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Boy steals truck, media blames GTA for no reason
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It's a classic case of "kid does something wrong and also plays video games, therefore video games must have been responsible". A six-year-old boy stole a pickup truck from a parking lot and ended up, quite unsurprisingly, crashing it into another vehicle.
The boy's mother claims that she fell asleep while her son was playing video games, which is when the boy took the opportunity to sneak out of the house and go carjacking. He walked through the parking lot of a retirement home until he found an unlocked vehicle with the keys inside (lucky!). The media instantly jumped to the conclusion that the boy was reenacting Grand Theft Auto, even though the mother never mentioned the game.
Of course it's easy to jump on the GTA blame train, but just because the kid plays games does not mean that they are what's fueling these bad decisions. Moreover, it's unfair to point the finger at a specific game (or series) like GTA when there is no evidence that he has ever even played it. Also worth mentioning is that the the driver of the vehicle that got smashed into actually said that her son crashed a truck when he was just three years old, and I highly doubt he was playing GTA at the time.
It's safe to assume the boy learned fundamental driving mechanics from somewhere, but I'm not sure the face buttons on a controller translate to an actual gear shift in a car. After all, he reversed out of the parking space, drove for a while before hitting another car, and then actually backed up and smashed into the same car again. It's more likely he has Forza and a steering wheel instead of a GTA game.
No one was hurt in the incident except the boy -- he got spanked and grounded from video games for a while.
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