course, where did these two kids get access
to a pair of automatic weapons? The police force, the men and women
who are out on the streets every day enforcing the law, putting
their lives on the line, carry handguns. They carry revolvers and
9mms. Why, then, if the police are carrying this amount of firepower,
would _anyone_, outside of SWAT teams and the Army, need to own
any sort of automatic weapon? The simple fact is that if these kids
had not had access to these sorts of weapons they could not have
done what they did. This, again, is the issue that the media needs
to be focusing on, keeping disturbed youths from getting weapons
like this in the first place.
I feel that this message needs to get out to the public, to the
media and those who accept the spoon-fed malarkly about Doom and
other outside influences being serious factors in this tradegy.
Hockenberry, on one of his recent rants, described the Columbine
HS shootings as, and I quote "a direct recreation of the video
game Doom". As should be plainly obvious to anyone who has
played the game even once, this is about as far from the truth as
you can get, and it seems obvious to me that the media is simply
picking up on an old scapegoat from years back (if you remember
Doom was one of the 'cash cows' from the violent videogames controversy
that started with Mortal Kombat some years back) and, given the
opportunity, the media has dusted it off and picked it up again
to use as a scapegoat in this tradegy, not focusing on the issues
where the blame and improvement needs to be done. The fact that
there are few gamers out there who even _play_ Doom anymore (it
is old news as far as shooters go) shows just how out of touch the
media is and how quickly they are to blame things that they known
nothing about.
We cannot let them do this. We cannot let them, in whatever confused
cloud of reality they may live, deflect the focus of improvements
that need to be made to prevent something like this from happening
again off to peripheal things like videogames and music. As I've
said, the focus of prevention in this issue needs to go to stopping
it at its source, at the home, and gun control, preventing violent
and disturbed people from getting their hands on automatic weapons
in the first place.
I hope that you will all join together and make this fund, Gamers
Against Violence, a reality. I hope that you will join together
and help me to get the message out to the public that this behavior
is not acceptable and that we will never condone anything like this,
but that the focus of efforts to prevent this from happening again
is going in the wrong direction. If all the parents who are contemplating
jumping onto the the bandwagon of a lawsuit to ban violent video
games and movies were to instead redirect this energy, take 10 minutes
to _sit down_ with their children and talk with them, make sure
they know the difference between fantasy and reality, between right
and wrong, make sure that they know that _under no cirumstances_
is it acceptable to walk into a public place with a weapon and begin
shooting, they can do far more to prevent a tradegy like this from
happening again than they can do by banning every single violent
video game and movie ever created. Help me get this message to them.
It needs to be said.
I thank you all for reading
this extensive mail, and I await any comments or suggestions for
this fund, 'Gamers Against Violence' and the message behind it.
This is our chance to stand up for ourselves and our community and
contribute a _decisive good_ to the people who have been affected
by the horrible tradegy of the Columbine HS shootings. Let's not
let it go to waste.
Eric 'StarFury' Bakutis
Clan Phantasm