Yesterday in southwest Germany, disturbed 17-year-old named Tim Kretschmer walked into the Albertville secondary school and opened fire on his classmates and teachers, indiscriminately gunning down 16 people in a brutal rampage before being killing himself during a firefight with police.

And as devastated families and a grieving German people come to grips with the reality of this tragedy, activist groups and government lobbyists have seized on this moment barely more than 24 hours after the fact and are already taking turns at the blame game.

After police interviews and local investigative reporting discovered that Kretschmer was a talented table-tennis player who had considered pursuing his interest on a professional level, the nation has renewed its discussion over whether or not stricter regulations are needed for the hobby. Anti-table-tennis lobbyists argue that the correlation between the boy’s obsessive interest in the sport and his abominable actions constitute a definite causal relationship, and that by banning table-tennis or at least making it more difficult for the hobby to be enjoyed by children we will decrease the likelihood of such an event occurring in the future. Furthermore, proponents of stiffer legislation and criminologists cite that the reflexes, strategies, and physical endurance acquired through table-tennis playing enabled Kretschmer him to carry out his plan more effectively.

Sounds completely insane, right?

Yes, the above article is a farce; however, replace “table-tennis” with “violent video games” and now you’ve got some real life absurdity.

GamePolitics.com recently posted some translated clippings from a German news source, Heise, in which criminologists and government officials are already hard at work blaming violent video games for the horrible scene that occurred yesterday:

The President of the German Foundation for Crime, Hans-Dieter Schwind, calls… for a total ban on violent computer games, and a further tightening of the arms law. The criminologist said that the 17-year-old on the run even further to have done is a behavior the young people in games like Counter-Strike or Crysis could learn…

The Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann has… expressed demand for a ban on so-called killer games renewed… he said, it generally must be clearly said that the games were available, the obvious just in young people cutting inhibitions…

The grounds for blaming video games comes from the discovery that the boy had installed and been playing Counter-Strike on his computer in recent months. The following pieces of information were also ascertained in the on-going investigation:

• Unsecured weapons were kept in the home, including the one used in yesterday’s rampage
• Kretschmer was diagnosed with clinical depression for which he was not receiving treatment
• The shooter’s father owned 15 guns and built a shooting range in the basement of their home

That’s right. Of those pieces of information, video games are being blamed. WTF?

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