In my counrty there were no laws prohibiting the sale of cigarettes and alcohol to minors until i turned 18... so i could go to a bar and drink a beer and smoke a cigarette when i was 14 with no problems . (14 is the age i first went to a bar - i went to buy beer for my dad when i was younger. Got drunk once when i gulped one beer bottle to see how it feels
guess i was 12 or somehing)
Looking back on all of this i realise that it shouldn't surprise me. Everyone in every village in my country grows fruit for fermentation. I remember that i used to spend a few days every year around the still with my grandfather making moonshine. In fact now i think i can make booze out of anything organic that ferments.
I've played the most violent computer games (and so did all the kids from my generation): there were no laws prohibiting the sale of games or movies. My country had just emerged from communist dictatorship, so for a few years all cesorship (which was seen as a dictator's tool) was dropped. So i got it all as a kid: violent games, violent movies, erotic movies on tv (no porn though
) As a kid i played Doom, cutting people with chainsaws, Duke Nukem, Doom2, Hexen, Warcraft... all the goldies of the era. Then it all became regulated again, TV that is. But there is absolutely no censorship or rating for games. At least not yet. Seeing as my fellow citizens have no access to firearms, my guess is that guns are the issue, not the videogames.
I guess that being exposed to that level of violence makes one more indifferent to the suffering and violence in the world. I don't know though.
The news on tv are far more violent than any game: people exploding in Irak, murders, rapes, hostage takings, school shootings. For example, i clearly remember, as a kid, i once saw on tv some news about a guy who killed his neighbour, cut his arms and head. Then the killer nailed the severed hands of the victim to the front gate to his garden, placed the victim's head in a bucket next to his hands and then burned the remaining body. All this was shown on the news, in the middle of the day, with absolutely no cesorship (no large pixels over the severed hands, no blurring when filming closeups of the corpse). I was 13 at the time and i was thinking: man, these guys are showing these things on tv, well, shouldn't this affect me and turn me into a psycho or something? Guess it didn't. Or did it!? dun dun dun duuuun.
I believe that the fault lies in bad parenting, easy access to guns and a mental disorder.