Reflecting on the Shooting at the Madden Tournament in Jacksonville, Florida

By now you have probably heard of the poor people who were killed in Jacksonville, Florida during a shooting at a Madden Tournament

My condolences and positive vibes go out to the victims and their families. This is very sad and quite frankly, my heart is heavy writing this.

Unfortunately, it is also a bit of a disgrace to the gaming community as a whole.

Gamers are usually the most chill, laid back, lazy people and this is NOT representative of their behavior. Not at all.

Seeing a gamer erupt in violence and harm others is NOT something common or accepted within the community. While we may call each other names and blow up zombies, demons or soldiers in virtual worlds, it is frowned upon in the gaming community to actually physically hurt other people.




Sure, you can login online in your Playstation network or XBox Live, and will be almost guaranteed to hear sexual threats towards your mother and insults towards your competence and intelligence. However,   those scornful words are typically just a vent of frustration toward the events within the game itself and not a personal attack. Don’t take them personally. The person in the game chat does not literally want to f*ck your mother or rape your dog or place your face on a frying pan.

They’re just letting their emotion out in a healthy, contained environment that doesn’t actually harm others.

I’ve talked about the importance of being in control of your emotions, as a procrastinator, comparing it to holding you bladder. It’s immature to just piss yourself when you need to urinate; you’ve got to hold it in until you can use the bathroom.

But that’s the thing: you have to use the bathroom eventually. There was a lady that literally died from holding in her pee, in order to win a Wii once, or she held in her wee wee to win the Wii. Okay, jokes aside, holding your bladder is unhealthy and can kill you and so can holding in your emotions. You just have to do it in the appropriate environment and at the appropriate time.

Likewise, you have to be in control of the bladder of your emotions and not just freak out or cry or piss or moan about things in the moment they happen. But eventually, you do have to let it out.
The goal is to calmly and rationally handle problems as they arise, without getting caught up in the heat of the moment and firing off on a short fuse. Eventually, though, you have to kind of drain it out (the emotion) in a controlled environment, as not to hurt anyone or yourself.

How you let it out is up to you. Punch a pillow, shout underwater, listen to music, play some videogames, whatever gets you back to emotional homeostasis. Let it build up too much though and you’ll let it spill over and quite possibly, kill yourself (or others)





Gamers, we blow off steam by shooting undead or aliens, not innocent people in the real world, playing a Madden football game. The fact that a shooter would kill two people, and himself, and harm several others,  yet alone anyone, is dreadful and disgusting. The numbers don’t matter. Shooting people IRL (in real life) because you lost a game is NOT okay. It’s just not

He was  acting like a sensitive cry baby. Despite being 24-years old, shooter was David Katz was nothing but a little boy who couldn’t handle not getting his way, and threw a temper tantrum, a temper tantrum that lamentably ended with the lives of others.

This is the bane of enabling a hysterical, active mindset where instant gratification is always ready and available and it’s “okay to express your emotions”. People need to be procrastinators. They need to happy with the eventual gratification and comfortable with delaying/controlling their emotions.

It’s not okay to just express your emotions and those messages need to stop. It’s better to be calm and rational, lazy and laid back when it comes to reacting your emotions. I’m not saying being heartless and unemotional. No. I’m saying don’t let your emotions control you. You may not be able to control your emotions directly, but you can control how you react to them, and the lazier you are, the more laid back you are,  the less you care, and the easier it is to set your mind at ease.






Surprisingly, even Fox News couldn't warrant a blame on the "violent videya games"

That’s probably because there's nothing inherently violent about Madden. Heck, it's a football game.

I mean what are they gonna do? Call for a banning of football and physical contact sports? No.

I'm not gonna try and raise a gun debate here, but there's obviously a larger issue at hand here than "video games make people violent."  I mean first, the guy did legally attain a firearm, despite having some serious mental issues with a history of both medication and professional psychiatric treatment. Second, it seems a lot of these shooters lack a strong father figure, and his parents were divorced. Third, he was a loner, not that being a loner or introverted for that matter automatically means you’re a shooter, but  that ingredient combined with the other two are common among all the shooter cases: mental illness, lack of father figure, loner -- the recipe for disaster.

But I won’t go too deep down that route for the purposes of this article. The fourth, and I think more macro level issue, which we’re going to focus on here, is the typical “work hard” mantra we are bombarded with, day in and day out; the “go for the goal” propaganda that hits us constantly and is rarely, if ever, balanced out by messages to take it easy and be lazy (which is what I’m offering here).

Look, I’m not going to lie, I have definitely had my share of rage quits, especially in Dark Souls or the old PS2 gem called Maximo (which was basically a 3D remake of the notoriously hard classic arcade hit, Ghosts n’ Goblins) but at the end of the day, honey badger don't care.

I think the greater issue is the push in society to be the best and the drive for competition. We're taught to go "no holds barred' and to "work hard until you get what you want". We’re unceasingly barraged and blasted with these type of “give more effort” messages that it really starts to take a toll on our psyche.

That makes people a bit relentless and uncompromising when it comes to achieving their goals. The consequences of enabling a go-getter mindset is exampled here in the story we’re talking about.

We feel that if we don’t accomplish, if we don’t beat it, if we don’t win, we’re a failure. Our instinct tells us failure means death; it’s hardwired in our brains. Our ancestors, if they made a mistake, if they had a failure, it would often end up not surviving. Likewise, if they didn’t receive social approval, their odds of surviving alone, outside the group were slim; plus without a group, they could never pro create. So we’ve evolved to associate failure and social disapproval with lack of survival ability.

Pushing people beyond their limits was a survival of the fittest tactic. People who fail at something big feel like they are literally fighting for their life to survive. They can’t fail or they will die.

We’ve continued to push this subconscious belief in society, even though technology has given us comfort and safety; it’s allowed us to be lazy and enjoy leisure.  Failure in the modern world (usually) does not end in a life or death, struggle for survival scenario.

There are exceptions of course: car accidents, plane crashes, etc.

But the point is: while the consequences aren’t as realistic as primal times, the feelings, the emotions, the pain, are the same.  That pain of failure and social disapproval is just as intense as our ancestors experience.

It doesn’t help that we, as a society, further that pain by pushing the “Go! Go! Go!” drive.

Imagine if this guy embraced the Lazy Mindset and took victories as they came and didn't get frantic or emotionally unhinged or charged up at failure  He could have just moved on, without worry. Hakuna Matata!

I write with deep sorrow that this is not the case, and again, offer my grief to the victims and their families, for as much as that is worth.



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By the way, props to CNN for focusing their story on the victims themselves, by the way, and not glorifying the shooter in this article. They just mention him as a little foot note at the end.

THAT is how you write about these issues. Stop giving shooters the glory.

Typically when news outlets talk about shootings, they say the name of the perpetrator, they show his picture, they talk about the body count. They then talk about the shooter and his past, his family, his life.

(To be fair though, CNN did have a later article completely focusing on just the shooter alone, so I'm not completely glorifying or praising them)

This is what they want guys. They want that notoriety; they want to be infamous for their “work”

Really, the only one that seems human in these stories, I mean the way that they are typically told, is the shooter himself. Everyone else is just a number that happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If you want the shootings to stop, you have to make the victims the ones with the story, the victims the ones that are human.

I believe CNN should go even further and refer to this guy as “Shooter 946“ or something and don’t show his picture.

They actually later wrote an entire article focusing completely on the shooter and his life. Look, I know people may be curious and it’ll sell more “papers”, but don’t do it. Don’t give him the attention he was craving.

You don’t pay attention to a screaming toddler who is on a temper-tantrum, because what happens if you do? They learn that’s how they get what they want; that’s how they get attention; that’s how they win.

So you don’t pay attention to a shooter trying to make a name for himself, just like you don’t pay attention to the out bursting toddler. ’

You pay attention to the people he hurt -- the victims, the families.

The shooters, like the toddlers they are, will learn to shut up.


Keep calm and procrastinate on.

N8


Update 8/27/2018: Fox News just blamed the Florida shooting on "violent" video games. This is just about the typical response we'd expect from them.

I'm surprised they waited a day though. Normally they're right on pulling that "videya game" blame trigger before you can say "first person shooter."

Let's ban the "violent" football games.

How can someone tell the difference between tackling someone on the field and plummeting someone to the ground on the street?