My opinion is simple (and we talked about something similar when I already expressed it):
There are violent impulses in every person. Doing bad and being evil is not people learn how to do - it's something that lies within every person.
Many institutions will try to look away from that and would just blame the influence of: low class literature, comic books, inapropriate songs, movies, agressive sports, TV series, news programes, animal programes showing predators in action, video games,...
Basically in the last 200 or so years everything that was aiming for realism was considered a bad influence (because certain people wanted to look the other way pretending this is not happening in their neighbourhood).
Video games are just the next target.
Nobody forces people to watch certain things, to play certain games, to listen to certain music...
People do that, because they like it. Now a regular normal person like Stroggy (no offence, but you said you played all GTA games), will play a game (even if it's really violent). He may like it or dislike it, but I guess he liked it, because he obviously plays the game a lot. But Stroggy also does other things. He is not addicted to the game.
Now the kid Punch was telling us about was addicted to GTA. And if you are on the level to get adicted (no matter to what) then you are going to loose it anyway (you probably have, that's why you got addicted in the first place). For that kid it would just be something. Were it not for GTA there would be some other thing that would get him addicted and do what he has done (maybe a Beach Boy's song about driving around with cars - and he'd do the same thing... well they'd say that in the 60s probably).
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