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I've never been a parent, but I have it on good authority that it is a pain in the ass, and I respect the hell out of anyone that can do it even reasonably well. "Reasonably well" correlating to, say, keeping your child from murdering another in cold blood, or guiding them towards a life not ending in prison, or making them self-sufficient enough to be out of the house by the age of 25. These aren't stringent guidelines, but I believe most of you would agree they are perfectly acceptable measures of good parenting. So when I read article after article after article about how VIDEO GAMES, (which followed rock music, which followed television, which followed talkin' pictures, which followed traveling circuses, which followed Dante's Divine Comedy), are the downfall of our nation's children, I get slightly perturbed. Maybe not enough to just kill a man, but that depends on how much Ratchet & Clank I've played that day.

How are we not discussing the responsibility parents have for raising their children?? How did we gloss over the fact that these people brought a human life into the world, and perhaps they should be questioned more harshly than the makers of Grand Theft Auto 3 when their spawn does something awful and tragic? Let's even look past the issue of parents letting their kids play games they have no business having in the first place; that's on them too but hey, you can't watch your child every minute of the day. But if you do your job as a parent, if you take whatever time you have to teach them real from fantasy, right from wrong, smart from stupid, you won't have to worry about little Jonny getting his hands on Gears of War and deciding to try out the cool Chainsaw attachment he found in the garage on the neighbor's dog.

Some have argued that since video games are such immersive and increasingly realistic experience, our impressionable youths are being more and more easily poisoned. What is a parent to do??? Shut the F up. I played the CRAP out of video games for, literally, as long as I can remember, up to and including today. But because my parents, (who had me as TEENAGERS, by the way), had just enough common sense to teach me right from wrong and to smack me around when I forgot such lessons, I always knew who to listen to more. Whether out of fear of a beating (Daddy), or fear of a sadly disappointed stare (Momma), I knew that it probably wouldn't be best to play out my Contra 3 fantasies and start setting ablaze any animal I saw walking towards me.

And listen, this is not a diatribe to put all the blame on all parents every time their progeny commits an act of crime. Sometimes there is just something wrong with a kid's mind that you can't control, and whether they saw it on a video game, a tv show, a car commercial, or read any number of violent stories in the Bible itself, he was gonna kill the neighbor's dog execution-style...or something even worst. You did your best, and there's nothing you can do. What this diatribe IS about, however, is not placing the blame where it doesn't belong, namely harmless games and media. Sure there is a reaction when video games are played! Just as there is when you see a kickass action movie and want to jump over trash cans pretending to shoot; or read a great scene in Harry Potter and want to grab a broom and pretend to fly; or go to the circus and want to go home and climb a tree and try to jump from an outer limb to the roof of your apartment building. But do you blame the trapeze artist for making flipping in the air look cool when your dumbass son lands in a crumpled heap on the lawn? Maybe a little, but not NEARLY as much as you blame yourself for not being there, and yourself for not telling him a couple more times how NOT to be a dumbass...

...and your spouse's side of the family for giving him all the dumbass genes. No treehopping morons on your half of the family tree, you know that for sure.