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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.
And watches the same movies, and listens to the same music. Yet we're the only ones with a mass murder fetish, and the shittiest mental healthcare. Media isn't the problem.
It's not cool to be anti-Semitic anymore. When will it finally be socially and morally reprehensible to treat atheists like this?
Exactly. This is why we need a decent safety net for health services. People who don't get helped can affect others, so it is in everyone's best interest to have a certain bare-minimum.
While you're waiting, interesting fact about the infamous "Assault Weapons Ban" that cost the Democrats the 1994 election: it was passed with almost unanimous support in the Senate. Republicans and Democrats alike supporting it in overwhelming numbers.
Because it was a good bill? Hell no, it's a terrible piece of legislation, but that's not the point: back when it was passed, there wasn't this "Left = gun control, Right = guns for all" crap. Even before the AWB, Saint Reagan himself, as governor of California, had signed into law some of the worst gun control legislation ever seen.
From what I can discern, the NRA decided that the best way to protect its members was to (relatively arbitrarily) pick a party, and throw its weight behind it knowing that if that party knew that was going on, it would avoid crossing the NRA to avoid losing its support. This policy started in the late seventies, but really took hold in 1994 when they went all out to elect a party that was equally to blame for the hated AWB as their opponents. As long as the supported party stayed in power, and was sufficiently scared of losing support to not waver from pro-NRA positions, the NRA's policies would be bolstered.
And that action drove the usually civil-liberty-loving liberals into the hands of the NRA's opponents. Take a step back a moment: does it really make much sense that liberals, who detest restrictions on speech, on what you can do with your own bodies, on people being jailed, would actually, normally, be in favor - in principle - of someone owning a device as long as they used it responsibly?
And that leads to an obvious conclusion: we can safely assume that it's highly improbable that gun control will pass in the next two years, even token gun control. But let's fast forward to 2014. Congress finally is switched to blue in both houses, as the trends suggest (there was a popular vote victory for the Democrats in the House this year and it was only because of the way district boundaries are drawn that Republicans won the House.) The Democrats celebrate by passing sweeping laws outlawing most semi-automatic weapons with a gun buyback program to get the weapons finally out of circulation.
Who has created the political climate where the Democrats would be so anti-gun it would do such a thing? Where the party of the ACLU would delight in stepping on the rights of millions of peaceful, non-threatening, gun owners?
Maybe, just maybe, the NRA should change its strategy.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.