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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.)
No, the jocks don't do they actual shooting themselves. But they are likely the ones who bullied the nerd into the rage that triggered the nerd's violent actions, so they are also responsible to some degree.
I played hockey since I was 5, and also played for my high school for a year. But I had to quit - because of all the idiot jocks and their homophobia, misogyny, and general distaste for anything they couldn't understand or was slightly different from them. You should have heard the shit that was talked about in the locker room. Yeah, those dumb louts sure had a firm grip on their emotions all right.
"But this one goes to 11!"
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.
But if you use the reward you get from the group to directly support the opposite of their agenda... did you really help them? For instance, using the gift token to buy a new FPS game.
I would like to think they would somehow arrange for the reward to not be able to be used in this way, but groups like this tend not to be terribly forward thinking.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Funny part is, no banning or restriction of any one thing, or even combination thereof, will curtail mass violence.
Removing every firearm from the planet won't prevent future mass violence. Removing every violent cultural item (video, music, books, etc) won't prevent it either.
Long story short... it's going to require a massive cultural shift. Problem is, too many people stand to make too much profit off of not doing that. News media will blame the viewers without stopping to think that they themselves created the viewership. Hollywood will do the same, and so one down the line, all forgetting that they all participated in building that lowest-common-denominator which we have today. The NRA will of course defensively want to keep every type of firearm legal, as they're too busy staring at the slippery slope of rights-curtailment and not liking what they see, but neglecting to see that sometimes maybe some folks don't need the things. Overly-busy parents aren't going to want to curtail their lifestyle and actually pay close attention to WTF their kid is watching, playing, and reading - especially if those kids are teenagers. Sometimes those parents can't slow down (e.g. the single working parent) - overall, this is going to require a strengthening of marriage (though not by law, but by culture).
As you can see, there are too many people won either like the status quo, or hate it but fear changing it (especially if that change introduces responsibility). So I fully expect a whole lot of nothing to be done at the least, or a lot of the wrong things done at the worst.
Meanwhile, some as-yet-anonymous sad loser of a kid quietly designs a bomb that will utilize the school's natural gas line...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?