There is no good way to pause and share support with those who lost life and loved ones during the Friday shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. Everything, whether it’s a moment of silence or a promise of solidarity in the face of violence, is not enough. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though. The health and fitness-centric Gamer Fit Nation and its CEO Antwand Pearman are trying to do something for the victims of the massacre with the Day of Cease Fire for Online Shooters event scheduled for Friday. It’s an unusual moment of silence, and a laudable one.
“We ask for gamers to show their support for the families of those who lost their lives in the tragedy that took place in Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday, December 14, 2012,” reads a statement from Pearman on Facebook, “We are simply making a statement that we as gamers are not going to sit back and ignore the lives that were lost. Instead we will embrace the families with our love and support.”
“So if you are an owner of a website I ask that you post to your readers that you will join us in our Day of Cease Fire for Online Shooters. I ask you all to please share and I thank you for reading. This starts Thursday night, Friday morning at 12am and will end Friday night, Saturday morning at 12am.”
Pearman’s request is a tall order just days before Christmas, a period when online gaming populations spike thanks to students and others going on vacation. It’s also the time of year when the newest online shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and Halo 4 see peak saturation. The statement that people stand together and refuse to engage in even an entertaining facsimile of violence in the face of real brutality should be all the more powerful as a result.
Video games have shared an ignoble link with school shootings in the past. The Columbine massacre in 1999 was marked by reports of the shooters’ playing early first-person shooters like Doom. The mainstream press has abstained from blaming games or game communities on the mindless actions of shooter Adam Lanza, though tabloids like Britain’s The Sun have made dubious claims that he was obsessed with Call of Duty.
Please do take Friday off from shooters to show your support, even if that’s all you can do.
Ummmm… No. Why, It makes no sense. There is no proven correlation between Games and violence.
Plus I nothing else to do but play some BO2 and BF3
America is becoming a country where no one has personal responsibility anymore. Blame everyone else, it’s never the individuals fault. Have a violence problem? Blame video games, movies, or guns. But don’t blame the individual who committed the crime. Noooo. They were told by the video game, movie, and gun to go kill as many people as possible. Then you have the media. Over sensationalism of the topic creates panic. They should be arrested for inciting mass hysteria. Gun violence is a statistical blip on the radar. Barely occurs when you compare the ratio of owners with guns to incidents per year. We have close to 300,000,000 guns in this country. How many of us go on a shooting spree? Not many, but those are some pretty good statistics. How many times do we hear the stories about people saving someone’s live from an attacker, while using their legally owned firearm? Not many. But those stories are out there, and they are thousands of them. I would rather be sitting in a room with 20 people who are all armed, than sitting in a room with 20 people and only 1 armed.
* life
*they’re
damn… don’t blame me. lol I’m getting over the flu! I wish you guys had an edit feature in your comments so I can fix my typeo’s…
*there are
damn… I’m just giving up now.
No, thanks. There is already an irrational link between bad people doing bad things and virtual combat entertainment. Add that to the irrational link between the same bad people and good people who are gun aficionados.
Why don’t you ask for us to not play knife combat games too, since it was a knife-wielding nut-job who attacked the kids in china?
Why don’t they ask us to stop playing racing sims as well, being that the ratio of car deaths vs gun deaths in american is not even comparable…
Nope. I’m gonna LOOOVE slaughtering all those soldiers who STAND IN MY PATH TO VIDEO GAME GLORY! ARRRRRRRRRGH!