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Two bills target video games following Sandy Hook tragedy
- ck2 14y agoI don't personally care for the existence of video games and movies that are super violent just for the sake of being violent. But here's the thing - plenty of other countries have full access to all these video games, movies and even their fair share of mentally ill. What they do not have is constant mass slaughters like this, and that's because they don't have the guns-are-toys mentality we do and open access to as many guns as you want, as powerful as you want, without tracking, liability or lack of social pressure to stop. Sadly nothing will be done and in a decade we'll have a mass-killing anniversary for every day of the year and everyone will just be desensitized. Instead we'll have armed guards at every place where more than 10 people gather and like the TSA everyone will say "oh well, what can you do".
- CamperBob2 14y agoOr, you know, we could just stop spazzing out in reaction to vanishingly-rare events. You can't shrink-wrap the world.
- bicknergseng 14y agoEspecially when readily solvable problems like obesity and drunk driving kill exponentially more every year. But hey, that's how social fear and hysteria works.
- Jach 14y agoEven non-drunk driving is dangerous. Apart from the array of problems associated with obesity, you have specifically heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, less specifically other types of cancer... Just considering disease (or simpler, anything that falls under "old age"), and it's easy to see humans aren't very effective killers of each other, compared to what else is out there. Among all causes, for the whole world, the estimated rate is 1.8 people who die per second. If ck2 is really concerned about the total number of deaths per month, I hope he donates to various transhumanist-influenced organizations whose goal (or side-effect of their main goal) is stopping death entirely.
- ck2 14y agoUh, over 1000 people have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook a month ago [1] That's not a rare event - it's just distributed far apart enough in the news and localized to the point where you purposely do not notice. I think it would be a great service if every national news program would open with a list of the names of everyone killed by guns and drunk drivers, every day. It would only take a minute but if you did it every day, people would start to get a hint. PBS News closes with all the people (mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings) killed in the military every night, it could be like that. 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/1...
- CamperBob2 14y agoUh, nearly 1000 people have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook a month ago. Sigh. We're done here.
- monochromatic 14y agoMost of them were suicides, which really shouldn't count in this statistic.
- hayksaakian 14y agoHow many were obtained illegally? How many were suicides? How many more people died from more preventable causes? Sound bites are sound bites are sound bites.
- ck2 14y agoIsn't the proper question "how many deaths happened in other countries of the same population density" ? Because I assure you, it's lower in the UK, Japan, etc. You cannot just say "oh well what can you do, it's the price we pay to have our toys".
- philwelch 14y agoYou're right. Let's ban cars. Though that's a bit too extreme, let's only ban assault vehicles. You know, those black SUV's that look a little too much like military vehicles. That is a good solution to the number of people killed by drunk drivers.
- blakehaggerty 14y agoWe dont have "Open access" and we cant buy guns as powerful as we want (no full auto, nothing over 50mm, certain shotguns, sbr...etc) we have tracking, lots of media preasure. So not sure what you are getting at. Look at ca with strict gun laws, bahas a AWB has limits on hangun purchases and registration. They still have very high gun violence. The problems lie in how kids are raised.
- bdcravens 14y agoWhy is no one targeting music that advocates gun violence? Video games and movies are pretty obviously works of fiction. Some rap music, for example, advocates murdering real people in real situations
- cheald 14y agoMusic only caused violent and undesirable behavior in our parents' generation, obviously.
- malandrew 14y agoThrowing another art from another medium under the bus isn't going to help things. If anything, doing so just legitimizes these ridiculous laws. We should be against these shenanigans regardless of the medium in question.
- jlgreco 14y agoIt might help things. If we threw in books for example suddenly the 1st Amendment implications would become very clear to everyone. Right now pretty much only video games are involved, and a very large portion of the population considers these to be alien, "not art" and frankly just a second class "speech medium". Music (well, rap music) probably sits somewhere between the two.
- graeme 14y agoWhat research has been done on this? When I played FPS games, I would have visualizations of walking around with a gun (in a game world). These continued for a few years after I stopped. Now I don't have them. I was never violent, nor had any urge to violence. But I had tons of violent images. That's an interesting effect. Did anyone else have anything similar, and is there any research on this?
- MartinCron 14y agoReminds me of the well known "Tetris effect" where you see falling blocks long after you stop playing the game. I have experienced both sensations, but have neither shot nor dropped bricks on anyone.
- sukuriant 14y agoSame thing happens with falling arrows and DDR
- mistercow 14y agoTrue story: I got DDR not long before the second time I took the SAT. The night before the test, I played until around 4 AM. On test day, this is what I saw every time I blinked: http://i.imgur.com/hTk7Q.png http://i.imgur.com/hTk7Q.png
- RegEx 14y agoI'm a heavy player, and unfortunately I've never had the joy of seeing arrows flying around me during the day.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- graeme 14y agoInteresting. I figured it was something like that, since the images didn't match any though patterns I was having.
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- jrockway 14y agoWhat about violent books, conversations, thoughts, and lectures at school? (Have you ever read a history book? They're twice as violent as Grand Theft Auto.)
- rhdoenges 14y agoViolence in books is textual, so it's going to be far less vivid for the reader than a video game where you actually cause the violence. Additionally, violent books/conversations/thoughts/lectures often focus on the negative aspects of violence rather than glorifying it the way movies and video games do.
- jlgreco 14y agoEver read American Psycho? Honestly far more disturbing than any game I have ever seen.
- r0s 14y agoSome would disagree: http://www.merrycoz.org/yc/BADLIT.HTM http://www.merrycoz.org/yc/BADLIT.HTM It's a familiar horse to beat, this NEW media is special, and different and scary. It happened with jazz, rock&roll, comic books, movies, novels, heavy metal, many scapegoat has met the whip of the righteously ignorant. It's always been a meaningless argument, totally void of scientific fact. Were there wars before fiction? Was there crime before video games?
- unimpressive 14y agoAs somebody who played tons of these newfangled murder simulators for years, I can say with 100% confidence that the worst ideas I ever had as a kid came from cartoons, not video games. [0] Games don't mess around with casuality very often. Usually when you do lethal things, they kill stuff. In cartoons, very dangerous things are portrayed as being something you can walk away from with only soot on your face or a lump on your head. To give you an idea of how bad we're talking here, there was a time very early on in my life when I didn't know that strangulation could kill people. I'm not even joking. [1] [0]: Keep in mind of course that one person is a single data point, not a set. (And not even a rigorous data point at that.) [1]: Thankfully nobody died.
- malkia 14y agoGames, cartoons, books reflect the society we live in, hence they would portray violence.
- philwelch 14y agoI would argue the opposite. Violence is very dramatic and exciting, it's always going to appear in fiction more often than in real life for that very reason.
- charonn0 14y agoI find it hard to believe that video games (or movies, songs, novels, etc,) even extremely violent ones, could compel someone to murder unless they were already seriously mentally ill. Such an ill person, deprived of violent media, would not miraculously be cured nor would they pose any less a risk to those around them.
- diminoten 14y agoAfter reading the bill, I'm not opposed to it on practical grounds. For a $60 game, it's $0.60. Who cares. Furthermore, the revenue would go exclusively towards the treatment of mental health conditions, which is just fine with me, as I believe the real cause of these violent outbursts is a lack of support system for those who need it most. What I disagree with in this bill is the use of the privately run, industry controlled ESRB as the measuring stick for what is and isn't violent. Not only are they terrible at accurately rating games (in my opinion), they're not even being given the chance to distinguish between violent video games and other kinds of mature video games (complex plot, general adult themes, etc.) ALL T rated games or higher would be taxed, regardless of the level of violence in the game itself. That's simply inaccurate, and displays a very fundamental lack of knowledge on the topic. Don't try to regulate what you don't understand, please. Not to mention the fact that, if this wins, it's further legitimizing the absolutely absurd notion that video games are the cause of these exceptionally rare and exceptionally violent outbursts. I can't agree with that.
- eurleif 14y agoThe thing is, once you accept a 1% tax on violent video games, you've accepted in principle that violent video games warrant government interference. Then the question becomes how much the government should interfere, rather than whether it should at all. Violent video games are free speech. Specific types of speech shouldn't have special taxes placed on them. I feel the same way about a 1% tax on violent video games as I would about a 1% tax on books containing witchcraft-related themes.
- jlgreco 14y agoMedia should not be taxed based on it's content. Permitting that puts the government one step away from being able to create de facto bans based on content by merely cranking the tax rate.
- diminoten 14y agoWhy shouldn't media be taxed based on its content?
- meh01 14y agoSigh. Let's blame video games and mental illness instead of tackling the real problem. This is going to work out great.