Coop Norway

Norwegian Coop has taken down several videogames and toys that Anders Breivik may have used to become a terrorist. Brilliant. He also breathed air. Clearly, air is for TERRORISTS. I for one will NEVER BREATHE AGAIN. And if you do dare to breathe, the only logical conclusion is that you're only ever thirty seconds from minor genocide. I bet he also ate FOOD, the monster! Special TERRORIST food. I'll never eat anything he has ever eaten, and to see them on shop shelves for other terrorists to eat and train with disgusts me. What are you doing about it, Co-Op Norway!?

The worst thing is, this isn't even a Norway-wide ban. It's just a cynical, TERRIBLE attempt to garner publicity from the death of innocent children by a terrifyingly callous Norwegian company. It's a bit like a security firm advertising itself on the back of "We wouldn't let a crazed madman shoot kids on our watch! We've never had that happen at any of our events. Can our competitors say the same?", or a clock company going "Anders Breivik never used our time-keeping devices to work out when to commit atrocities. Use Watchico, exclusively not for terrorists!".

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps Coop have spent the last few years blissfully unaware that the violent videogames it sold contained the images of you shooting another person, and they've only just found out. But this thing is healthily enjoyed by a large proportion of the population, with absolutely no mass-murders, and yet Hitler grew up completely without them. It's obvious to see that insane people will do insane things, and if you keep banning things that 99.99% of people can enjoy perfectly normally, we'll end up shouting about terrorists training with sticks as rifles, and how society should protect itself against these stick-trained monsters by chopping down every tree, with, no doubt, Coop Norway saying "We refuse to sell any arboreal devices in this store, and no doubt or competitors will follow suit so as to stop terrorists, unless they are secretly supportive of it.". Correcting this isn't curing the actual problem at all, merely shifting blame onto a largely blameless third party. Surely if these games were so WILDLY engrossing he couldn't separate them from reality, he'd be halfway across Russia trying to defeat communism. And for God's sakes, he played World of Warcraft, which Coop removed from its shelves. What was he going to do with that information, dress up in a cloak, leap out and try and magic them to death?! "I use a fire spell against you! Why aren't you burning alive? Hey, does anyone know how much HP I have? I can't see my bar.".

Or perhaps it's fair to say that the videogames played no part whatsoever in the crazed acts of a right-wing lunatic, who was intent on doing this regardless of what videogames he played.