Ban everything.
First person shooter games, are cartoons.
Movies are real life imitations of violence.
How come no one else sees this ?
Don't tell people in New Mexico that. William Bonney was a teeny-bopper when he started his killing spree that led to lots of officers trying to track him down.
/johnny
Ridiculous. Calls for yet more bans. What game was at fault in the late 70s—Pong?
It's also only recently in recorded history that we classify teenagers as juveniles rather than adults.
Maybe the core problem is something else. My parents are still married. For all their flaws, I thank them for giving me a level of certainty in my childhood.
Ban guns. Ban video games. Ban movies.
What nobody is asking for is to ban mentally damaged people (from little monsters in middle school to toothless hobos on the streets) who barely blocked by chemical doses from going murderous/suicidal. There are millions of mentally damaged people who can snap and kill a lot of people.
Same problem as banning guns, except without the explicit Constitution recognition of the right: freedom.
People need to get this through their heads: IT IS NOT GOVERNMENT'S PLACE TO TELL THE PEOPLE WHAT TO DO! If it doesn't harm someone else, leave us alone!
When this man explains the millions of people who daily play FPS and other games involving violence and don’t go out shooting puppies, babies and the elderly puppies and babies, I’ll buy his BS.
I never killed anyone so am I the sole exception on the planet? Are the other millions the individual sole exceptions too?
Does anyone see the stupidity of where this fool is headed?
If we are to ban anything, it should be a 1st amendment restriction on the press to publicize the name of any mass shooter.
They are intent on suicide, and know their key to fame is in the number of killed before they themselves are killed and the enemedia’s insistence on spreading their name. They want their name to live in infamy, towering above the previous mass murderer’s count. Otherwise, they may not get their own wikipedia entry.
Clearly, the mass murderer recently shot and killed in Texas last month will never be famous. His total count was 0, thus not having the prerequisites for being infamous.
SLA Marshall is a discredited source who made up the interviews that support his contention that only 10% of WWII infantry fired their weapons in combat. David Hackworth whaled away at this fraud in his books. Grossman does not know what he’s talking about, even though he wraps his BS in a cloud of plausible sounding statements.
did we have fps games in the late 70s?
meanwhile, when did we shut down the nuthouses?
oh yea.... the late 70s. hmmm... what a coincidence
300,000 copies of MOH Warfighter were sold the first week it was out. If 1% of those were sold to juveniles there would only be 3000 kids playing (we know it is far greater than that). Then 1% of those were mass murderers then we would assume that there are 300 kids that will eventually snap and gun down a classroom. Sorry but I don’t see that many mass murders going down or even planned, let alone being done by juveniles.
That is just one game title.
We don’t have a gun problem or a game problem, we have a values problem.
With all due respect to the Colonel, it was years (arguably quite a few years) between when the “first juvenile homicide” happened and when any video game even beginning to simulate firearm combat at any level of realism was on the market.
Seriously, what game in the late 70’s was causing shootings? Atari Tanks? Battlezone? Space Invaders?
On top of that, he talks about no “juvenile” committing these multiple homicides in 500 years of gunpowder combat when he knows full well that until about 150 years ago the technology for ANYONE to commit a multiple firearm homicide didn’t exist.
My childhood training involved learning to play a saxaphone and a clarinet ~ they have different finger schema but you have to learn to play both at the same speed when you participate in a music group.
That was followed by learning to type REALLY REALLY REALLY fast ~ 238 wpm on an electric typewriter (specially geared so it could go that fast).
Then, in the Army I discovered MACHINE GUNS. Due to my skill at firing bursts of 2, bursts of 3, bursts of 4, bursts of..... ~ whatever length you needed, in whatever order desired, I was picked to work with another fellow at firing all sorts of machineguns for the background fire in the John Wayne Vietnam war epic titled "The Green Beret".
I'm referred to in the credits as Fort Benning ~
I can still stomp them in the dirt when it comes to PacMan.
The error the analyst makes is imagining the development of eye-hand coordination to a high degree is necessarily limited to whatever you were seeing at the time you learned to do the trick. If it were I"d only be able to fire machine guns if I had a piece off paper in front of me ~ and I will assure anyone, I can fire machineguns with the best of them, paper or no paper!
And before video games kids used TOY GUNS (GASP!?!?!) pointed them at each other yelling “Bang Bang!” and pretending to get shot and die.
And before guns, kids played with sticks in mock swordfights... pretending to slice and stab each other and fall over dead.
Both of those kids games are physical real-world roleplaying but there was never an outcry or some attempt to connect “cowboys and indians” to later violence in life.
I was born right on the cusp of the development of video games and have played them my entire life up to now. I could be considered an expert on the progession of games and the systems that run them.
Unless you are a true paranoid schitso, with the medical diagnosis, there has never been a problem of separating GAME from REALITY.
The problem is whether these kids who are growing up have any internal moral limiters to their REALITY. We teach kids MORAL RELATIVISM actively in school. How the hell do we expect any other result than the semi-frequent mass murder when kids are taught in class that “right” and “wrong” are based on your own personal feelings?
What’s the logical endgame to that line of reasoning? What if killing 30 people sounds good to you today? My fear of God Almighty keeps me from doing something like that. What do today’s kids have?
Comment on Grossman from an online forum:
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=09f752eac59d906ff5fc67f480dd6ac1&t=118514&page=2
Again, I salute you all for your extensive knowledge. This has been a big help for me. Not to nitpick, but in Grossman’s introduction he suggested a reliance in his approach to Freud and then even mentioned Alfred Kinsey both of whom to a greater or lesser degree, have been discredited. He relied a great deal on Freud throughout the book. In addition he aruges that we have been a sexually repressed society which leads to the problems associated and described in his book. I thought his argument when have been tighter if he had left out Freud, Kinsely, and discussions on sexual repression (something I don’t think any era has successfully suppressed). And, of course, he relies heavily on Marshall which, if discredited, all of the above would call into question his work. As an aside, a gun-rights activist gave me the book because Grossman teaches some sort of self defense seminar, but, in the conclusions to Grossman’s book, he makes a pitch for what could be described as gun-control through disarmament. I thought that was strange unless I misread it.
I’ve experienced, first-hand, the combat conditioning that LTC Grossman refers to. However, I take issue with his extrapolation to FPS games. I made a series of very conscious decisions to get myself into the position where I finally used that “autopilot”. Once the shooting started, yes, the conditioning was there, and I was very aware of it later. It’s entirely possible he’s right regarding the conditioning effect from the FPS games, but the series of decisions that place these psychos in that very situation still have to be made. It was obvious that the Newtown shooting was planned. Aurora, CO, was planned. Columbine was planned. Most (all?) of these mass shootings are planned. Conditioning only kicks in when the lead starts flying, in my experience. Does the conditioning lead to higher body counts than would normally occur? I doubt it, but I’m sure LTC Grossman doesn’t know either.
I was raised on Doom and Quake and I turned out fine.