Your Son Is A Murderer

I think with this war going on and all, the media sometimes gets nostalgic for the good ol' days when they would scare you with any given "epidemic" that was "sweeping the nation" at least once a week. There were killer bees, El Nino, West Nile Virus, Asbestos, Blah blah blah.

Anyway. If you're a middle-class suburban parent, look out. Your children are most likely murderers:

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (CNN) -- All Nathan Moore says he wanted to do was smoke pot and get drunk with his friends. [ed - a common lament]

Killing Rex Baum was never part of the plan that day in 2004.

"It all started off as a game," Moore said.

The 15-year-old and his friends were taunting the homeless man -- throwing sticks and leaves -- after having a couple of beers with him.

No big deal, Moore says, but he's sorry for what came next.

It was a mistake, he said, a sudden primal surge that made him and his friends Luis Oyola, 16, and 17-year-old Andrew Ihrcke begin punching and kicking Baum.

"Luis says 'I'm gonna go hit him,' We're all laughing, thought he was joking around,'" but he wasn't, Moore concedes. "We just all started hitting him."

They hurled anything they could find -- rocks, bricks, even Baum's barbecue grill -- and pounded the 49-year-old with a pipe and with the baseball bat he kept at his campsite for protection.

Ihrcke smeared his own feces on Baum's face before cutting him with a knife "to see if he was alive," Moore said.

After destroying Baum's camp, the boys left the homeless man -- head wedged in his own grill -- under a piece of plastic where they hoped the "animals would eat" him.

Then, Moore says, they took off to grab a bite at McDonald's.

Baum's murder was indicative of a disturbing trend.

A National Coalition for the Homeless report says last year, there were 122 attacks and 20 murders against the homeless, the most attacks in nearly a decade. (Coalition report on 2006 homeless attacks)

Police found Baum's body two days after the teens attacked him.

They bragged about it around town. Police picked them up and they described what happened.

Ihrcke told police that killing "the bum" reminded him of playing a violent video game, a police report shows.

All three teens pleaded no contest to first degree reckless homicide charges and went to prison.

Moore recently turned 18 at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin, where he is serving a 15 year sentence.

"When [the beating] stops, you say, 'What did we just do?'" he told CNN. "There's no rational explanation."

Well, we could attribute this to the fact that these were delinquent, evil and irrational human beings who killed a homeless man, but the media was able to plant somewhat subconsciously the real explanation: violent video games.

I never got why libs will support any and all morally depraved activity, especially if it involves children, but they're so quick to blame violent video games for all of society's ills. Maybe they realize that pretty soon people are going to notice the link between their secular progressive society and other forms of moral depravity and catch the link. Maybe video games are a purposeful scapegoat. Maybe not.