Dear Editors,

I disagree with Ava Stepan’s opinion piece “Victory Royal.” My first issue with the article is the sentence, “The same boys who participated in the walkout are now sitting in their basement for hours on end shooting people.” We’re not shooting people. We’re shooting animated characters that are generated by a code created by Epic-Games. As someone who has played over 1200 games of Fortnite, I do not feel that playing the game has desensitized me to violence in any way. It’s an enjoyable hobby that has led me to making new friends after playing with people I don’t know as well. Furthermore, I believe Ava Stepan is not qualified to write this article. At the start of her tenth paragraph, Stepan says, “With the click of a green button, I make my first kill.” On no console or platform is there a way to make a green button kill someone. And there is no correlation between playing Fortnite and shooting people. In the article, it says there have been 3.4 million people playing Fortnite, and by now it has gone up. There are so many people playing, it is unrealistic to assume that Fortnite has had an impact on violence. Video games have been a part of our mainstream culture for two decades. Why now do we start blaming them for acts of violence that have no relationship to them? No study has proven a relationship between the two. We have to stop focusing on who is to blame, and focus instead on how we can fix it. The problem here is not Fortnite.  We have to look at gun legislation, not a video game.

Andy Wessman