I disagree with what you said about an 8 year old being too young to understand the difference between reality and virtual reality. Every person in a very early age knows the difference between good and bad, and I'm not talking about something obscure here because there's nothing more obvious in that department than killing someone.
Did you not know that killing is wrong when you were a child? I've been playing violent video games(among others) since I was 8 too, and I never hurt anyone, and I hardly believe I am an exception.
That kid was obviously disturbed enough to commit something like that. The parents' responsibility in this case would have been to give him psychological treatment.
Even if the child took "inspiration" from GTA to kill someone, the fact that the 8 year old even considered and had the will to kill someone means that he would eventually kill someone regardless of playing the game or not, either by being inspired by another form of media, or simply doing it just like that.
If a person is disturbed enough, he'll do horrible things, and sometimes he'll just need an excuse to do it, but if you take away his excuse then he'll just find another.
Same as Mark David Chapman shooting John Lennon after taking inspiration from the book "The Catcher in the Rye", and John HInckley trying to kill the fricking president of the United States in the same manner depicted in the movie "Taxi Driver".
These killings by inspiration happened all over history, but those people are to blame, not the entertainment industry.
It's not the children that changed so much, it's the parents. I wanted stuff when I was a child too(Maybe I wanted much less stuff than kids today, but I still wanted), and if my parents didn't think I should get something, then I didn't get it. End of story.
Today parents just fall under the children's pressure.
Mevrick's comments