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Connecticut Group Wants Your Violent Videogames — To Destroy Them
DavidGilbert99 writes with this excerpt from IB Times: "The Sandy Hook shooting once again raised the debate about how much power violent videogames wield over teenagers. Following proclamations from the National Rifle Association and the establishment of a study by the National Academy of Sciences to investigate the psychological effects of violent games on children, a group in Connecticut is now having its say Southington, a town 30 miles from where the shooting took place, is offering gift tokens in exchange for violent videogames, as well as other violent media such as DVDs or videos. The group, called SouthingtonSOS, said in a statement: 'There is ample evidence that violent video games, along with violent media of all kinds, including TV and movies portraying story after story showing a continuous stream of violence and killing, has contributed to increasing aggressiveness, fear, anxiety and is desensitizing our children to acts of violence including bullying.'" And Yes, they plan to destroy the traded-in games. (Note: Beware the obnoxious auto-playing video ad with sound; adjust volume accordingly.)
After all, they are asking people to voluntarily turn in their video games which people are free to do -- or not. This stands in stark contrast to those who would ban violent video games entirely and who would most likely support video game confiscation and for those who really want to play violent video games, background checks and registration. By requiring registration, it ensures that some newspaper will publish a map as to who owns violent video games or not so that violent video game owner's friends and neighbors may demonize them.
Meanwhile, I'll burn a stack of CD's that I can turn in for a stack of coupons.
Then you run into the same problem as people trading in broken or useless guns to the gun buyback:
By turning in your property, you effectively endorse their political cause. They get to say that "X number of people turned in this filth to get it off of our streets and out of our schools!". Personally, I'm not willing to become part of their cause and make that value of X going higher at any cost.
If you actually do find their message convincing then by all means turn in your games.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I just don't get this obsession. There are always a few nuts. The rest of us are fairly well-adjusted.
THIS. A thousand times.
Look -- I think the gun control crowd basically has one legitimate point that is nearly triviailly weighed against. My bias declared up front.
But there's been school shootings for at least four centuries. Their frequency is likely easily plotted out with some basic statistical physics or similar applications. The "epidemic" is so insubstantial as to be boring to everyone but CDC types with a moral obligation to treat it as such.
But I don't even need science for this, just memory and a bit of knowledge of history.
Before I was born there were witch trials, pogroms, purges, mccarthyism.... and all of these were in reaction to *shit happening* (although not necessarily caused by the victims of these activities)
In my relatively short lifetime there's been panic over D&D/satanism, rock & rap music (remember tipper gore?), trenchcoats (after columbine), pedos, terrorism, and I would claim drug use. Every five years or so we need a new internal societal threat.
These might all have a legit correlation with some form of violence. I really don't know (or care -- if they are or aren't correlated is immaterial to me, they mostly fall under the guise of the 0th freedom of thought).
But people want to find a way to understand bad things happening. They will latch on and clasp desperately to God, to an outlier, to anything to explain the 'senseless' violence they see rather than admit we are big dangerous apes with a thin veneer of civilization.
To point out anything not them that they can collectively engage in risk-free destruction of in part of the big orgy of lynchmobbery -- ideally through the tyranny of the majority driven through by the rifles of the government and their easy taxy dollars. Because this is how civilized white people destroy things -- with a pen stroke instead of a rioting mob.
And that is really all that well-adjusted means.
BRB, gonnna watch some CNN and Fox....
Jocks go on to become executives, lawyers, and politicians. Social outcasts might shoot up a movie theater every year or so, but it was jocks who got us into Iraq and caused civilian casualties in the hundreds of thousands.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yes you do. You need to think emotionally and politically.
No one is gong to track what you spend your token on. They will just count the number of games Point at the pile and say 'See!' why won't you DOOOOOOO something!'
No different then book burning.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You became a professional soldier but you don't see that as an expression of your violent tendencies?
Step back from yourself for a moment and think about that.
Oh, bullshit.
People join the armed forces because it's a job with a regular paycheck. They join because the military offers some sweet medical benefits. They join because they want to go to college without spending the rest of their lives in debt. They join because they had family members in the military.
And some of them join because they believe the Constitution and what it represents matters enough to risk their lives defending it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I don't care if people criticize video games - I'm opposed to people demonizing video games, when the facts seem to say otherwise. In regards to video game related crime, from http://www.theeca.com/video_games_violence website:
Incidentally, something like 2 days later a guy kills a couple of firemen with the same gun (a Bushmaster .223) and the guy is obviously not a video game player, but we won't mention that anywhere. Another guy shoots up a shopping mall and also is not known to be a video game player, so no talk of what caused his craziness. Suddenly the media hears "the shooter is a video game player" and Jesus is on the fucking cross and video games are to blame.
It proves that the military believe this link exists.
Actually, it doesn't even prove that. It proves that the military believes the games are useful for training in some way--which might be making trainees more willing to kill, or it might be improving their reflexes or their tactical awareness, or it might just be as a morale-boosting tool for a generation of recruits who grew up playing the games. Personally, having served as both an infantryman and a medic, and having become very familiar in the latter capacity with what the consequences of real-world violence look like, I'm deeply skeptical that even the most realistic modern video games will do much to "desensitize" anyone to actual killing.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.