 On Saturday, in a twist on gun buyback programs, a Connecticut town will host a “Violent Video Games Return Program,” encouraging residents to turn in their used first-person-shooter games—to be later smashed and incinerated—in exchange for a $25 gift card from the local chamber of commerce. I sympathize with the initiative: The town in question, Southington, is a mere half-hour drive from Newtown, and the program’s founder is Max Goldstein, a 12-year-old who, while attending the funeral of a boy murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, resolved that the violent games he loved were just too real to take after Adam Lanza’s shooting spree.
– The Newtown shooting has America understandably on edge. "But are we really hoping to purge our collective soul by demolishing copies of Halo 4?" asks Liel Leibovitz at the New Republic. The town of Southington, Conn., originally planned to do just that on Saturday, though the event has since been canceled. Past cultural bête noires—from comic books to gangsta rap to television—have seen similar burnings, but video games are a unique case. They're not consumed, they're played. "The digital violence we witness on-screen comes from our own hands," Leibovitz writes. That may sound scary, but as all gamers know, the experience "has more to do with our thumbs than it does with our minds," resembling contact sports more than watching TV. What's more, it's "not fundamentally different than what previous generations have done, when sticks served as swords or hands as pistols." It's play. Then, as ever, it helps people deal with intense experience in a safe, sublimated way. "By confiscating and burning their games, parents risk extinguishing a critical outlet—and creating the very problem they were trying to avoid," he writes. Click for Leibovitz's full column.