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[Column] General: The March Against Violent Videogames
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Excellent article, Pokket. I have played my share of violent video games, but I know the difference between reality and fantasy quite well and can easily separate the two. I have been treated for depression and bipolar disorder (and I was a holy terror as a kid) but I am not a violent person by any means. In fact I have a weakness for cute things like teddy bears and babies LOL.
Parents are ultimately responsible for what they introduce their children to. It's not that hard to educate yourself about what kind of material a game or movie contains and then decide if it is appopriate for your child. Being ignorant is no excuse. And I fully believe the government here in America is looking for any convienent scrapegoat they can find. Mental health is not a high priority in America but it should be - recieving the proper treatment for mental conditions helps prevent a LOT of problems.
Re the gun issue, I think it boils down to the simple fact that it's much harder to commit mass murder with a knife than it is with a gun, any gun, which is also probably why some of the poorer countries tend to have more of a problem with suicide bombers(fertilizer is much easier to produce than guns/missiles).
As for violent videogames and movies, call me a carebear if you must but I firmly believe in keeping them under tight age restrictions, just like all violent news stories should not be aired during "family" hours. The more a person is exposed to something, be it sex, violence, discrimination, or whatever, the more desensitized one gets to it.
Death used to be scary and undesirable, something parents would steer their children away from even hearing about let alone watching on tv, reading about in the newspapers, and certainly not taking them to movies or buying them games that glorified it, now it seems that they're all grooming their kids to become the next big werewolf or vampire sensation, or honey booboo or some other variant of child explotation.:/
Yes the "boys" will always want their bigger and better"toys" and the women will always swarm to the alpha male thus perpetuating the whole war/death syndrome, all we can do is try to keep it from destroying the human race and if it takes some big brother controls to help do that, I don't see a huge problem with it. After all we let them control our food chain and that is what will ultimately end up finishing us all off if they don't smarten up and stop poisoning it with pesticides, genetic tampering etc.
Exactly that, the parents are the ones buying these "violent" games for their under aged children. It's just something for people to blame that isn't themselves.
I think spanking needs to make a big come back!!! Kids need to learn respect because its been lost...
No, a firearm isn't a spoon. But BOTH are only tools. They have various functions. Firearms aren't *only* for killing things. Some people use them for target practice, and never kill anything (look at the Olympics for example) . Some people collect them. Again, they never kill anything. Its all about how a tool is used.
In response to your last, do you want to make it *harder*, or *easier* for law abiding people to defend themselves from dangerous criminals?
Did you know in 2011, more people were stabbed to death than were killed by assualt weapons. Bats, too. Bare hand were the cause of more murders as well.
Did you know that in the 10 years that assault rifles were banned, it had no significant impact on the number of people being killed with them? No study, sponsored by any group, was able to find any correlation to a reduction in violent crime with or without the ability to purchase legally an assault rifle.
Something like 6000 people were killed by a handgun in 2011, compared to just over 300 assault rifles.
No one's blamig handguns though. I personally believe that the banning of handguns would be fine, and every american of sound mind shouldn't just be able to purchase an M16, but should be encouraged to do so.
As long as a government is equiping soldiers with assault rifles, so to should the citizens; especially citizen militia. You do not hunt with a pistol, and you would be hard pressed to stand up to your government with one as well.
Even if profits weren't involved, the US government (mine) would rather ban assualt rifles than ban handguns. No government likes it's citizens armed with assualt riffles. It's naive to think they would.
Thomas Jefferson believed that a government needed to be reminded who was in power ever 20 years or so, through citizen uprising. The same guy that helped to give us the right to bear arms, felt it was our job to periodically use them against our government.
He believed that was the only way to prevent a government from becoming corrupt. He believed that even during his 2 terms as president.
Considering the state of our government, I really can't say he was wrong.
gotta love american logic
every citizen has the right to carry a gun
logical conclusion out of that: every gunfight is caused by a video game!
seriously... do we actually need to argue on that one?
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
LET ME THROW SOME STATS AT YOU ... softly:
. In 2011, according to fbi.gov, California had 1,790 total murders, 1,220 which were caused by handguns. This number doubles that of any other state, including TX that had 1,089 murders, 699 were with firearms.
Found here.
. In 1920, Britain passed a law requiring civilians to obtain a certificate from their district police chief in order to purchase or possess any firearm except a shotgun. To obtain this certificate, the applicant had to pay a fee, and the chief of police had to be "satisfied" that the applicant had "good reason for requiring such a certificate" and did not pose a "danger to the public safety or to the peace." The certificate had to specify the types and quantities of firearms and ammunition that the applicant could purchase and keep
. In 1968, Britain made the 1920 law stricter by requiring civilians to obtain a certificate from their district police chief in order to purchase or possess a shotgun. This law also required that firearm certificates specify the identification numbers ("if known") of all firearms and shotguns owned by the applicant
. In 1997, Britain passed a law requiring civilians to surrender almost all privately owned handguns to the police. More than 162,000 handguns and 1.5 million pounds of ammunition were "compulsorily surrendered" by February 1998. Using "records of firearms held on firearms certificates," police accounted for all but fewer than eight of all legally owned handguns in England, Scotland, and Wales
. ...the homicide rate in England and Wales has averaged 52% higher since the outset of the 1968 gun control law and 15% higher since the outset of the 1997 handgun ban
. Chicago did a handgun ban in 1982. In 1995 the law was amended and in 2010 many of the laws passed in chicago and suburbs were repealed. In 2005, 96% of the firearm murder victims in Chicago were killed with handguns.
More...
I really wish there was a like option on these forums.
PS: I wonder how many people ever wonder if the fact that our government can't take our guns away, may have a bit to do with why many americans try to blame things like games, movies, and music.
They can't take the tool, so they try to fix what they think might be the underlying problem, the person.
We just really suck at fixing people.
A spoon is a tool to eat food with, not to kill efficiently with. Why is this so hard to grasp?? A gun is tool for KILLING. End of story. This is not debatable, this is the facts. Gun control or not, stop with the "its only a tool" line of bunk reasoning. Find a better argument as this one clearly fails.
With this line of reasoning citizens should have the right to build nuclear weapons. Its only a tool...
We are not talking about a multipurpose instrument here. Hunting is the only acceptable reason to own a gun, and no one is suggesting taking away peoples hunting rifles. You don’t need an assault rifle to protect yourself, heck a stun gun would work, what are armed militias invading your neighborhood? So you live in Afghanistan or something that you need Ak47's to protect yourself?? Give me a break.
I just don’t understand this sort of religious zealotry some Americans have over this issue, its like they have blinders on to common sense.
Guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.
900 Americans shot to death since Sandy Hook massacre.
"It's a sandbox, if you are not willing to create a castle then all you have is sand" - jtcgs
This is beginning to remind me a lot of the flamewars over whether UO subscription rates went up or down when Trammel was released.
No matter which side of the debate one is on, you have to be careful with stats like those - do you really know who those graphs would have behaved if nothing had changed?
Hunting is NOT the only acceptable reason to own a gun, YOU need to stop with that.
A government that is not oppressing it's citizens has nothing to fear from an armed populace.
The right to bear arms has NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH HUNTING or being able to shoot criminals. The only reason we have it is because guns are needed in order to defend against the government.
Our rights are based on those things that the British tried to keep from us when we were a colony.
The right to free speach, to assemble, to bear arms, all these things the british tried to stop us from doing. These are considered BASIC human rights that when not allowed to have indicate a state of oppression.
They were all the rights that our forefathers were being denied. That is why they wrote it into the constitution that our government can not take them.
And the right to bear arms is the one that they identified as being the right that allows us to protect all of the others.
The last thing this should ever get is a Government run Research. Shall we go back to Nixon who decided to do Research on Weed by strapping a tube to a monkeys mouth and pumping that tube full of Weed smoke. (not a stoner BTW) What the scientists did not do however is add in any oxygen to the tube. So when the monkey got brain damage from lack of Oxygen they blamed it on the weed.
When goverment Science walks up to a issue they say "how can we prove this to be true" not "how can we prove this false" or even better "How can we fairly judge this situation".
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.
Wrong, the 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with hunting and everything to do with protecting oneself from tyranny. This isn't even up for debate. The USSC has ruled as such. The authors of the Constitution have also written this many times over.
If find it odd that you believe the people on tv when they say that the Forefathers, after revolting against a dictator, decided to guarantee the right to a recreational activity. Get real. You know exactly what the 2nd Amendement means and it scares you.
Furthermore, you keep changing the "only reason for guns". Using whichever works best for you I suppose. First you say they are for killing people. Then you say they are for hunting. Another guy points out that they are used for sport. I will say that they make one hell of a deterrent. "A rifle behind every blade of grass". Remember? CCW goes up, crime goes down. etc etc..
All across America, people are loading up on firarms and ammunition, breaking records each month since 2008. They are not doing this to just turn them in.
Again, why haven't boxcutters been banned? They murdered 3,000 within minutes. I can't wait for your response on banning boxcutters..
I was waiting for this argument. (you are right it is the real argument)
The second amendment was written when "guns' were muskets. You'd be lucky to kill a person at 20 yards with one. Your forefathers couldn’t not have seen this future. The government has warplanes, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, tanks, and biological weapons. Are you suggesting that citizens have the right to arm themselves with these kinds of weapons to protect themselves from the government? If this truly is the heart of the amendment then you must be in favor of this, because the government can wipe out any opposition with the flick of switch with modern technology.
The times of changes people, time to wake up.
Remember the old food pyramid?
That was based on another government "study" that was later overturned. At the time is even apposed, but the orignal doctors of the stufy were fired, and new ones were hired who run a new "study" that had different results.
Even the stupid food pyramid was devise as a way to prop up friends of the government. Unfortunately it was taught to every kid in school for decades to eat lots and lots of carbs and then go sit at a desk all day.
And we wonder why we live in a country of fat people.
To this day, no indipendant study has linked violent video game to crime. In fact, they have found games to improve cognitive functions. Things like problem sovling; even hand eye coordination. Even those violent video games are found to have small benefits to higher brain function.
Funny that.
Western Europe is statistically the least murderous area of the world. This is according to the U.N. To know if there is a relation between gun ownership and murders, we'd need the same kinds of charts that the U.N. provides, but for gun ownership. What's really interesting is that this type of research in the U.S. will get any federal funding you have immediately cut by law. Look it up. We would have to rely on the U.N. to do that type of research, but they wouldn't be able to get any assistance from U.S. colleges, universities or any organizations that receive federal funding.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Our forefathers were not technically ignorant.
The only thing that mattered to them was that SOLDIERS carry them. It's entirely based the principle that the people need access to the same weapons that the GOVERNMENT uses.
I'm sorry sir. You are very, very wrong.
Because they also made it clear that the bill of rights isn't interpretable. You're not even allowed to amend it.
It was written in blood for godsakes. Our ancestors died enmasse so we could have them!
I would die tomorrow to keep them. BELIEVE THAT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaF9nbLo8as
Penn and Tellers: Bullshit - Videogames.
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.
If you were paying attention the previous argument was not originally about the second amendment.
Secondly, the reason for guns is killing things, end of story. There is no debate here.
Please make a cogent argument. What are guns for? What is YOUR argument? Are they for defense? For sport? Because of the 2nd amendment? You guys are good at arguing with the arguments in your own head, your not actually dealing with the real argument. I wonder why?
A box cutter is not designed to kill masses of people. FALSE ANALOGY.
If you want to say airplanes are weapons of mass destruction you might be getting someplace. Yet airplanes are not DESIGNED to kill things. Realize that this argument has failed, your just not accepting the logic of it.
If you tell me AK-47's were designed for target practice I am going to face-palm.
We vote to oppress ourselves.. We the people will take everything away from ourselves in false hopes of creating a more safe world.. in truth, it only makes the situation worse because whenever oppression is left unchecked, rebellion will occur..
See what happened when they even mentioned a ban on assault weapons and high capacity ammunition clips? Gun show attendance went up 10 fold.. Gun stores sold out of high ammunition clips.. Assault rifle style weapons are being purchased rapidly..
Some people in this country will lock themselves in a steel cage just to feel like they are safe in the world..
I would never sacrifice some of my valued freedoms, chasing something that truly cannot exist such as safety.. We do not have a way to know everything that could happen at any given time..
Every victim in every tragedy more than likely woke up on their final morning feeling relatively "safe"..
Instead of trying to take things away from ourselves, why don't we look deeper within to find the more troubling issue with society. We have lost respect for morality and more so have lost our emotional bearings. Simply put, we "don't care"..
Riiight. You still havent answered my question. Your just not willing to see it. Its your ideology, it's not based in reason.
The government uses tanks, warplanes, and chemical and biological weapons. You cant escape it that easy. Should citzens have accesss to these as you say the amendment intended?
Do you know that violent crimes includes more than murder, correct?
Here. Watch this nice little bundle of facts with citations all on one video clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qedZV48R238
This isnt a government thing, its a lobbyist thing.
Actually watch the entire Biden video posted here earlier. VP Biden is warning the video game industry that as this progresses they will become under attack and gave them ADVICE on how to PROTECT themselves...he knows the game, everyone will be blammed to deflect from talking about guns, gun restrictions, background checks or anything else thats actually important.
It is also important for the President to have all of it looked at, if he doesnt say, allow the gaming industry to be looked at, opponents WILL make it look like he is not looking at all options and is just trying to take ur gunz like a nazi facist liberal commie jew maoist lennonist marxist monarchist dictator warmonger fear hate RUN! would do. New World Order.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson