Not sure these kids can distinguish reality from reality TV though. That's the whole thing. They don't understand potential consequences of their behavior. Now it's with guns. Back when I was a kid it was throwing rocks or such like.
My youngest bro and some pals around same age, subteens, sneaked down into the park where a railroad line ran out from some factory. They liked to throw rocks at the sides of the cars when a train passed through there. One day the bro heaved a rock at the caboose and a window was open and luck of the draw, the rock sailed through and hit the brakeman in the jaw. Of course the guy's mates jumped off the slowly moving train and gave chase to the kids who naturally ran straight for their homes.
The bro ended up in juvie court and my dad about fell out when the judge --after a lecture and decision to leave it up to my father how to impress against future such behavior on the part of the bro-- said "I hope you understand how lucky you are I'm not sending you to reform school, young man" but the bro bolding piped up "Well I don't see how it's great luck when I got caught."
See he still didn't get it. To him it had all just been a game and the fact that the brakeman was actually injured by his action only meant to the bro that a feature of that particular game was kinda like a board game where you pick up a card after landing on some spot and the card instead of saying you win a hundred bucks says Go Directly To Jail Do Not Pass Go... so he stepped through the ensuing motions with about that much attention to real life consequence, figuring he'd learned that the dice just don't always roll your way.
And that was way before today's video games when the thrill of wielding life and death power over a virtual opponent in the game is at stake. I don't think all kids react the same way to these games. But I think the ones who are vulnerable to ending up unable to control their behavior and so let their feelings make the calls are ill suited to sitting in front of a screen where they get to kill whatever stands in their way. Add access to real guns and stand back... meanwhile they're most often short of adult help to cope with their real feelings of isolation, rage, exclusion, etc. And people around them are still too often unwilling to speak out or try to arrange an intervention.
How many times do we hear of kids who were mass shooters being described by people who knew them as loners or even that they had talked of shooting a place up? There's still this stupid idea that telling some adult about forerunning incidents is "snitching"... even after all these times where it's pretty clear that someone could and should have blown a loud whistle before tragedy played out yet again. I keep hoping that prevention efforts and education will help more school kids decide they've had enough of these largely preventable incidents, and there are times that it's not "snitching" to speak out, it's potentially lifesaving.
As for the idiots who don't lock up their guns... "thoughts and prayers" are what they offer up when some other idiot has not locked up his gun; no thought to "that could have been my gun got swiped"?