

Two bills target video games following Sandy Hook tragedy - mbenjaminsmith
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/184997/Two_bills_target_video_games_following_Sandy_Hook_tragedy.php

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ck2
I 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".

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CamperBob2
Or, you know, we could just stop spazzing out in reaction to vanishingly-rare
events. You can't shrink-wrap the world.

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ck2
Uh, 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/2012/1...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html)

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hayksaakian
How 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.

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ck2
Isn'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".

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philwelch
You'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.

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ck2
Nah let's remove speed limits and drink all you want when you drive. Because
people should have all the freedom they want and people are rational and
intelligent. Screw the rights of other people to be able to drive safely.

Heck, why restrict fully automatic M16s and bazookas - why dare impose limits
at all. People are rational and intelligent their freedom should not stop
where others begin. In fact you should be able to drunk drive and carry around
your loaded M16 out the window down the highway.

We should be like the middle east with people firing fully automatics in the
air anytime they want and gangs roaming around in pickups fully armed.

The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because
anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and
it's a start.

Guns are not toys and that's the whole problem, people want to play with them
because they think it's a game.

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unimpressive
>The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because
anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and
it's a start.

The thing about legislative efforts, is that on an issue where there are
parties who want to take certain laws to one extreme or the other (Ex: Banning
all guns.) and the sliding scale is freedom vs regulation, there will
inevitably always be push from both of the extreme sides. So even if you enact
"reasonable" gun laws, there will always be parties trying to push them
forwards or backwards. This means that the sensible thing for guns rights
organizations to do is turn even a minor gun regulation into a shitstorm so
that the opposing forces on the other side have to spend all their energy
maintaining reasonable gun laws.

Internet activists may want to take notes.

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ck2
As long as people enjoy killing animals, guns will never be illegal in this
country. There are plenty of lefties in the senate who really enjoy killing
animals so guns are always going to be legal.

What they are trying to restrict is the use of guns as toys and I have zero
problem with that. I think hunting is ridiculous and horrible in this day and
age but I guess that's part of the compromise I have to do. I am not accepting
anything further than that though, guns are not toys.

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fusiongyro
There are environmentally sound reasons to control the population of wild
animals. A population boom/bust cycle wreaks havoc on the environment. We've
already interfered with nature on this continent to such a degree it cannot
self-regulate. I don't enjoy killing animals, but those that I know who hunt
are in fact doing us all a public service we would otherwise have to pay the
government to do.

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unimpressive
As 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.

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bdcravens
Why 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

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malandrew
Throwing 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.

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jlgreco
It _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.

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diminoten
After 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.

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jlgreco
Media 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.

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diminoten
Why shouldn't media be taxed based on its content?

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graeme
What 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?

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MartinCron
Reminds 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.

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sukuriant
Same thing happens with falling arrows and DDR

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mistercow
True 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>

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charonn0
I 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.

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jrockway
What 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.)

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rhdoenges
Violence 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.

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r0s
Some would disagree: <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?

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malkia
Games, cartoons, books reflect the society we live in, hence they would
portray violence.

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philwelch
I 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.

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meh01
Sigh. Let's blame video games and mental illness instead of tackling the real
problem. This is going to work out great.

