Did a Toronto taxi driver die because two teens were imitating the kind of driving they’d practiced on their video consoles?Two 18-year-olds were racing a pair of Mercedes Benzes through the city on Tuesday night, reaching speeds of 140 kilometres an hour, when they piled into a taxi turning left, killing the driver. A copy of the racing game Need for Speed was found on the front seat of one of the suspect’s cars, following the crash.
"Here we have, in real life, two guys driving high-end cars at a high rate of speed in an urban area," said Toronto police Det. Paul Lobsinger. "I don't think it's a giant leap for people to say, 'Wow, how does this go together?'"
How does it go together? It doesn’t. What happened to the cabbie is a tragedy and should never have happened, but making even a casual link between video games and his death is ridiculous.
How could a couple of teenagers ever had the idea to race cars? Maybe they’d just finished watching James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Perhaps they had been listening to Jan and Dean’s Dead Man’s Curve. Or maybe they were just 18-year-olds with high performance cars.
I remember when playing Dungeons and Dragons was supposed to drive kids to Devil worship and murder. Ditto with heavy metal music. Pop culture doesn’t kill, stupid teenagers do.
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