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School Shooting Prompts Legislation To Study Violent Video Games
New submitter seepho writes "Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has introduced a bill directing the National Academy of Sciences to lead an investigation to determine what impact violent video games have on children. Senator Rockefeller commented, 'Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better. These court decisions show we need to do more and explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process.'"
This legislation was prompted by reports that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was a gamer. A draft of the bill is available online.
When you have an anti-religious, secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life, something fills the vacuum. And that something, you know, I don’t know that going from communion to playing war games in which you practice killing people is necessarily an improvement.
Huckabee:
We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability?
My work here is dung.
...right along with gun owners, we are at the twilight of those two industries unless we put this to a stop. Logical people know video games and guns don't cause violence - crazy assholes do. But as long as we're willing to be vilified, we will be picked to pieces in the chaos.
Endless war, militarized police, drone strikes, torture, gangster lifestyles, and overall general violence, it is all a contributing factor to devaluing life.
But let's ignore the real problem: mental illness. Lets blame guns and video games.
Adam Lanza's mother received nearly $25,000 a month in alimony, maybe the should study the connection between receiving ludicrous amounts of money for no reason and violence in children as well.
"They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons."
Classic literature and Saturday morning cartoons are, in many cases, bloody as hell. And people have gotten plenty hysterical about them in the past.
But hoarding guns and spending your time on a shooting range apparently isn't.
This looks more like a case of "shit happened, we need to blame somebody" than actually trying to solve anything. If a violent video game is going to turn someone violent it's more likely as a result of a preexisting condition.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
is how nobody understands that in roman times, medieval times, heck, even just 100 years ago, mankind was peaceful and loving
ever since these video games came out, murder has gone through the roof /sarcasm, for the sarcasm impaired
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Really? Julius Caesar played violent video games? Ghenghis Khan? Al Capone?
has anything better to do. Who cares about the fiscal cliff?
Preventing events like this is equivalent to trying to stop lightning strikes. In fact death by lightning is more common.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Why aren't we looking at keeping the crazy people themselves off the streets? As someone who has known someone that was mentally unstable and worked with their doctors to have them committed it's next to impossible to have an unstable person committed involuntarily. Typically the best you can do is 3 days, and beyond that nothing can be done unless they are an /immediate/ risk to themselves or others.
The standard needs to be changed to indeterminable risk to themselves or others, as this would make all the difference in the world in keeping unstable people off the streets and the rest of society safe. The standards are simply too stringent and by closing the institutions we have gotten rid of all of the economies of scale that allowed unstable people to have access to the physical and mental health care that they need. The result now is that the mentally unfit are homeless and society isn't protected from the unstable. The idea that this is somehow more 'humane' is ludicrous.
Let's try to keep deadly weapons out of the hands of crazy people, hmmm?
Even the NRA shouldn't have a problem with people properly securing their firearms.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Yes, the religious right does that -- and the extreme left does it too. You don't have to look at only one extreme to see all the hate being generated. Your post is an example of yet another one-sided hate spewing viewpoint.
... or both.
Our recent politics on all sides have generated the idea that anyone who disagrees with the One True Viewpoint is either Evil or Stupid
A pox on all your houses.
The way to combat such stupid, ignorant hate is to stop doing it!
But there is one big difference between us and the rest of the world. We have the mostest, biggest, baddest guns. (Baddestest?)
Switzerland issues fully automatic assault rifles (real assault rifles, not just "scary looking semi-autos") to every mentally competent male of military-eligible age. The type of weapons that are incredibly difficult to acquire in the US (for those of us not obscenely wealthy, anyway)
By your reasoning, Switzerland should be a madhouse of old-west style gunfights; I'll leave it to you to discover whether or not that is the case.
But there is one big difference between us and the rest of the world.
Indeed, and you already pointed it out:
the rest of the world may actually take care of their mentally ill.
There's the real issue at hand.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Saying this man killed his mother and then a bunch of children and teachers because he played video games is about and logical as saying he did it because he ate fatty foods, so we need shut down all McDonald's. There is no link whatsoever, beyond the fact that somebody wants to milk the events and the heightened emotions it is generating for their own crusades. Tighter gun control would not have stopped a determined and unstable man from stealing guns to go killing. Even if there had been no guns, Im sure he could have found another way. Hell, this was the 2nd deadliest elementary school killing because the deadliest used a bomb.
This really is getting ridiculous. I am getting really tired of all the politicians and lobby groups trying to spin this tragedy to their own agenda.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Canadians manage to watch movies and play video games without shooting each other. Regardless of the reason why someone picks up a gun, the problem is that they are still able to get one when they are not fit to have one. Issues about mental health and culture SHOULD be addressed, but I think the NRA and other pro-gun people are going to use those things as diversions to the real issue.......keeping automatic weapons away from most people.
I'm not American, but I've worked there for a while. And back home I keep up with the news about the US.
I fail to see that hate-spreading-left you talk about. All I see is crazy people from the Republican Party spreading hate and intolerance, promoting ignorance, forcing their warped puritan religious views on others, but promoting extreme selfishness, against the very basis of the religion they claim to love so much.
Most of those people would be considered mentally ill where I live.
Lets see, classics: Romeo and Juliet: Massive family feud between two wealthy "merchant" families, resulting in street battles and pub brawls with deaths. Ending with two main characters committing suicide. King Lear: King splits up kingdom to his daughters based on who loves him the most. Two of the three daughters conspire together and lie to get the largest shares. King disowns daughter who didn't lie. Once having the kingdom, the 2 daughters proceed to treat their father like crap, and plot to kill him. The good daughter goes to war with the other two. Good daughter is executed. King finds out his good daughter was executed, dies from grief. King's good servant commit suicide to continue serving the King in the afterlife.... Hamlet: Brother of King, kills the King, and then marries his now dead brother's wife. The son of the original king confronts his mother and can't believe that she would marry her former husband's killer. Girlfriend/lover of the son/prince commits suicide because the prince declairs that marriage should be outlawed in rage of what his mother has done. Oedipus Rex: Son/prince kills father/king. Marries mother who he is in love with.... No, there was no violence in classic literature, as long as you don't consider child molestation, incest, rape, murder, and suicide violent....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
What the hell is a "military grade" weapon and how would banning those stop shootings?
.223 Remington, a caliber too small in most states to legally shoot a deer. Meaning that the majority of hunting guns have much more energy than your so-called "military grade" weapon.
.30-06 is absolute bullshit. The idea that these "military style" weapons are somehow more dangerous demonstrates a lack of knowledge or a willful ignorance to the facts.
Banning "assault weapons" to help reduce crime is like banning red cars to reduce speeding.
The gun used in the Sandy Hook Shooting was a
These guns aren't fully automatic, they are semi-automatic, the same types that many hunters use. You pull the trigger once and it fires once. You can't hold down the trigger and spray bullets everywhere, to get those you have go to through a LOT of paperwork and they are quite expensive and because of that very, very, very few civilians own fully-automatic firearms.
These guns have detachable magazines, much like any hunting rifle, either bolt-action or semi-automatic. The magazine capacity doesn't matter all that much when we are dealing with unarmed people in a school, the 5 seconds it takes to change in a magazine doesn't make a difference in a massacre like that.
The only other things that separate an "assault weapon" from an ordinary hunting weapon is the use of bayonet mounts and some other stylistic differences, none of which make a difference when it comes to the Sandy Hook Shooting.
The idea that the gun used in the Sandy Hook Shooting is somehow more dangerous than your grandpa's
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Media, as in news media is the problem. Every time a fucked up nutcase goes out on a killing spree, there is non stop media coverage. News media glorifies the murderers yet no one remembers one of the victims. So the next nutcase sitting at home watching this is probably thinking: Man, I could do the same thing and the world will remember me!