Posted on 02/23/2013 4:34:29 AM PST by Kaslin
The Obama administration's assault on the Second Amendment in reaction to Newtown is not a serious solution. It's a Band-Aid on cancer. The NRA's call for armed guards in every school also misses the point. When is anyone going to get serious? The problem is violence, a violence of monstrous and horrific proportions that has infected America's popular culture.
The Hartford Courant reported on Sunday that during a search of Newtown grade-school killer Adam Lanza's home after the shootings, "police found thousands of dollars worth of graphically violent video games." Detectives are exploring whether Adam Lanza might have been emulating the shooting range or a video game scenario as he moved from room to room at Sandy Hook Elementary.
In California, 20-year-old Ali Syed went on a carjacking and shooting rampage, killing three before turning the gun on himself. Syed was a loner and a "gamer" who spent hours holed up in his room, Orange County authorities said. "He took one class at college, and he did not work, so that gives him most of the day and evening, and most of the time in his free time he was playing video games," reported county sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino.
After Newtown, President Obama and other officials insisted the country needed a "dialogue" about "gun violence," but there's been remarkably little exploration of the role of video games and even less of movie and TV violence.
Rep. Frank Wolf of Virginia requested a study from the National Science Foundation and was disappointed that Obama's State of the Union only focused on gun control. "While I recognize the potential constitutional issues involved in tackling media violence, mental health parity and gun control, I am disappointed that mental health issues and media violence were left out of the president's address," Wolf said.
The NSF report acknowledged that a link between violent media and real-world violence can be contentious, but explained, "Anders Breivik, who murdered 69 youth in Norway, claims he used the video game 'Modern Warfare 2' as a military simulator to help him practice shooting people. Similarly, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who murdered 13 fellow students in Colorado, claimed they used the violent video game 'Doom' to practice their shooting rampage."
No, Virginia, not everyone who has ever played a violent video game is an assassin in training. "However, a comprehensive review of more than 381 effects from studies involving more than 130,000 participants around the world shows that violent video games increases aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, physiological arousal (e.g., heart rate, blood pressure), and aggressive behavior."
As researcher Brad Bushman of Ohio State University stated in a "PBS NewsHour" story on violent video games, "correlation doesn't imply causation," but the correlation is disturbing enough. Does it make sense for policy makers to go around suggesting that gun makers be held liable for school shootings, but fail to suggest the same for say, Microsoft Game Studios, which makes "Gears of War" series, spotlighted by PBS as especially bloody?
Neither gun makers nor video game makers mean for their products for mass shootings, but politicians like Obama have singled out the gun makers and gone soft on their entertainment-industry campaign donors. Somehow, Democrats isolate the inherent evil of a gun almost as if it's self-shooting, while denying our violent media has any influence on these under-21 shooters.
Even the mildest restrictions on the sales of violent video games -- like a California law forbidding minors from buying games rated M for Mature ("Content is generally suitable for ages 17 and up") -- were rebuked by the Supreme Court.
In 2010, Obama appointee Elena Kagan mocked the law and the entire controversy by insisting that the game "Mortal Kombat" was "an iconic game, which I am sure half of the clerks who work for us spent considerable amounts of time in their adolescence playing." But "Mortal Kombat" was a pioneering ultraviolent game when it debuted in 1992, with scenes of decapitations, electrocution and ripping out the still-beating heart of an opponent with bare hands.
I wonder if Justice Kagan would still argue in public that these games are blameless, and the Adam Lanzas of the world are never influenced by these "iconic" works. She actually suggested, "You could look at these games and say they're the modern-day equivalent of Monopoly sets." No one ever practiced for a school shooting by buying hotels for Park Place and Boardwalk. But Kagan was hailed by USA Today's Supreme Court reporter as bringing a "practical twist" to the high court. The kids aren't playing "Monopoly" any more. Three of the four top-selling games on Amazon.com in 2012 were "Halo 4," "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" and "Assassins Creed III" -- rated M, M and M.
The people who want to conduct a Newtown "dialogue" really need to broaden their gabby horizons.
The Hollywood lobby has done a great job. No one even considers movies or TV.
Groupthink.
More than that....everyone is looking for a reason.
Sometimes the reason is the person is crazy and evil. Bad things happened well before video games and violent movies.
Politicians are not going to turn against the people that supply their money to them,
Kagen is no more qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice than I am, she is simply a political animal placed there because of her liberal views.
Certainly violent movies and video games have an effect on weak minds. Weak minds think up the plots to these violent games, and films.
Dorner has become a hero thanks to a black violent movie Django unchained which will probably get an Oscar.
> Bad things happened well before video games and violent movies.
That’s true, but not this often, and not on this scale, and not with 24/7 hyperventilating coverage.
Perhaps it’s an artifact of the massive population increase in the last 20 years.
However, it would be sweet schadenfreude to see ultra-liberal Hollyweird, MicroSoft, and Google whacked by regulations on how violent and salacious their effluent must be.
Watch them squirm and squeal as they whine about their First Amendment Right to purvey their obscene filth.
Maybe they’ll understand why we’re so jealous of our Second Amendment.
Just dreaming ...
I’ve been gaming my whole conscious life and I don’t have plans to go on killing sprees. This is a distraction, as usual.
Its not a distraction. The level of senseless violence our children are exposed to is off the charts, and these video games are a primary contributer.
"Dialogue" with liberal trash? Pig in the mud. We're well beyond a dialogue.
A liberal’s idea of ‘dialogue’is more like what goes on in a reeducation camp than an even exchange of ideas. It consists of one person giving received ‘truth’, and the other one repeating it.
I think we should be talking about the “Psych-med angle” before we start branding the gamers. JMHO
Sure, that's what you use your microphone and headset for, everybody knows that.
"Let's do this! LEEEEEROY JENKINS!!!
We already had this "dialogue", it's called the "bill of rights".
There is even a provision for changing it, it's called an amendment.
This is total nonsense.
I can’t think of a SINGLE mainstream video game where the murder of innocents is glorified. Even the infamous Grand Theft Auto doesn’t even come close because that takes place in an alternate universe where innocents pretty much don’t exist anywhere. Action games pretty much always involve fighting soldiers and monsters. In some cases (like in RPGS) they involve playing a bad guy who is clearly identified as a bad guy...and in a fantasy setting where such roles have meaning.
Been playing M-rated video games since I was 7 years old and I still haven’t finished grieving over the Sandy Hook massacre. In fact, I’ll probably never be able to forget it for a single day! So I definitely didn’t turn into a psycho.
Lanza murdered those children because he sank to the bottom of the abyss. That is a point of pure hollowness where a genetically human creature turns into a ravening soulless monster. The aesthetics of love do not exist in that place.
The reason why this event happened is because community members are isolated from each other. Had this been a more sane and less “tolerant” period in human history, someone would have spoke out the moment that they starting teaching this psycho how to use a rifle. By all accounts, Newtown KNEW that this guy was nuts but didn’t want to say or do anything out of a fear of appearing “unkind” or “judgmental”. That crap needs to stop NOW!
Do you know any children that are violent as a direct result of violent video games?
A bazillion people play violent video games every day without shooting up a school, mall or theater. Growing up in the ‘50s-’60s we played “cowboys and Indians” and used WWII terminology as we played “Army” and we didn’t head down to the school to off our classmates. My favorite movies, war movies and westerns, from all time are violence saturated and I still do not feel compelled to shoot people.
If we eliminate “gun free” zones then at least those won’t be conveniently easy shooting galleries for nut jobs.
There’s dialogue in “Assassin’s Creed.” My son has learned quite a bit of Italian that you don’t want to use in polite, Italian-speaking company.
The U.S. murder rate was higher before when movies were invented than after, and was MUCH higher before violent video games were invented than after.
What I learned from this article - Kagan is more of an idiot than I thought.
I have a question. I have never played violent video games and neither have my children who are now grown. What is the appeal of these games? Why would an otherwise-normal young (or old) person want to experience killing people and raping women in the most violent ways imaginable?
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