Take-Two CEO Says It's "Disrespectful" To Blame Video Games for Violence

It’s been a while since politicians have bothered harping on how “video games are causing violence”, largely because the attacks were 100% insincere and they accomplished the goal of distracting people until we forgot about our outrage, again. But just because they’ve stopped attacking us doesn’t mean we’ve stopped being defensive – after all, this is a rare chance for the jerks who run the video game industry to come off as heroes defending our first amendment rights – you know, the ones that weren’t really under attack.

One such jerk is Take-Two interactive chairman and CEO Strass Zelnick, who was on CNBC’s financial talk show Mad Money. He talked about a lot of stuff in his segment, including the future of the games industry and photo-realistic graphics, but he also used that chance to address people blaming video games for violent behavior.
 

"This is a terrible tragedy, a senseless tragedy. It's fun to talk about entertainment, but lives were lost. The truth is, it's disrespectful to the victims and the families to point the finger at entertainment. Entertainment is part of people's daily joy, and it's consumed worldwide, and it's the same worldwide. Gun violence is uniquely American. And that has to change, and it will only change if we address the real issues."

He went on to say that if there was every any real substantial evidence that video games caused violence, he would stop selling them. A noble statement from a man who wants us to believe he wouldn’t take advantage of people’s crippling mental issues for a buck when he only recently announced an actual friggen’ casino in GTA Online.

But anyway, the segment itself was… fine, I guess. You can watch it here if the mood strikes you, but it’s not going to be the deep dive you might be hoping for.

Not a whole lot “deep” on TV these days, really.