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German Police Union Chief Wants Violent Game Ban After Shooting
A recent shooting in Germany has raised the ire of many politicians and officials, and they're turning to video games as a scapegoat after it was revealed that the shooter was a fan of Counterstrike and played Far Cry 2 the night before the rampage. First, a major retailer decided to drop mature-rated games altogether, and then the Minister for Social Affairs suggested restricting "addictive games," such as World of Warcraft, to adults only. Despite an unfavorable reaction from gamers and game developers alike, the chief of Germany's national police union has now spoken out against violent games as well, saying, "The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames."
Blame the games. Because we know how many people are killed each year by mice and Dual Shock controllers.
This is in the same vein as people who blame pornography for rape.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
...leave it to a German to take one person and blame a mass of people for that one person's faults. counter-strike and Far cry 2 aren't animate objects. they can't load a clip for you. they can't cock the hammer and pull the trigger. Run a search for violence statistics on google and you'll see that since the creation of violent video games, world-wide violent crimes have gone down, not up.
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It was also found he was breathing the night before he killed those people. We should ban that too.
You'll find that the vast majority of school-shooters play first-person shooters.
The vast majority of young males also player first-person shooters.
You'll even find that the vast majority of young males eat bread.
What exactly does this tell us?
This wouldn't have happened
1) if the guy hadn't had access to inordinate amounts of bullets (you can't kill 15 people with less than 15 bullets)
2) if the guy hadn't had access to a gun that was stored outside the legally required locked safe
3) if the guy hadn't been given weapons training even though his diagnosed mental condition (again, this was against the law)
Once you've addressed these issues, we may want to talk about banning violent games.
Look, the whole world culture is becoming more violent when compared to - say - the 1950s. Comics like Tales of the Black Freighter existed in the 1960s, but they were harder to get instead of say, Archie comics. Television had violence in shows like Gunsmoke, but always with a moral tone.
Movies like Last House on the Left would have a hard time getting made even in the 1980s. Yes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre existed, but Last House on the Left depicts a violent rape, and the Saw movies are torture porn.
Responses to web boards (every major newspaper now takes comments to about every single story) depicts a violent world. I took a look at the Entertainment Weekly website, looked at an article about Natasha Richardson's death from head injury. Unfortunately, the sysadmins at EW don't screen comments. It was horrific, with comments that are hard to repeat, many talking about what they would do to her corpse and many being glad that she "got what she deserved".
Videogames are simply reflecting this culture shift. A game like Bully simply reflects what goes on. It's a deep, and very unfortunate, confusion of the chicken and the egg. Somehow, legislators look at Resident Evil 5 and see something that they don't see in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. They look at Far Cry 2 and they take a pass on Sorority Row, a trailer I saw last night that looked as violent and horrific as anything I've seen from Wes Craven.
Somehow the interactive nature of video games makes people feel that it "thresholds" behavior. If you fantasize about harming animals, you need therapy. If you actually bind, torture and kill animals - you are quite a step closer to being a human killer. Somehow, this logic is being applied to shooters. That makes playing shooters itself a deviant behavior. I think it signals something deeply wrong with our culture, but it's interactivity alone does not single it out as threshold behavior.
It seems that most responses to this sort of article are of the form "violent video games have nothing to do with what he did!" And then when something about a black shooter in a ghetto comes up, most people say "It's his society and location, if we could just get rid of the ghettos/black gangs/whatever, we'd have less violence/shooting/murders."
So it seems that in general, people do think that the environment one lives in affects one's decisions. Well, video games are part of my environment.
So instead of simply dismissing video games as having anything to do with decisions (which, IMO, is a ridiculous proposition, the idea you could spend 20+ hours a week playing video games and not have it affect you, whether that's morally, ethically, intellectually, ... grammatically ... what about, oh, say, myspace? no affect?)... I'd propose that we start posting how video games (especially violent ones, since that's this article's topic) DO affect you. How does virtual violence affect someone.
And preferably more than the curt "Duh, it lets you cool off virtually making you less likely to kill someone in real life." I'm not sure that is any more or less proven than video games causing real life shootings. If it does... then [citation needed]
Crappy journalistic research.
It's "just" the chief of the Hessian section of the DPolG, not the Chief on the federal level.
And there's several police unions as well, with the DPolG only being second largest (about half as big as the GdP with a few micro unions not worth mentioning).
Apart from that, it was pretty clear that everyone's gonna scream BANZOR KILLARGAMES after the little fuckwit ganked his old school, so no big surprise there.
What is imo most surprising is how careful and diplomatic Christian Pfeiffer is with his statements. He usually was pretty rabid anti-"Killergame" the last couple years and I expected him to gloat and go "TOLD YA" to his critics, but he actually says stuff like games are not the deciding factor, not the original cause for stuff like that, just a small piece of a big puzzle with social issues being the real problem, etc.
I'm confused. It's like if Jack Thompson would go ahead and offer to become BFF with John Carmack.
Sure. Let people buy guns. When they use them to kill people, ban video games. Hey, some crazies have killed people because God told them to! Let's ban religion!
When ever you see a tragedy such as a school or public shooting or anything for that matter the first thing you do is say why, the second thing you do is find the easiest answer. The truth is that if someone does something that people don't understand they tend to blame the thing that person did that they didn't understand. I would agree that violence can breed more violence but it's pretty hard to blame video games when you see it played out in movies, TV, on the streets, and anywhere. The question is, is that when every one I know plays violent video games and not one of them has been convicted of a violent crime what does that prove? Counter-strike has 4.2 million users(just the original not source as there would be some cross over between the users number comes from Wikipedia) world wide. If this game(which is 10 years old give or take a few months) truly breed the kind of violence that made this kid kill people that's 0.0000238% of all people that play are made violent enough to commit a crime, I'm pretty sure that's an anomaly.
I would hope that things would settle down people would look at it a little more logically and decide that this kind of thing is silly. I would hope parents would be aware of the mental state of their children and be trying to get help if they can, and be aware of what content they can handle. I have heard of kids calming down once fighting games were removed but as a parent you should be watching them instead of letting them socialize on video games alone. If you let them play video games watch or play with them, of course as they get older it's harder to do that besides not giving them money to buy games, and then if they are still violent it's tragic but at least you shouldn't be blaming video games at that point.
...as is evident from the hundreds of thousands of CS gamers who DIDN'T go on a murderous rampage.
The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames.
Nor would it be any poorer if there were no movies in which people died, or books containing stories involving violent conflict.
I also think the world would get along just fine without football, golf, chess, horse races, and many other things.
But that doesn't in any way justify me taking those things away from people who want them....let alone those who turn a decent profit from facilitating them.
Maybe they should ban guns?
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External locus of control. The shooter had it. Why do you think 14 out of 15 victims were female? He was gunning for females, because he was blaming all females for his condition. He blamed them for so much that he thought they collectively deserved to die.
Now the interesting part: pretty much everybody who wants to ban videogames because of events like these believes just as much in an external locus of control as the shooter. Except instead of believing that a group of people is directly harming them, they believe that a group of people is influencing "their" people through violent games. And instead of wanting to shoot the people they accuse, they want to ban their product.
Granted, it's better to ban a product than to shoot someone. But the fundamental drive is the same. It's also the drive that's behind book burnings and conspiracy theories like the protocols of the elders of zion. It's bullshit that makes people feel better and in control - it's not them that's the problem, and there's an easy solution at hand.
I despise both the shooter and the idiots who clamor for video gaming bannings equally. One's more harmful than the other, but that's just because the other is a bigger pansy. I'm convinced that under the right circumstances, the head of the state's police union would be just as willing a shooter as the 17 year old kid.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
to reduce warfare! Ban Monopoly to reduce greed! Ban Poker to reduce deception! Games don't cause the darker side of human nature...they allow a safe acceptable way to explore it in symbolic simulacrum.
While we're at it, lets also ban drugs, that way, we'll never see them on our streets again! ... Oh wait, we do. The only thing this will accomplish is an advocacy of piracy. Do you really think passionate gamers aren't going to turn to the torrents to get their fix? Keep dreaming you simple-minded jackasses.
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The real problem with that guy in Germany was that a) he had a depression and was not treated for that, b) his father trained him shooting with real weapons which is forbidden for depressive people and c) his father had not his weapons locked away which was also against the law.
His depression was caused by feeling underrated by other people. He felt bullied by his former classmates and teachers. These two aspects were the cause of the shooting not any ego-shooter.
Police are supposed to investigate and solve crimes. (among other things).
How can you investigate and solve crimes if you don't understand the difference between correlation and causation?
Is anyone else worried that the Chief of Police makes conclusions like this?
It basically shows that the guy running the police force isn't smart enough to reason properly about simple casual relationships.
For example, if you turn up bound and gagged at a murder scene, is this chief of police going to conclude you are the murderer?
Rather than that some third factor (the actual murderer) is responsible for both you and the victim being there?
It's not good.
nobody wants to hear exactly this kind of stuff and ask these questions over here.
the german school system has degraded seriously since i 'enjoyed' it. the kids are under more and more pressure, but if you fail, it's only your fault. because you're lazy. it's never the systems fault. if you're treated unfairly, your fault. you're an outsider and laughed at by the others? your fault.
this whole systems is becoming more and more a radical filter to push out good portions of our society. the worst thing that can happen to you in god ol' germany is that you fail school at some point, are undereducated, don't get a job, no further education. that's the real german stigma. unemployed and even worse: lazy. then you 'failed' society. this is pushing a hell of pressure on you in our educational system.
and that's what happened to this guy. he failed school at a point where it's really hard to get a job. especially now. but, his parents are supposedly pretty well established (porsche etc.). maybe pressure from his parents? you bet.
oh well i forgot. it was just 2h playing counterstrike.
You mentioned *fiction* works. What about a Book that a significant percentage of people not only claim is NOT fiction, but a work full of moral and ethical teachings? What if that Book has scenes of drunkenness, incest, genocide, murder, prostitution, debauchery? How much worse would be the effect of that?
Interviewer: "If you could say anything to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, what would you tell them?"
Manson: "I wouldn't have said anything, I would have listened to what they had to say."
And you're wrong, too. The kid felt the need to kill people, and so he did. His father teaching him how to use real weapons did not cause him to feel the need to kill people. His father not locking the weapons away did not cause him to feel the need to kill people.
It is easier to kill with guns than a knife or baseball bat. It is easier to take an unlocked weapon from your dad's closet than steal one from the gun store. But making it harder to kill isn't going to stop people from feeling the need to kill others. Maybe we should find out what it is that causes people to want to kill other people. Find that out and make it harder to do that. Then you will solve problems.
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The world would be no poorer if there were no idiot politicians looking to gain fame and control the masses, and leveraging the bodies of the recently deceased to do it.
This makes me think of comedian David Cross's joke about Hitler and what violent video games he played. I'll preface my main post with this: I'm not German but my wife is, and I've spent quite a bit of time in Germany over the past few years. That doesn't make me an expert, but I have observed a lot about their culture through talking with people, being there, and just simply paying attention to what goes on there.
What amazes me is that for a country that has contributed some of the important art and intellectual works across all spectrum, they are so willing to sacrifice certain rights for a perceived sense of freedom. I get into arguments with my wife all the time about censorship, and like most people (even here in the US), as long as it doesn't directly affect them, they don't care. I've often said that it's easy to sacrifice another man's freedom. Sacrifice gun rights, freedom of speech and press, expression, religion, just as long as the right being given up doesn't affect me. I guess I expected more out of Germany.
I'm so sick of the whole violent video game debate. I'm having flashbacks to the 80s when I was a young metalhead, and watching Tipper Gore and the PMRC blame metal music for society's ills! You can make statistics prove anything. The fact is that the problem is not epidemic. Millions of people all over the world play violent video games. If there really was some direct correlation to playing games and real violence, we would have mass chaos and destruction due to the sheer number of people playing games. It's a lame, knee-jerk reaction to explain complex problems. I guess it's easier to blame serious problems on video games than on the real problems that cause violence on a mass scale: ethnic disputes, religion, etc. People have taken the old "Devil made me do it" argument and put a new spin on it: TV and movies made me do it, DnD made me do it, metal music made me do it, and now video games made me do it. What is the percentage of people that commit real acts of violence and play video games? Is violence something new? Did man just become violent in the last 30 years or so?
I don't want to put all of the blame on Germany. There are other countries that do the same - Australia, for one (I lived there!). As an American (and as an artist), the idea of censorship is repulsive to me. I've grown up cherishing and respecting my constitutional rights, and when I see people in foreign countries (modern and democratic countries) so willing to give up their rights, I'm shocked.
Ok guys. Here's the secret... Violent people (read: people with a tendency towards violence) do violent things. People with violent tendencies are DRAWN to more violent forms of entertainment. This is not to say that the form of entertainment is the cause. Millions of people around the world do not kill people the day after they play CS:S. I am also not saying that just because you have violent tendencies that playing CS:S or watching "Silence of the Lambs" or "Halloween" will cause you to go out and shoot, eat, or stab people. The people that do stuff like this are simply violent due to some freak coincidental chain of events that happened in their lives and the choices they made to cope with those events. Parents need to teach their children how to cope with stuff going wrong... But even if they fail that responsibility, it doesn't warrant the person committing such acts to do so. Nor does it warrant the government to ban these forms of entertainment for the general public. (Or people "targeted with violent tendencies" for that matter.)
I remember watching that film very well, it was an excellent documentary.
But, in particular, I appreciated the irony that the most intelligent comment about the killings out of all the interviews came from the very man who was the scapegoat.
Well how about we just go and ban killing altogether then? ban the movies, ban tv, ban the internet, can we ban history? Sure lets ban history! Lots of death and killing in that vile thing called history! I mean someone went mad last week and killed 3 people and you know what? I heard he had a history exam yesterday! By this dumb-ass logic we can then assume that history classes cause you to go on a killing spree with their terrible content.
And you're wrong, too. The kid felt the need to kill people, and so he did. His father teaching him how to use real weapons did not cause him to feel the need to kill people.
But if he didn't know how to use "real" weapons he probably wouldn't have killed as many people.
His father not locking the weapons away did not cause him to feel the need to kill people.
But it made the guns easy to access, and familiar.
It is easier to kill with guns than a knife or baseball bat. It is easier to take an unlocked weapon from your dad's closet than steal one from the gun store.
I've never been in a gun store (not sure they exist in this country?) but I'm guessing they have pretty good security.
But making it harder to kill isn't going to stop people from feeling the need to kill others.
But it might reduce the casualties. If the man hadn't had a gun available, he might have calmed down before he managed to get one. Or he might have been caught trying to steal one.
Maybe we should find out what it is that causes people to want to kill other people. Find that out and make it harder to do that. Then you will solve problems.
It's already been mentioned that the man was depressed. I don't know if he was being given treatment.
We don't have to choose between stopping people from wanting to kill people and eradicating tools used to kill people. We can do both, which seems to be the case in Germany.
the kid was mobbed by his class and his teachers.
That's why he went to his former school to kill his harassers.
In total he played 10 minutes of FPS as shows his online counter.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
Or I could try and buy one on the black market, but I don't associate with the right kind of people, so that wouldn't be easy.
It's easier than you'd think. If you can find illegal drugs you can find illegal weapons.
Most guns are banned here in the UK. Some can be owned with a license
I'm a gun-toting American, so I doubt you and I would see eye to eye. I'm a believer in having the ability to defend oneself from the criminal element and do not think that taking away tools is a good way to reduce crime. A better solution in my mind would be to address the socio-economic factors that push most people into committing crimes while locking up the true psychopaths who can't be redeemed.
Did you know that 80% to 90% of people who commit murder already have violent criminal records? Instead of trying to disarm the people who aren't violent criminals perhaps we should be asking ourselves why the violent criminals are being released back into society so quickly?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Yeah, I know: we're all tired of idiots saying "I blame society."
However, for smart children, this society is a mess. It has no goals. It suffocates us in platitudes (equality, generosity, compassion) while forcing us into a life of conformity to very basic aims, like money and popularity. While all this public bloviation goes on, commerce destroys everything good by turning it into a lowest common denominator product. The smart kids see this; everyone else is oblivious.
From my reading of the documents that school shooters like Jeff Weise, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen leave behind, this more than anything else is their motivation: our society is a monstrous hypocrite that has lost direction, and because it cannot face that, we all serve in boredom and frustration.
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What video game shall we blame for Adolf Hitler's actions?
(Oh, that's right. VIDEO GAMES weren't invented yet!!!)
The human mind is the greatest weapon ever created, plain and simple. Because the German police have lost touch with reality and decided to be patrol officers instead of being active in their society, what that teenager did was ALLOWED to happen.
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate