TheOtherView
Opinions from around the country

Grand Theft Auto makers sued after shoot-out

On June 25, two children played out a scene from an adult video game, firing shotguns at cars on a busy highway. One person was killed in the re-enactment, and another was injured.

The 14- and 16-year-old boys charged in this crime pleaded guilty in criminal court, but soon the case will be back in court for a civil lawsuit.

Who will be the defendant? Not William and Joshua Buckner, the brothers who acquired and fired the shotguns that killed Aaron Hamel and injured Kimberly Bede that day in Tennessee. Not the boys’ parents, who allowed them to play the “mature”-rated game that inspired them to fire the fatal shots and who were absent the day the boys took guns to the highway and started a real-life shoot-out. Not the person responsible for allowing the boys access to the guns. Not even the person who bought or allowed the boys to purchase the video game.

No, the defendant in this $100 million lawsuit will be TAKE2Interactive, the developer that created “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” the game the Buckner boys were emulating. According to the lawyer leading the charge, it is TAKE2Interactive, not the children or anyone directly involved in their life, who is responsible for their crime and must pay for the damages.

This lawsuit is misguided and wrong. It’s not seeking closure or justice, but a convenient scapegoat and a big payout. It’s an attempt by an over-ambitious lawyer and bitter parents to lay blame on and extract money from an entity only fractionally related to what actually happened on Interstate 40 last June.

Although studies show violent media, video games included, increase aggression in people, it is greatly overstepping the bounds of such research to say the game is the sole reason for particular acts of aggression, as this lawsuit contends. Grand Theft Auto has sold 25 million copies since it was released in October 2002, yet this is the only case of violence attributed to it. There are more acts of violence committed in the name of religion each year than that.

There is plenty of blame to go around in this case. The children who committed the crime, their inattentive parents and others who allowed them access to guns should all share the burden of this crime. But TAKE2Interactive should not be part of this group. They only produced an extremely successful video game that happened to be extremely violent, and there’s nothing illegal in that.

This is a staff editorial from the Iowa State Daily at Iowa State University. This editorial was distributed by U-Wire.