A twisted gamer shot his pal and a selfie of the victim, resulting in his arrest this week for homicide and firearm violations.
The Pennsylvania teenager blew his friend’s face off while the two were posing with a loaded gun, but then intimated the killing wasn’t exactly an accident.
“I just pulled the trigger and I didn't care,” 16-year-old Maxwell Morton remorselessly explained when asked why he murdered his gaming partner Ryan Mangan “for no apparent reason.”
Prosecutors say his incriminating statement, plus the fact he'd texted another friend to brag, “I just got my first body,” shows extreme malice and intent.
That third youngster is not a suspect because he had the decency to notify the police when he realized that not only had the deranged gamer shot his pal and a selfie of the grisly crime, he’d continued playing videogames online as if it was no big deal.
Real time acts of game-inspired violence, like this latest one, are on the rise now, especially among young males who compulsively play realistic single-shooter programs.
Researchers worldwide have conducted dozens of studies over the years exposing a direct correlation between excessive gaming and violence, but, of late, the multibillion-dollar videogame industry and its powerful lobby has found a few of their own *experts* to insist on the opposite.
Their current campaign is much akin to how the tobacco corporations used to propagandize that “9 out of 10 doctors smoke” their cigarette brands -- before being heavily penalized for hiding the truth about the dangerous product they’d been peddling for decades.
Interestingly enough, a recent poll of tech innovators and executives, who themselves have impressionable young children, showed the majority forbid their own kids to indulge in the very same games, gadgets, and group sites they shamelessly plug to the rest of the planet.
Said tech mogul Steve Jobs in 2010, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Parental restriction that speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
