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CNN’s Banfield Dubs the Charleston Church Shootings ‘Mortal Kombat Murders’

June 24, 2015 by Ian Miles Cheong

CNN paints Mortal Kombat as a stressor in the Charleston shootings last week.

The media machine responsible for demonizing video gamers during the '90s, especially after the Columbine school shootings, is at it once again with an anti-video game narrative. 

While speaking to former Democratic Congressman Ben Jones (GA), CNN's Ashleigh Banfield countered Jones' arguments defending the Confederate flag. Jones argued that the flag has been used in a "positive context" and that it doesn't represent white supremacy, which he declared a "sickness."  

Banfield countered his argument, stating that white supremacy lead to the "Mortal Kombat murders" of last week's church shooting in Charleston, in which eight parishioners were gunned down in one of the United States' oldest black churches by a gunman who expressed white supremacist leanings. 

It's hard to say what's going through Banfield's mind when she makes her rebuttal to her guest, but her description of the shootings as "Mortal Kombat murders" implies that the shooter, Dylann Roof, was a gamer and that video games were somehow responsible for the shootings. 

One has to wonder how much further big media like CNN will go in roping in video games as a culprit for the Charleston church shootings just so they can avoid broaching the issue with the seriousness it requires. 

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