Wednesday 17 February 2010

More Scaremongering

Here's a recent new article about a supposed link between D&D and a murder. Suspect in slays fan of ‘Dungeons’. Ignore the poor standard of English in the title and brace yourself to read some utter rubbish. Its hard to believe that such poor reporting and nonsense still makes it into the press these days... what am I saying!

Here's the TPM thread that alerted me to this article, which has some interesting and valid comments. For me the idea that owning a copy of D&D, or being a player is an obvious motive for murder is just ludicrous. The article is suggesting a cause and effect based entirely on pre conceived bias and supposition. Its like saying that 100% of Murders occur after the murderer was born. Its a completely accurate statement but utterly disingenuous.

Right, I'll get off my soapbox now...

3 comments:

  1. Pathetic isn't it. The same kind of thing angers me everytime the Sun or Daily Mail report a schizophrenic murdering someone. As if that's the cause of the murder.

    Wonder when they'll realise that murderers have hobbies and interests the same as everyone else?

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  2. Unless they dressed up in armour and killed the other person with a sword - then looted the ody for copper and silver coins, I fail to see the connection between D&D and the murders committed.

    Also, given the fact that hundreds are murdered every day in the US, finding just one or two examples of 'D&D' murders in all that time makes to connection even more tenuous.

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  3. I've no idea what the numbers are but I think it would be a safe bet that most 'high school murderers' (in the US where this incident took place) are legal gun owners, or have access to a legal weapon. Compare that percentage to the number that have played D&D or own a rulebook...

    I know this is heresy in the US where gun ownership is as American as apple pie, but surely availability of weapons is much more likely to result in incidents like this than what games they played in their spare time.

    People have breakdowns every day, its a fact of life unfortunately. But they can't do much damage with a bag of dice and a rulebook. It takes easy availability of a weapon to turn a breakdown into a killing spree.

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