Aussie youth worker blames videogames for knife fights

In Australia, knife fights are all the rage among the kids. A youth worker has decided not to blame the rise in knife crime on anything tangible, like poor upbringing and a lack of discipline, but has decided to blame something unrelated, because that’s a lot more trendy. Henceforth, videogames now cause knife fights.

“Normally they’d have a fight and people might ring around them, and it would be one-on-one, and when one [child fell] to the ground it would be over,” says Les Twentyman, waxing nostalgic about youth combat. “But today that is not the case because of the amount of violent entertainment that these young people are absorbing. They lose sight of reality and become desensitized.”

Amusingly enough, Australia is the country that bans most of the violent games that are released. So really, if we’re going to play the “make up tenuous links to pass the buck” game, why don’t we instead claim that it’s because games get banned that there are knife fights? You can’t doubt that there is a correlation. Because Left 4 Dead 2 got banned, people fight with knives. Logic for the win!

Games Turning AU Kids Into Knife Wielders [GamePolitics]