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GTA Blamed for Graffiti
Voodoo Extreme is reporting on a group of Greensburg, PA boys who went on a Graffiti spree and then blamed it on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. From the article: "The boys range in age from 12 to 14 and are charged with institutional vandalism, criminal conspiracy, criminal mischief and desecration of venerated objects." Is it just me or, um, should 12 year olds not be playing GTA?
The next thing you know people will start blaming the break dancing craze on Electric Boogaloo.
then the only real solution is a government ban
Oh yea, great idea, cuz the government ban on various drugs has been so successful.
Is there one single reporter out there who is also a gamer? If I was a reporter I would go interview the parents. So, you bought this game for your children? Do you rent adult movies for them too?
New at 10: Parents buy mature and adult video games for their children, then blame the game companies when their kids make mischief.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
"Is it just me or, um, should 12 year olds not be playing GTA? "
Well if the kids are that stupid - what are the chances their parents understand a "mature" rating?
No it's not just you. But it's not their fault either. Someone had to pay for the 50 dollar game. Where are their parents. My parents still don't like me playing Grand Theft Auto. Fortunately it's outside of their control. The parents should be out cleaning the graffiti alongside their children.
E.g., if I get syphillis from a hooker, can I sue/blame the hooker and not be arrested for soliciting? Or that is a context argument. If I was 14 and got shitfaced drunk and say shot somebody, could I "blame" alcohol and avoid prosecution?
So where is this tolerance level coming from? These kids admitted to obtaining and viewing for personal use what for them is illicit material. That's enough for a paedophile webring so why not a bunch of vandals who were too stupid to avboid getting caught?
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
It's true that kids can be influenced, but so can everyone. If we want to say that kids cannot be responsible for their actions, fine. Then we must hold the parents responsible. You cannot blame a game that is designed for the 18+ crowd and shouldn't even be sold to minors.
Why do people think they can blame their actions on somthing or someone else? The only thing that made those kids pick up a can of spray paint are their own minds. Even a 12 year old knows graffiti is vandalism and they know it's wrong. Society needs to stop allowing people to scapegoat their actions. We are responsible for the things we do. Were these kids going to jack cars and run people over, maybe grab a flame thrower and torch cars and then get away with it by blaming GTA. Nobody is responsible for their actions anymore, aw jeez McDees made me fat, Smith and Wesson shot my face off while I was cleaning my loaded gun and Jack Daniels made me beat my wife.
piss off
Jesus, what a lame graffiti. They should be locked up for conspiracy to commit weak-assed self-expression.
"Wow. Now THAT'S a lot of angry Indians." - Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer
Ok, so graffiti didn't exist before GTA came out? If it didn't or it wasn't a problem, then they might have a case.
Graffiti has been a problem for decades. To blame it on a game is as ignorant as it is outrageous. I remember when some kid shot up his school and the media was all set to blame that on video games. The problem isn't the games, it's that the world that the games are based on (real-world) sucks.
Murder happens. Vandalism happens. Playing a game that incorporates this and then going out and doing this stuff doesn't make you any less of a murderer or vandal. These kids will most likely get sentenced as is proper in PA law.
The GTA angle is just a sad attempt to push a political agenda (far-right tightwads). I'm tired of conservatives thinking they have the right to tell me and whoever else what I should be able to buy. If they had their way, there wouldn't be any games with a hint of violence.
Where would that leave us? I dunno, puzzle/board/card games, I guess.
Tetris and Solitaire.
Yeah.
Right...
These kids are probably hoodlums with or without GTA.
Agreed. People who want to do bad or dumb things will do them no matter what. There was _plenty_ of graffiti long before Pong hit the market and the alleged warping of America's youth began.
GTA didn't make stupid kids vandalize things.
Beavis And Butthead didn't make stupid kids set their house on fire.
The Program didn't make stupid college kids lie down in the middle of a street and get run over.
Notice the recurring theme, anyone?
they can't sell you something you don't already want
You put very simply what is probably going to end up being one of the best points in this thread. GTA didn't make hoodlums, hoodlums made* GTA.
* No, not the programmers (though I don't know any of them personally), the general population craving the "mature" video games and shelling out big bucks for them.
http://publicvoidlife.blogspot.com
But couldn't the same argument be made for adult movies that they will get in the hands of kids, so they should be banned? This line of logic can be continued indefinatly. There are many things in this world that are dangerous to children, parents have to take responsibility, end of story.
Personally I know of a woman who rented and allowed their 8 year old daughter to watch "Saw" now thats some sick twisted stuff. Either way I still wouldn't ban the movie, just really really wish parents would use some common sense, but then again maybe this kid has proved they can handle movies like that well. On the other hand noone knows what the long term effects are. So I guess my argument is circular, all this stuff is tragic, but its not new, and we can't just go around banning things we don't like.
I grew up near Greensburg, they're now putting in the largest Wal-Mart in the world there. Not much to do in the area except go to Westmoreland mall. Kids get quickly bored in that area. I wouldn't say GTA: San Andreas is to blame. I'd say corporate commercialism and liability is.
If there were places for teenagers to hangout, like skateparks, there would be less influence to go out and do stupid things. Any time a teenager brings a gun, drugs, or hurts himself on your property, you lose your property to lawsuits. So no one caters to making fun places to hang out, its nothing but people's houses and stores out there. Maybe its like that everywhere now.
God spoke to me.
Sadly, I don't have a reference to give you about this as the moment, but I do remember reading about a psychological study where kids were separated into a group that was allowed to watch violent TV, a group that was only allowed to watch children's education programming, and a group that was not allowed to watch TV at all.
The study found that kids who watched TV were indeed more aggressive than kids who didn't. They also found that kids who watched Sesame Street were just as aggressive as the violent TV group.
I don't know if there have been any follow-up studies, but this seems to me to be a very big clue that the problem isn't strictly violence on television, but instead that there's something inherent in the mass media that goes much deeper than violence that is harming people's (or at least children's) socialization.
Just another of the little tidbits that leads me to believe that the reason why we've separated into two camps - one screaming about violent TV and video games and the other screaming about crappy parents - is that nobody really wants to admit that both of these are just symptoms of the core problem. Namely, our entire crappy, violent culture.
could be worst... ever talked with a real graffiti "artist" about their "craft"?
They would have you think that they are the great revolutionaries, fighting the supression of the individual by putting their tag everywhere and thus destroying the mindless uniformity and attacking the collective subconscious or some such.
Now admittedly I like some graffiti.... theres some absolutly beautiful peices of artwork that people have illicitly put up in backalleys on walls. Stunning stuff. Of course thats the stuff that doesn't get washed off, because well, it really does make the place look nice.
If this was what they defended I might be with them, but the vast majority is just a bunch of silly words written in paint marker or scratched into a plexiglass bus window. Crap. Nobody appreciates it but them, it just makes a place look run down and ugly.
"Yah I am a counterculture revolutionary because I can write a word in really funked up letters that nobody can read"
At least these kids if they blame it on GTA, probably wont do it again
Dumbasses.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
GTA: San Andreas sold roughly 2.1 million copies in the first 4 days. Lets say in all there were 10 million copies sold in the US (probably a conservative estimate. I can't seem to find solid numbers, even in take2's financial statements)
Now, if 1% of the copies caused people to shoot another person, that would be 100,000 murderers created by the game since its release at the end of October. A crime spree like that would be front page headlines across the country!
So lets say 0.1% of them became murderers. (We're already below the margin of error for most polls and quite a few research studies) That would be 10,000 people out of ~291million (in July 03). New York City had a population of 8,085,742. Assuming an even distribution, that would be 270 murderers in New York city alone, half of the murders for the year of 2004 (which was the lowest rate for the city since the 60's).
Below 0.1% you're no longer arguing statistical correlation vs. causal relation, you're talking about coincidence. Or in this case, the kids blaming their bad behavior on anything but themselves.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I painted 100 "Grove 4 Life" tags all over the town, now where is my AK 47? :(
I just thought they had dumbass parents who don't give a shit about their children and let them play violent video games and run the streets with weapons and spray-paint.
But now I realize, no one can control these children. At 12, they are so intelligent and powerful that parents are helpless to stop them from doing whatever they want.
FYI, there's a 12-y-o under my roof who watches nothing pg-13 or above (because he's obnoxious enough as it is, that's way). He also doesn't buy spray-paint.
Changa hates change.
So you can spray paint graffiti too in GTA:SA ? What doesn't the game have?
I've got to get this game when it comes out on PC.