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California City Issues Internet Cafe Moratorium
DarkZero writes: "The Sacramento Bee is reporting that the City Council of Garden Grove, California has issued a 45 day moratium on internet cafes following a fatal stabbing and several other crimes, with the justification that internet cafes are "improperly supervised environments" that very large groups of minors frequent daily (mostly to play games), and that a lot of gang violence has cropped up because of this. Another new restriction is that minors may not stay in any internet cafe past 8PM on a school night, though it isn't clear whether or not that restriction will be lifted after the 45 day period." The New York Times has a similarly breathless story, emphasizing the violence of games played at such cafes.
Roads were closed in California because they make people prone to anger and violence.
I already noticed this like 10 years ago after noticing the increase in cannabalism due to mrs. pacman.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
All these instituted regulations on minors remind me of the fundamental flaw that is at work here.
Namely, if it is so important for said minors to not be playing violent video games after 8 PM in the evening, then where are the parents? If you want to replace parents with government, then just say so and call the modern family a failure.
I doubt "the Internet" has anything to do with this issue. It's just another thing for kids to do. Movie theaters were probably thought to be similar breeding grounds for dissoluteness back in the 1920s when the problem was really that the parents didn't care enough about what their children were doing.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
One of the new restrictions will be that minors not accompanied by a parent or legal guardian may only stay at the cafes until 8 p.m. Sundays through Thursdays. Fridays and Saturdays they can stay unaccompanied until 10 p.m., city spokeswoman Kathy Moore said.
That solves it! So what do you think these youngsters are going to go do after they get booted out at 8/10 p.m.? I assure you, they won't be going home for bed-time. This just gives the kids a few extra hours to get even more bored--just think of all the stabbings they could accomplish with all this new free time.
Good to see government still knows how to protect the children.
I wish just for once.. i could read about a problem with kids and hear about a solution instead of some rediculous feel good legislation.. For gods sake help these kids.. become mentors.. work on getting better parenting for them. Solve the F*cking problem! Making them leave an internet cafe is brilliant?! So they walk down to the local park, field, parking lot.. and kill each other there. The people in charge don't care enough to do anything that would make a positive difference so they do something.. just so they cant be accused of doing nothing. It disgusts me.
Yeah, let's get violence off the computer screens and put it back on the street where it belongs.
Of course, the amusing part fo the story is that the mayor ran on a platform warning voters that without him, the town would turn into a police state [ocweekly.com].
goats.com: better than
I used to work for a company that would break every Friday at 3 to play UnrealTournament or HalfLife. Two hours of every week we'd spend splattering eachother's body parts across digital walls and floors. A good time was had by all. And when the boss stopped paying us because he'd wasted all the company funds, we simply walked away, and called our lawyers. We didn't kill him, like we had done so many Fridays in the digital universe - we didn't even give him a severe pounding (which he sorely deserved). Somehow, despite the excellent sound and graphics of the game, we still seemed to grasp the difference between the game and reality.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
Internet cafe has now turned into a modern day, high tech arcade. They should not have to do anything different from a arcade owner. If an arcade owner has to apply for a license, so should internet cafe. If an arcade has to abide by a certain regulation, so should the internet cafe. However, extra burden should not be place on the internet cafe because it is modern and may seem different.
That's what I find troubling with a lot of new regulations coming out. There are a number of prior laws that could be used to cover the computer industry but they often make new laws specifically targetted at it. Remember, computers are only another tool.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
(c. 1923) Police in an unamed mertoplitan area banned all sale of alcohol, after noting its' strong correlation to domestic crimes. "People expect the police to protect them," a spokesperson said. "We can't do that if these crime-enducing liquors are on sale."
Wow, you'd think people could learn from history. Two things may be related, but changing one doesn't neccessarily change the other (cause & effect).
Do you like Japanese imports?
Now that they're kicking the minors out early and extending the hours, that leaves 6 hours for the old folks to frag each other instead of getting fragged to oblivion by twelve-year-olds!
Last year, I use to visit the internet cafes (though these are in NYC) pretty often. I, like most other people, went to play Counter-Strike.
When one or two first opened around my place, they were relatively quiet, filled with kids who would rather be out with friends playing a game than sitting at home doing it.
But then they started getting pretty popular. Soon, we'd all go in and almost all the computers would be taken up.
And when you played, kids would truly get violent. You'd make a kill on someone and they'd get up out of their seat and start saying stuff like "Yo! Who da fuck is _______ (insert username of person who just killed him here)"
The thing is, you can't just go about banning these places because of these assholes. Unfortunately, there is normally only one person supervising the place and they normally try to avoid doing anything but collecting the 3 dollars a hour you pay.
At first, when I read about the 45 day stall, I was kinda taken aback. But now that I look at it, it's appropriate. It's not permanent. It gives these places a month and a half to hire more staff, or security, or what else is going to be needed. It's really unfortunate that this stuff is needed in the first place, but kids apparently can't take a game.
One other thing: To say it's the game itself that causes violence is bullshit. Absoutely bullshit. If this is the reason the restriction is being placed, then you better do it to all competition. Gangs are formed there too, except they're called "teams".
They key to competition is having it supervised tightly so it never gets out of hand. As lame as that sounds, it's the fault of kid's my age that brought it to that.
Regulation will solve it? Licensing will solve it?
Come on. How about considering the option that the person responsible for the teenager should be held liable to the full extent of the law.
Don't make cigarette shops card a teenager, don't make internet cafes card a teenager, don't make ANY commercial or private individual become a watchdog for the government or a parents -- because that's how we've become a nanny state.
Parents are lazy because they feel they don't need to parent anymore. Instead of watching TV with their kids, they can set their V-chip to "Rated G" and forget about it. Instead of browsing the web with their kids, they can install software, in hopes it will work 100%. Instead of finding out why their kids weren't home by 10, and grounding them for a month or three, they can hope the government will regulate a coffee house, arcade, net cafe, whatever. Instead of searching their teen's jackets and drawers looking for drugs or cigarettes, they can rely on the nanny state.
I say get rid of all regulations like these, and lets finally force parents to do the job they are responsible for: parenting.
Mod me the fuck down, if you dare:
US minors are not responsible, but they can be sentenced to death. Almost no other country in the world does that. Way to go, USA!
US adults below 21 cannot drink alcohol, but they can serve and get killed in the army. Way to go, USA!
A man is stabbed in an internet cafe. The response: put a moratorium on opening new cafes, but not on selling more knives. Knives don't kill people, people don't kill people, internet cafes kill people. God help us all.
This is where it gets really funny:
Let's suppose that they could magically enforce this. Do they know nothing about the history of trying to control demand by stifling supply? Heard of a little thing called Amendment 18? "Hey, I know of a great little Clickeasy behind the funeral parlour... I wannanother cuppa Java..."
Semi-seriously, I'm reminded of a curfew in Paisley in Scotland, when all of the nightclubs were instructed to kick everyone out at 2am on the dot. The result? The emergency services quickly learned to dispatch units at about 1:50am to arrive in time for the stabbing frenzy. If gang violence is really an issue here, I don't in all honesty see how this situation would be any different.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please, ignore the poorly worded intro on slashdot, and read the article for yourself. The City Council, responding to a fatal stabbing and other crimes at this Los Angeles suburb's many cyber cafes, placed a 45-day moratorium Tuesday on the opening of any more of the establishments. (emphasis added)
They're not shutting anyone down. They're putting in place an 8pm curfew on weeknights, and asking that the established cafes enforce the standard 10pm curfew the on the weekend.
Please, lets not let this turn into "this city is trying to take the internet away from the people because there are violent video games on the computers". This is a response to gang related stabbings. It has nothing to do with the internet, or geeks, or nerds, or whatever you choose to call yourself. It has everything to do with a rise in the number of cafes in a bad area, and the consequential rise in gang activity at those cafes.
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The beginning of the article seems to be trying to imply some link between violent video games and real-world violence, but the statements of experts in the article don't seem to support that idea.
It looks like the violence has moved from the schools, not from the computer screens, to the parking lots outside the cafes (or, presumably, anywhere else the kids might gather).
It seems to me that the mayor and others involved are imposing these restrictions because they were just recently exposed to the fact that the kids were ditching school, not because of some presumed causal link between video games and violence:
Now that I think about it, the whole darn article is just a bunch of bunk holding together a few useful statements by people who might actually know something. Other favorite parts are the repeated references to race with no apparent point ("umm, by the way, they're all Vietnamese -- draw what conclusions you will, *wink*, *wink*"), and this classic bit:
The "harmless nerds" bit is just funny, and the idea that gangs are somehow not dangerous until mixed with video games is laughable as well.
How did government ever obtain to the right to tell me how to raise my kids?
Because you weren't doing a good enough job.
Before you all erupt in mindless rage, I'm not referring to anyone specifically; this law, like most laws that attempt to regulate parenting, was done in response to a problem.
I'm not saying it's a correct response. I'm not saying it's moral. I'm not even saying it's Constitutional. But the automatic negative characterization by people on these forums of those who try to deal with these problems is just pathetic. These are NOT comic-opera villains passing laws simply out of a desire to restrict YOUR freedoms, as they twirl their long black moustachios and chortle gleefully. They're not always ambitious and greedy bureaucrats bent on advancing their career by passing frivolous legislation.
Quite often they're dealing with serious problems that don't have easy answers, and the fact that so many people here try to reduce everything to such simplistic terms reflects poorly on this community. Instead of complaining, why not suggest an alternate method of dealing with the problem?