If there's one game the media really loves to play it's, "Won't Someone Please Think of the Children", and for anyone who remembers Ed Bradley interviewing Colonel David Grossman after Columbine on how video games turn kids into mindless killing machines, can't be too surprised that Ed Bradley was doing the same thing back in the Dungeons and Dragons scare era.

You might be thinking, "Dungeons and Dragons", how could anyone seriously claim that Dungeons and Dragons made people kill? Made people lame sure, but how can a fantasy game with dice and manuals, that wasn't all that fundamentally different on a conceptual level from playing Battleship, evil?

But that's where the scare machine kicks in. Watching the 60 Minutes D&D broadcast with Ed Bradley is a little like watching footage of the Salem Witch Trials. It's clear that these people are all worked up over a problem that doesn't exist, but it's also clear that they're invested in promoting the idea that there is such a problem.

But if there aren't witches, why did my husband cheat on me? But if D&D doesn't kill, why did my son commit suicide?

There's no useful answer to those questions that they will actually accept.

Sure you could point to all the gunmen who had Catcher in the Rye in their pockets or to Charles Manson hearing secret messages from the Beatles. You could tell them that crazy people who become detached from reality find larger meaning in things that have no meaning.

To troubled teenagers suffering from schizophrenia or alienation from their environment, D&D might look like a good escape, an entire self-contained universe where you can win battles instead of always losing them. But if D&D wasn't around, it would be something else. Maybe something that even Ed Bradley and 60 Minutes would be forced to admit is completely harmless when not in the hands of a crazy person.

Once upon a time it was Hardy Books books that were corrupting the youth. Then it was comic books that made kids perverted and yes even homicidal, see the Brooklyn Thrill Killers defense. For a while it was television. Today it's video games and the internet, though that line of attack has faded, as a generation that actually plays video games is in every newsroom, and everyone uses the internet now.

But every now and then, someone still has to shout, "Won't someone please think of the children," and it begins again.

Patricia Pulling seen in the video funneled her grief into an organization called BADD that eventually reached its limit. She has since passed away. Ed Bradley also passed away, after being lauded for his career in journalism and winning numerous awards. Gary Gygax passed away as well. D&D gaming is on the decline. Today's D&D crisis is WOW, which is commonly blamed for broken marriages and any number of other things. The beat goes on. Won't someone please think of the children.