With all the recent school shootings, we've seen a number of strange events.
Media loves to point the finger at games when this stuff happens, but, now, it may become a bad move to do so. The recent amish shooting shows that shootings are not limited to or caused by teens, and that at most, the only true common link in all shootings so far was Mental instability on the part of the shooter.
With the Columbine shooting, courts rejected the claim that games were to blame. With other cases, they rejected the claim again and again. However, with the recent amish shooting, a sudden truth as emerged that was ignored before.
The shooters need not be teens and need not engage in violent media. The amish shooter was supposedly a milkman who fantizied about molesting young woman and had planned to do so to his victums had the cops not arrived when they had.
Gill, the montreal shooter, while engaged in gaming, was also an adult with a history of mental disorders and a habit of showing off weapons. His 2 games of choice were not commerical, and in one case is only avalible through direct marketing.
So, with this development, I think the industry should launch a full on legal blitz to silence any effort to pin shooting on games. With the sudden and tragic events showing that there is clearly no single factor in what happens in a shooting, they could make they case that the media has unjustly linked violence to games without proof, a form of slander and public defamation.
Admittedly, it's not exactly a simple thing to prove, but thats not the point, the fact that the industry wasn't just rolling over anymore might get the big media to back off when they know there up against 100 miliion viewers who think little of them to begin with.
Thats just my opinion of course.