A 13 year-old girl in Mississippi was shot and killed yesterday by her nine year-old brother, following a dispute over a video game. WTVA reports that, when Dijonae White was unwilling to give up the controller to her younger brother, he proceeded to fetch a handgun and shoot her in the back of the head. A bullet passed through her brain, but she survived the immediate attack. She was later rushed to the hospital where she died.
The report states that the local sheriff does not know what charges or consequences the boy will face for murdering his sister, stating that he’s never had a case where one child shoots and kills another child in this way. At the time it’s unclear whether or not he is in custody.
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It’s a terrible, tragic story, and one that we’re very sad to report. The family of these children has to be going through intense pain, and this trauma is going to change their lives forever. The accident has renewed heated debates over gun control, and even video game violence, and how it should be addressed.
To be completely transparent, I wrestled for some time over whether or not I should report this story at all. We’re a gaming website, and we report gaming news. By allowing this death to be framed in such a context that it can exist as a headline on a site like this, I have to ask myself if I’m conceding that video games were part of the issue. I asked myself that same question when I first saw this story reported by Kotaku. Does it belong on Kotaku, simply because the argument had its genesis over who got to take their turn playing a game?
Please understand that I am not trying to make the gaming community the victim in this story. A young girl’s life has been lost, a young man’s life has been changed forever, and a family of real human beings is going to be in a state of terrible mourning for a long time because of this. These people are the victims. I’m not bringing this up to try to frame myself or any other gamer as a kind of social martyr in this situation. Instead, I’m simply pointing out that the conversation has been framed in such a way that video games are being considered a piece of this puzzle, and I think we need to be ready to have that conversation.
It’s not going to go away. President Trump has made it clear that he’s willing to go on record saying that video games are too violent, and that they affect and sway the minds of the young people who play them. He made those statements immediately following a tragic mass shooting of young people, cementing the bond between the issue of gun violence and video game violence in public discourse.
I don’t have the answers, and I wouldn’t dare pretend to know where we “should” come down on the issue. No doubt several of you know exactly where you stand. Feel free to express yourselves in the comments below; we only ask that you speak respectfully.
