Actually, I’m not sure it was the face. The details are unclear because this horrible news was presented to me by a factoid box on the bottom of the screen as some woman on CNN talked about some more important news. I didn’t even hear her. My jaw on the floor, I sat wondering how something like this could possibly happen. A boy shoots his little sister in the head with a pellet gun, killing her. Promising myself that I’d research it further in the morning, I turned my attention back to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

The streets were quiet as I walked calmly towards the old lady sitting in her sports car. I didn’t stop to wonder why she’d ever be driving so nice a car, and by the time I even put the information together in my head, I had pulled her forcibly out of the car and thrown her face-down onto the pavement. One quick pop with a handgun and she stopped screaming. I took her purse, hopped into the car and sped off.

The blood spurting out of the woman’s new lead piercing was incredibly realistic, and the violent smears on the road that marked each pedestrian I overtook with the yellow convertible. Little glowing gobs of money appeared next to the corpses.

I’d always thought there’d be bonus points for little kids or old people. Guess not.

I didn’t dream that night. Apparently the brain can’t reach REM sleep very well with extra chemicals flowing in the brain. Or maybe nothing during the evening had moved me enough.

CNN.com seemed to be the place to look for the story about the little boy and his sister, since that’s where it’d aired the night before. I entered the search criteria: “boy shoots sister.” Stories from the Oklahoma bombing in ’97 filled the page. How about: “boy shot sister.” The top story was from Canada, dated Jan. 4. A 7-year-old girl took her 22-year-old brother’s .45 and shot her 6-year-old brother in the head. He died.

Earlier that week, Canadians burned their firearm licenses in protest of a gun registration law. The gun that killed the 6-year-old boy was unregistered.

Still no sign of the anonymous little boy who shot his sister. Without any frame of reference as to where it happened, this is getting pretty damn difficult. But now that morbid curiosity has just taken over. L.A., as I recall, has had an ungodly number of murders this year. Let’s check that out, shall we?

The website of the L.A.-based Daily News, www.dailynews.com, describes Los Angeles as “the murder capital of the nation,” with 592 murders in 2002 through Nov. 20. For all those with my level of morbid curiosity, New York pulled a close second with 489. And Philadelphia and Detroit both have higher rates of homicide per capita.

Newly promoted LAPD Assistant Chief Jim McDonnelloffered his two cents: “This is the last category we want to be number one in.”

Brilliant.

The kid who shot his sister seems to have been lost in the shuffle, and from an hour’s web-surfing it looks like it’s a fucking huge shuffle.

Shall we play the finger-pointing game?

It’s video games, like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. They’re becoming so realistic that they distort the minds of young gamers, and the idea of taking a handgun to the head of an old lady for a few bucks in her purse or hijacking a car in the middle of a street is becoming far too familiar to children before they can properly distinguish reality from fantasy.

Or bad parenting. Parents spend too much time working. Or not enough. Or they abuse their children, teaching them that violence is indeed the answer. Meanwhile, children of negligent parents are weaned on TV, which clearly has no sense of right or wrong.

Maybe it’s you.

Daily Nexus assistant Opinion editor Cory Anthony just wants to know why.