Stealing cars. Killing cops. Assaulting prostitutes and swiping their cash. That’s the world of Grand Theft Auto,an enormously popular series of M-rated video games. You may have heard of them. Maybe even played them. But did you happen to catch Conan O’Brien’s reference to GTA on The Tonight Show recently? He turned one of the day’s headlines into the following joke:
In Boston, a woman called the police because her 14-year-old son wouldn’t stop playing Grand Theft Auto at 2:30 in the morning. Out of habit, the boy hit both cops with a baseball bat and then drove off in their car.
The audience laughed. I can only assume they were unaware of another headline from a few years back that made O’Brien’s barb, at least to me, feel as insensitive as a one-liner about 9-11.
On June 7, 2003, an 18-year-old Grand Theft Auto fan named Devin Moore got picked up by police on suspicion of stealing a car. He had no criminal history and cooperated with authorities. But once inside the Fayette, Ala., police station, he snapped. He grabbed an officer’s .40 caliber Glock automatic and—with great precision—killed three men, all with shots to the head. Then Moore stole a squad car. Some experts are convinced he was acting out in a stressful moment what he’d rehearsed while playing Grand Theft Auto for hours on end. Or as 60 Minutes put it, “day and night for months.”
Some people might argue, Lots of people play GTA and don’t kill anybody. Why should we assume that the game had any influence? Maybe it’s because when authorities caught up with Moore, he said, “Life is a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.” Unfortunately, in this case, the casualties were officers Arnold Strickland, James Crump, and dispatcher Ace Mealer.
Conan O’Brien and his audience must have missed that headline. They probably had no idea how closely his quip reflected a real-life tragedy. At least I hope they didn’t.
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