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Senator Feinstein: We Need Video Game Control
ducomputergeek writes "Since the assault weapons ban seems to have died in Congress, it looks like Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) now turning her attention to video games...again. '"If Sandy Hook doesn't [make game publishers change] then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the future," said Feinstein. She went on to claim that video games play "a very negative role for young people, and the industry ought to take note of that."' Yet, as the article points out, since the introduction of games like DOOM, the crime rate in the U.S. has gone down. Dramatically. Correlation != causation, and all that jazz, but there are a lot of violent video games these days and yet crime has continued to go down."
News at 11...
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I mean, with the certainty that the "leaded gasoline -> crime" study had, it should stand to reason that the only criminals left are ones who play with discarded car batteries or maybe gnaw on certain chinese made baby toys. I think the continued presence of crime can be explained one of two ways (Certainly not both) that there is secretly lead in our water supply, or that violent video games are lead infused.
Science!
There are a lot of violent video games these days and yet crime has continued to go down.
Taking your anger out on pixels on a screen is far easier and cost efficient over running rampant on real people.
Fact is that video games have made us safer. Population has increased yet the number of psychos per 100 people has decreased. Homicide rates have decreased. The murder rate in the prohibition era (1920s) was 4 times higher than today's rate.
Thanks to banning violent comics in the 50s there was no violence in the 60s.
Absolutely no seducing your innocents allowed.
crazy dynamite monkey
It is the usual democratic knee-jerk reaction.
As opposed to the alternate republican knee-jerk reaction.
I don't even think that these people believe the verbal diarrhea they spew, but it plays well to their constituents.
Overall, across the country, crime is down. Way down, and that includes murder and murder by gun. That doesn't seem to get considered in their posturing.
What's really newsworthy about this? The NRA and Feinstein agreeing on something...
I'm checking the temperature in Hell right now, expecting record lows... /NRA member, wrote to complain to them after their little news release.
I don't read AC A human right
Every time she opens her mouth these days, stronger and stronger derp comes out.
Recently she's gotten up to weapons-grade stupid. Time for her to go.
What part of the First Amendment doesn't Diane Feinstein understand? The courts have (rightly) ruled that video games are a constitutionally protected art form. The government has no more right to censor video games than they do books, plays, movies, or any other type of media.
I always figured that violent video games, especially the more realistic ones, provide a safe (ie: therapeutic) outlet for the homicidal impulses that everyone (however otherwise sane) inevitably has. Outlaw those and escalating "urban stress" will cause a dramatic increase in violent acts.
What sort of cultural dysfunction makes wrinkly old people in positions of authority so insufferable? Is it the rock and roll devil music that they were exposed to as children?
I personally love violent video games and movies and would be angry to see them banned or censored.
On the other hand, pretending that constant exposure to violence is 100% harmless is silly. Personal anecdotes about "I played DOOM and I never shot anybody" does not help either.
Conservative Teens
Recent surveys show that today's teens are more conservative than the previous generation on issues like abortion and drug use. What do you think?
“Who can blame them, what with all the conservative video games they're playing?” -- Fannie Whitton, Tailor
where are the Dead Kennedy's when you need them?
I have an idea, why doesn't the United States do what they did with movies and put ratings on every video game, and then refuse to sell ones aimed at adults to children?
Oh wait, they already did that.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
How many times do we have to go through this? There are volumes of research that says that these concerns are shaky at best. There is a mountain of case law that says that these laws won't survive challenge. Yet, here she goes again. At what point do these people accept reality and stop wasting time and money?
I'd like to propose a law myself. It says, if any member of government tables a bill that they know, or should have known, would fail, they MUST resign their positions. Maybe it would make them do five minutes of research before rushing to waste time and money.
Before it was about the tools used, now its about entertainment they consumed, maybe after this gets dropped they will get to the real cause: the side of effects of SSRIs
OR in otherwords.
STFU Feinstein....pass the stupid budget...balance it...or we'll beat you to death with our Halo 4 game box.
So all here agree that she is obviously wrong about this.
Can we all agree that she is obviously wrong about her other issues as well, such as gun control?
Both parties about nothing but bread and circus.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This isn't some confused 14 year old who went out and started shooting the place up it was a 20 year old. A 20 year old that should have had 20 years to learn that life isn't a video game. Learn that you don't go killing people just for shits, because you're pissed off, or what ever. Myself, and I dare say millions of people in world have played violent video games since the day they were able to sit at a computer(now a console I suppose) and to this day we have maybe a handful of incidents that cry out tragedy. That's some fucked up math. You want to point a finger at guns, sure they were probably used in 90% of these attacks(I recall one where some asshole blew up a school decades ago with TNT). Guns are not the problem here either, it's not the media glorifying it* though I dare say that has more of an affect on children than video games.
The problem is mental illness. This guy was sick, that's all there is to it. How else do you explain the millions of people that play video games and nothing happens. How else do you explain people that have gone through so much tragedy seen so much worse from such horrible backgrounds not going out and killing a swath of children with semi-automatic guns. He was sick, and no one gives a fuck about it. No one wants to explore a health care system that would try and reach people like this early. They don't want to try and help the people like Adam Lanza because he wasn't at fault, it was the guns, the video games heaven forbid they found milk in his fridge and blamed the milk man.
*The media does more to glorify killing than any video game, they play on repeat hours and hours of footage of what happened they immortalize the killers. Some guy who said to himself all his life "no one knows who I am no one understands me" all of the sudden realize "If I shoot up a school people will look at me and know my name, they will know who I am and spend years trying to figure me out" Shits fucked up.
This is one of the few topics where we should all be able to paste that classic animated gif of the guy beating the dead horse. I suspect these politicians don't actually give a crap about video games. They are just pandering to a noisy few people who pester them about it.
I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia where the municipal politicians have internationally humiliated themselves regularly every few years over proposed Cat bylaws. I asked one councilor why they would ever bring up the stupidest idea regularly every half decade or so and he told me that it was the number one thing that people whined at him about; not taxes (which are off the charts in Halifax), not potholes, not all the crime, the dirt, the lack of jobs, the money wasted, or any of the actual pressing matters but the thing that made people intercept him in the grocery store was cats crapping in their gardens. So he just proposed the stupid bylaw and weathered the storm of stupidity so that he could shut them up.
I suspect that these people who whine about Video Games are low IQ types who don't really understand the real issues facing the US but think they have wrapped their pea brains around an issue and then go off on their moral quest. Their parents were probably on about rap music and their grandparents had their knickers in a knot over satan's rock and roll.
The ironic thing is that these same people were probably all wound up about a tiny rule stating that the president has to be born in the US while ignoring the most important, and first, amendment in the constitution they claim to hold in nearly the same esteem as their bibles. What I think it all boils down to is that people that drive laws like this don't like people having fun that they don't understand.
The first victim of the Sandy Hook event was the mother of shooter. 'Mom' gave the gun to the shooter, and taught the shooter to shoot. What saddens me more is that the shooter did not immediately turn inward. Thanks 'Mom'.
Guns in the hands of the mentally unbalanced seems to be the most ignored issue, why?
Since virtually every console and most games now require internet access and use back-end servers for something, the manufactures/publishers just need to add age restriction enforcement to their TOS agreements. "You must be 18 years old or older to play games rates M" and such. Then just have the feds arrest the little violators and charge them under the CFAA.
Fixed! They were probably going to grow up to be felons anyway, so this just nips it in the bud early. As an added bonus since they will now be felons, they won't be eligible to (legally) purchase/own/use firearms!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
June 25, 2015: This morning, President Obama signed into law banning 'Everything Bad' for the American people. Americans must now return straight home from their jobs and TOUCH NOTHING!! Recent studies have shown that, "...too much of anything is no good for you."
This new law bans pornography, sex with anyone including so called "self sex", computing, video gaming, and drinking water, since studies have shown that 2 Englishmen die yearly from over-imbibing of the liquid. Film which would normally be at 11 about this latest development will not be shown, since the new ban now bans television.
Let's get some control on Congress and the Corporations -- like that will ever happen. If I recall -- Feinstein was among the members of Congress found to be actively engaged in INSIDER TRADING by dealing in information given to her by Industry Lobbyists in exchange for "favors" and GIVEN A PASS! These members of Congress had claimed that they didn't know that Insider Trading was bad and inappropriate -- no charges or even fines will ever be levied against the Members of Congress or the Lobbyists who supplied the information by the SEC or DoJ.
In the last 30 years Congress has redefined "The People" as the Corporate Entities and the .5%. They see their job as handing as much power and control over the Subjects of the US to them as possible. Controlling Freedom of Expresion and curtailing the Constitutional Rights of the Subjects is needed to achieve that end.
Dear Senator Feinstein,
The demographic you're trying to fear-monger votes out of is dying off and an ever-increasing percentage of voters think this makes you look like an unelectable fool.
Sincerely,
A democrat under 30.
Congress has learned that spoons make people fat. Senator Feinstein is now announcing legislation in conjunction with a PR push by Michelle Obama calling for a ban or at minimum a tax on all spoons to put an end to obesity.
If an artwork/material/etc is considered obscene by the moral standards of the general community at large (in the pertinent locale) AND has no redeeming social/educational value, then it is considered obscene and should be banned.
Any "obscenely" violent vidya game could simply take a page from Playboy's playbook, and insert some kind of PSA like "give the gift of Literacy" somewhere within the work that is prominently visible, and it would fail Part 2 of the Miller Test and therefore be Not Obscene.
Congress, Ms. Feinstein in particular, but the rest of them also need to be thrown out.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
People like Feinstein don't want to face the judgmental reality that some people are just incorrigibly violent and dangerous. Many others are such that they won't have an epiphany about not hurting their fellow man until the system rains down fire and brimstone on their heads (ex. many small time violent criminals) often in a way that ruins their life.
You are trying to understand low to non-existent empathy people from the perspective of normal empathy. You can't. Their brains are probably almost as alien in many ways as a jungle cat or a wolf's brain.
Liberals don't like to face the fact that evil people are very often not insane. In fact they are probably some of the most brutally realistic people you'll ever meet and can function on a level equal to or higher than the average joe in the social order.
This will be forgotten in a couple days.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
The truth is, our Senators are failing at their jobs. They make laws they know nothing about, and make a lot of laws that seems to be straight from corporation playbooks. But the sad truth is, the law makers do NOT understand Technology.
Look, if video games were that bad, then most of us would be killers. Instead of me laughing at dumb ass people, I'd shoot them. Since I've played a lot of Grand Theft Auto, in reality I must be stealing cars and killing people right and left. But oddly enough, I don't. You can't say it's because I'm not criminally inclined, because I am.
The truth is, some people are just plain fucked in the head. And they are going to lash out in a way that is public and we don't like. If you want to play the blame game, it's our faults for not giving everyone the mental health care they might need. Shit, I didn't get any till I was in my 30's. Why don't we put more money into the health care (mental included) for everyone in the United States, like a good government would do for it's people. That is, if they really cared about the people.
Be seeing you...
Mother Jones recently published an article America's Real Criminal Element: Lead, detailing the correlation between decrease in environmental lead levels (mostly due to unleaded gasoline laws) and the decrease in crime rates (with a 20-year delay). The numbers are impressive, and they've correlated across areas of the country that enacted lead control laws at different times. The research is thorough and they make bold claims: "Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century." I highly recommend giving it a thorough read.
We need Feinstein control.
All damn day long every day what you don't see is those Capitol Hill suits being handed the fat checks from lobbyists from the mega corporations who they really serve instead of the voting public.
We need to protect amurca from the turrists! (READ: We needs to blow up lots of Boeing / Raytheon / GE munitions so they can sell us more and Profit!!!)
We need to ban all the Weapons of War from Our Streets to Keep the Children Alive !!! (While the cops / border patrol / DHS all drive around in armored SUVs and MRAPs carrying full-auto machineguns and wearing battle armor)
We need Health Care Reform to make Medicine Affordable (... so they force everyone to pay the insurance companies who are responsible for accepting the overbilling of every single medical procedure performed because doctors know they will pay so they bill double, instead of having the medical prices actually regulated to sane levels like every other civilized country in the world practially)
If you support gun control now, you are just helping lay the groundwork for stringent GAME control later.
Just published, a good article on Kotaku making the case why game and gun supporters need to start treating each other with respect, instead of as enemies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Bombing people with drones and 12 years of endless war is ok, violence and murder is fine on television and in movies, but make a game about it? HELL NO!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If you follow her logic that playing violent video games leads to violent behavior by the people that play the game then we should all be running in fear for our lives from every military vet who ever served our country in a combat situation. If simulated violence is able to turn the average game player into a mindless killing machine, I can only imagine what is going on inside of the people who have had to be a part of real violence like war.
My apologies to all the members of the military. I in no way believe the above statements.
Every shooting in the USA, every single one, without exception, has taken place in a state which had at least one Senator. The majority of shootings took place in states with two Senators.
That even includes the District of Columbia, which is afflicted with two Shadow Senators even though it isn't a state.
It's obvious even to a child of six that the problem is not video games, not guns, not even lack of access to health care for the mentally ill, it's the presence of Senators.
Abolish the Senate and I guarantee you that the problem of shootings taking place in states with Senators will go away immediately.
Bullshit. Obscene is defined by whatever the person that holds political power and is willing to define it want it to be. That is the problem with creating loopholes in constitutional principles that should be absolute.
Vote all senators who voted for the Monsanto protection act out of the senate.
"We need video game control"
No, we need to control our government from going tyrannical. First they blamed literature, than pot, than liquor, than music, than movies, and now video games. How about we blame and get rid of the bible and Quran since these 2 books have a very major negative influence on society causing nothing but bigotry and violence, if we are going to play the blame game.
You will always have assholes lurking in any society using religion or some other ideology to rape, murder, enslave, control the masses through government propaganda. Video games, movies, music, sports, art, literature, automobiles are the best things in life to keep you from going insane.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
In the USA, fortunately, no one person holds all the political power.
These people spend all their time trying to deny other people of freedom. If we need any kind of control, it's Senator control.
Geez.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
FTC has been doing secret shopper tests on volutary rating systems. R rated movies, M rated games, Parental Advisory Music. Game stores have the best record. Their record has also improve dramatically in the last 10 years. In 2002 90% of the children secret shoppers could buy M rated games. Now it varies between 8%(gamestop) to 22%(walmart) http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2013/03/mysteryshop.shtm
Google 'Robbie Parker', and his scary wife, 'Alissa Parker', etc.
Are you so stupid that you believe anything the Jew-owned media tells you?
to always want more laws to "protect the children" and control the people. Hitler was a socialist who passed gun control laws.
Feinstein has always had problems with Constitutional protections for anything she doesn't like. She likes to pretend that the Constitution only protects the things that she favors. If a Senator will blatantly attack the 2nd amendment, why would it surprise someone that she would go after the 1st?
You have to give her credit in her consistent disregard for peoples rights, her track record is as bad as other Senator currently serving in Congress. She's a hardcore extremist and thinks nothing of using the law to trample anyone that doesn't think like she does. Left wing and right wing extremists are both just as bad at having trouble understanding rights are rights and that they should not mess with them.
Moderate in the middle that supports all rights.
We need Feinstein control. Keeping Feinsteins off our streets will make America a safer place. Come on, Californians, vote her out before she turns all of America into the communistic government that California has become! I've always voted against her, no matter who the opposition was.
The only thing that'll stop a bad guy with a video game, is a good guy with a video game.
ceci n'est pas un sig
If an artwork/material/etc is considered obscene by the moral standards of the general community at large (in the pertinent locale) AND has no redeeming social/educational value, then it is considered obscene and should be banned.
So in other words, it's completely subjective. What a surprise!
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
If the fad of games influenced people, we would be imitating FarmVille!
I know how to make video games less violent, add more sex.... beating hookers, why not as long they have their tops on otherwise the NC-17 rating makes it un-publishable.
There already seem to be laws against everything, so why do we need more? If we aren't enforcing the laws we have, we obviously need a law making it illegal to break the law.
YGBSM
I remember this kind of rhetoric was coming up in the news cycle a few months ago, and video game studios reacted as badly to it as gun companies reacted to talk about new gun control measures. Gun manufacturers immediately made the implicit assumption that any and all gun control measures violate the 2nd amendment (when the supreme court has repeatedly held this is not the case) by decrying new legislation as being unconstitutional before it's even written. Game studios were similarly quick to invoke the first amendment to protect themselves from the very idea of being held responsible for any of the consequences of the games they make. I'm an avid gamer, and I know that studies have shown that there is no correlation between violent games and violent crime, and that there is no logical reason to sensor violent games. That being said, I don't think it's unconstitutional to sensor media that leads to violence, and if a new study came out that verifiably showed a correlation between games and violence, I would support legislation to more heavily regulate games.
She couldn't do what she really wanted to with the gun industry, so she sets her sites on video games. Less lobbyists = easier targets. (Puns might be intentional.)
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
No one wants to explore a health care system that would try and reach people like this early.
The problem is that people don't wan't to admit that their love ones are crazy. You see all kinds of warning signs and you explain it away as bad behavior.
I know about Miller Test, but it is far from being an objective test and basically gives ground for a judges to consider whatever he wishes as obscene.
And although no one person holds all the power in US, you are ridiculously deluded if you think that in US or in any country there aren't very small groups of people who do hold all the power. Usually those "people" are called corporations.
It also explains why the birthplace of such fine things as pizza and a plethora of delicious cured meats was once a murderous death machine that ran atop lead plumbing.
She's long been one for getting rid of second amendment rights, without actually repealing the amendment. Something I think people forget is that the controlling/statist types don't stop at just trying to control the things you want them to control. They want to control everything. They'll ignore any rights they don't like.
So this should surprise all of nobody. She's one of the "People have rights only until I decided I don't like them," types. Doesn't really matter what the right is. If they decide that more control is needed, they'll trample on it.
We vote for video games the same way we vote for politicians: money. How is it that one can lobby to control the voting pool of the other? Does that mean the group of people who vote for video games with their money is essentially different than the group of people who vote for the politicians who wish to control them?
Not that human choice in either video games or politicians has been particularly stellar.
Maybe the loss in the end is that one group of people chose to vote for video games instead of politicians?
"Video Game Control", much like "Gun Control" really just requires the use of two hands.
(Discuss!)
Politicians don't want any part of the mental health issue because it costs a lot of money. A good mental health care setup would be pricey, particularly since you'd also have to combine it with campaigns to work on destigmaizing mental health care, slapping down employers who discriminated because of it, etc, etc.
Right now, if you tell someone you have some illness, acute or chronic, and need to see a doctor, they are sympathetic. You tell someone you have mental problems and need to see a therapist and they look at you like you are toxic and they want nothing to do with you.
The cost and complexity means politicians don't want anything to do with it. They want cheap easy fixes. There aren't any to be had, so they'll just invent them.
The issue is not just mental illness. There are always going to be people who plan massacres. We used to think up ways of doing it without implementing it and I think it is a normal part of human nature. Some people just don't like the bulk of people. Having said that most people grow out of it and don't ever pull off anything. But some people actually go nuts and do go for it. When these people have access to tools to make their plans reality, all hell breaks loose. In my plans we used to make up, we used to put claymores at either end of a shopping mall in rubbish bins, in the middle of the mall we'd fire randomly into the crowd, then detonate the claymores and drop the gun and walk/melt into the hordes of people running. Naturally in my country !America, it's impossible to get a multi-shot firing rifle or claymores so the entire idea was never workable. It amazes me how easy it is to get a hold of multi-shot weapons in America. The amount of media that has the message it's okay to shoot someone if they've wronged you is immense. Combined with easy access to guns and you can see a problem. But the issue itself isn't the media. The ability to express free ideas has always been more important than the ability to own a gun.
Would this be the same Dianne Feinstein that voted yea on a bill that limits the government's power to regulate guns? Not to mention that the regulations on the sales of games with mature content to minors is working very well and that the percentage of video games with a mature rating is pretty low. So yeah, Dianne, keep pursuing tougher regulation on video games instead of tightening regulations on guns - that definitely seems like the logical stance for a senator to make.
Ding Ding Ding!!! And that folks is why the US Constitution is *NOT* a "Living Constitution". If there is a problem, there is an amendment process to go through. By design.
Life is not for the lazy.
I have seen many forum posts and video game reviewer commentaries about how they believe "assault weapons" and hi-cap mags should be banned. I could go on to the same old rhetoric about semi-auto vs. full-auto weapons (if you don't know what I am talking about, google this debate). But there is another topic I think gamers need to realize. Just because a restrictive law does not affect your personal life, it does not mean you should not stand up for it. When we present solidarity to the federal government against eroding our rights on any level, then all rights (including the ones you care about) will be safe. If we split into little special interest groups that don't care about the freedoms of others outside their little world, then we all lose. We the people have to stand together or we will lose whatever rights people like Diane Fynstyn (yeah, I didn't think she was worth looking up the correct spelling) feel they want to trample on next.
If you believe Diane when she says you are in danger from these type of weapons, then I guess this post is not for you. You probably also believe you are in danger from people playing MW3, too.
Lead exposure has also been proven to reduce repeat offenders if applied in the 9mm, 40cal or 45cal doses.
Lately these amendments are used to restrict more and more our rights, though, and to give more and more power to the government and those who finance it.
If crime has dropped since DOOM came out, why are you defensively saying correlation != causation? You can't make both points at once.
We don't need gun or game control...
We need SENATOR control. You're out of control and of your ever loving mind.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I agree. We DO need more video game control. We need to be able to stop shitty games being made. Companies that make shit games, EA I am looking at you, that use draconian DRM, UBI....again...., and just generally bring the industry into disrepute, all need to be punished. Severely.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1077&bih=688&q=game+control&oq=game+control&gs_l=img.3..0l10.337.1664.0.1915.12.8.0.2.2.0.93.445.8.8.0...0.0...1ac.1.8.img.RCAs40SfkIE
Isn't the amendment process *the* thing that makes the constitution living?
they mother the shit out everyone.
"Assault weapons" Bullshit!
This lying crooked slimeball Feinstein wants to bamboozle the "Rubes" into believing that a lawful semi automatic rifle is a "machine gun", even going so far as to show an M16 in full auto as part of her bullshit dog and pony show where she dabs away crocodile tears and sniffs as she repeatedly refers to "Assault weapons" again and again! At no time did I hear ANYONE mention that select fire firearms have been unavailable to the American public since 1968! or that more people are killed with knives that rifles of any kind!
These is the same people who want domestic drone surveillance, indefinite detention without judicial oversight, universal electronic surveillance and that sign agreements in their home districts guaranteeing 85% occupancy to private prison contractors!
Got Freedom?
It has been reported that the shooter was taking a prescription medicine for his mental health.
Funny how that gets almost no attention. This isn't an isolated case, either. Others who have
done similar crimes were taking the same or similar medication. It's not video games; it's not
about legal gun ownership - these meds, under the right conditions, pose a public danger because
their side-effects can allow people to perform horrific acts they wouldn't normally do.
That's where the real focus should be...
As someone who occasionally gets violent urges, I can say that video games are a main reason why I have not yet lashed out.
It's a C-O-N-spiracy. At the top, EA, Microsoft, the NRA, probably the illuminati.
Step 1) Make all video games use always online DRM.
Step 2) Ban video games.
Step 3) Shut off the DRM servers.
Step 4) Combine the first 4 steps into "Step 1"
Step 2) ??????
Step 3) Profit!
It's all so clear....
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Feinstein is of the mindset that we can legislate our way to utopia. She's in the Senate, so it's unthinkable to her that she can do nothing to address a societal problem.
Gun legislation is an incredibly difficult uphill battle, but she still feels like she has to do something... FOR THE CHILDREN.
Now it's this lunacy.
Here on slashdot, I saw a lot of posts about how people don't care about my right to own a gun if it'll save one child's life to strip us of our guns. They weren't thinking long term. That kind of reasoning can be used to justify any intrusion.
They weren't thinking about the long term consequences of that position. Now, it's video games again. Eventually, it'll be rap music and heavy metal again. The point is that unless we say no the bullshit when it's aimed at someone else, there will be no one to come to our defense when they target us.
I'm a gun owning gamer. I'm not giving up either without a long, bloody fight.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Lately these amendments are used to restrict more and more our rights, though, and to give more and more power to the government and those who finance it.
Define 'lately'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Ratified_amendments
How many people here have discovered dead civil rights activists riddled with bullets? Hands? Yes Dianne?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone%E2%80%93Milk_assassinations
I think I'd be a bit traumatized too and probably not like anything with guns in it -- including games.
While I disagree with this specific method, I'm glad Feinstein is trying to address the problem of gun violence with a solution other than "more guns, yehaw!". The GOP seems to think there is no problem that cannot be solved through a combination of tax cuts, guns, and Jesus.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
WINNERS DON'T USE DRUGS
I knew somebody that claimed to be an anarchist but there was no big government policy they didn't like.(I guess they though it meant really liberal, not "without government.")
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
not lately, it's been the SCotUS.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
All of us probably mistake correlation with causation at times, but to think negative correlation equals causation is idiotic.
I don't have 150 friends, to get a https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/ petition public. If enough people are curious about Lead-Crime study, a petition should be started. Its economic consequences would be quite large. Similar effects might apply to depleted Uranium.
n/t
More music, fewer hits
What we really need is to get rid of the politicians that can't understand the Constitution & Amendments. Feinstein is near the top of the list with her failure to comprehend the 1st Amendment and 2nd Amendment as well as the basic concept of limits on government.
You actually believe the bullshit that the Jew media has told you about Sandy Hook?
Did Adam Lanza even exist? How convenient that he hadn't been SEEN by anybody for about two years before allegedly killing people. What a joke.
Had Adam Lanza ever shot an animal? Why exactly did he want to shoot children, or adults for that matter? No explanation is given.
It's cretins like you who give the Jew power.
If Senator Feinstein, D-California, really wants to save lives, she should get rid of the truth-in-advertising exemptions for herbalism, homeopathy, and other alternative medicines. She'll save more lives than all mass shootings for a hundred years put together, by several orders of magnitude.
Seriously. Go run the numbers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Freakonomics author's attributed the same drop in crimes to legalized abortion. Roe v. Wade is 40 years old now, about as old as the unleaded gasoline laws. It's really a choice between nature (lead metal) and nurture (mother's who hate their unwanted children).
Run her out on the next horse out of town.
To be your mother. It doesn't matter what you're talking about Feinstein wants to control it and limit you. That's her job. Well that and taxing you to pay for all that control.
A Brief History of Psychotropic Drugs Prescribed to Mass Murderers
John Hinckley (1981) John Hinckley, age 25, took four Valium two hours before shooting and almost killing President Ronald Reagan in 1981. In the assassination attempt, Hinckley also wounded press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and policeman Thomas Delahanty.
Laurie Dann (1988) In 1988, 31-year-old Laurie Dann went on a shooting rampage in a second-grade classroom in Winnetka, IL, killing one child and wounding six. She had been taking the anti-depressant Anafranil as well as Lithium, long used to treat mania.
Patrick Purdy (1989) Patrick Purdy went on a schoolyard shooting rampage in Stockton, CA, in 1989, which became the catalyst for the original legislative frenzy to ban "semiautomatic assault weapons" in California and the nation. The 25-year-old Purdy, who murdered five children and wounded 30, had been on Amitriptvine, an anti-depressant, as well as the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.
Joseph T. Wesbecker (1989) In another famous case, 47-year-old Joseph T. Wesbecker, just a month after he began taking Prozac in 1989, shot 20 workers at Standard Gravure Corp. in Louisville, Ky., killing nine. Prozac maker Eli Lilly later settled a lawsuit brought by survivors.
Kurt Danysh (1996) Kurt Danysh, 18, shot his own father to death in 1996, a little more than two weeks after starting on Prozac. Danvsh's description of own his mental-emotional state at the time of the murder is chilling: "I didn't realize I did it until after it was done." Danysh said. "This might sound weird, but it felt like I had no control of what I was doing, like I was left there just holding a gun."
Michael Carneal (1997) In Paducah, KY, in late 1997, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, son of a prominent attorney, traveled to Heath High School and started shooting students in a prayer meeting taking place in the school's lobby, killing three and leaving another paralyzed. Carneal reportedly was on Ritalin.
Kip Kinkel (1998) Kip Kinkel, 15, murdered his parents in 1998 and the next day went to his school, Thurston High in Springfield, Ore., and opened fire on his classmates, killing two and wounding 22 others. He had been prescribed both Prozac and Ritalin.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (1999) Columbine mass-killer Eric Harris was taking Luvox. Like Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Effexor and many others, a modern and widely prescribed type of anti-depressant drug called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, or SSRIs. Harris and fellow student Dylan Klebold went on a hellish school shooting rampage in 1999, during which they killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 24 others before turning their guns on themselves. Luvox manufacturer Solvav Pharmaceuticals concedes that during short-term controlled clinical trials, 4 percent of children and youth taking Luvox - that's one in 25 - developed mania, a dangerous and violence-prone mental derangement characterized by extreme excitement and delusion.
Larry Gene Ashbrook (1999) On Sept. 15, 1999, Larry Gene Ashbrook murdered seven people and injured a further seven at a concert by Christian Rock group Forty Days at Wedgwood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas. Ashbrook then committed suicide. A doctor had prescribed the anti-depressant drug Prozac for Larry Gene Ashbrook, but investigators are unsure whether he was taking it when he killed seven people and then himself in a Fort Worth church last week, police said on Monday. Fort Worth's Lt. Mark Krey, who is heading the investigation into the largest mass shooting in the city's history, said police have found a Prozac vial in Ashbrook's name and want to ask doctors why it was prescr
The NRA is a group of people, a large group composed of several million people.
While this may be true, the NRA is funded primarily by corporations [1], including many large gun companies. There is no way the gun companies live in fear of the NRA, they dictate what it does, because they fund it.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gun-industry-funds-nra-2013-1
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
So if some nutcase living in a rural cabin with nothing but spy novels goes and shoots up his local congress, should we ban books, cabins, or living in rural areas? Oh and by the way, to stay consistent, he also sent 5 warning letters ahead of time, told his therapist about it ahead of time, and posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest about it ahead of time...so it's definitely the books' fault.
When you talk about a governmental overreaction, which we have had for sure, making shit up and being extremely hyperbolic in your response is no more useful.
First off there's your bullshit about the gulag. A Gulag was not a place where there are extra security measures of questionable usefulness. It was a forced labour camp. This is a place where prisoners in the Soviet Union were sent there to work as slaves, abused, underfed, and in general experienced a mortality rate of about 10%.
If you are actually comparing the inconvenience of having to put up with the stupidity of the TSA's ineffective measures to that, you are an idiot.
Then there's the "Oh the coming after the video games is new!" cry. No, it isn't. Perhaps you were not old enough to remember the Columbine shooting in 1999. However it was discovered that the shooters liked to play Doom, and immediately there were morons calling it a "realistic murder simulator" and calling for restrictions on videogames. However that was just more of the same shit. It has been rock music, comic books, TV, movies, etc in the past. Whatever youth likes that is new and different gets targeted at something that is the cause of all the ills. It has been going on forever.
So, if you didn't know these things, then stop posting online rants about the US being a police state until you've spent time getting some historical and world wide perspective. If you talk without understanding, what you say has a much greater chance of being wrong. If you did know these things, then stop being an alarmist ass. It doesn't help. The response to government fear and FUD is not more fear and FUD. It is rational discussion, it is to bring this back down, help people understand that no, everything is NOT going to hell, we really are fine, chill out.
Or, as the Brits said so well "Keep calm, and carry on."
We need stupid Twats working in gov't control.
Miller Test is a judicial creation, though, and it was created because there were laws trying to regulate "obscene" content in the first place. If Congress comes up with laws regulating "violent" content, they'll end up in SCOTUS for review, and these guys could decide that if Miller Test was able to set free speech limits on moral grounds, then they can devise a new similar but not quite the same test for violence.
In the end, point is that the standing judicial interpretation of the First Amendment is that it can be restricted depending solely on the kind of content. That's fucked up, but unfortunately that's what we have, and it leaves the door open for any further restrictions.
Why do you hate freedom?
(it's gotta chap her ass to be following the NRAs lead after all these years of painting the NRA as the Devil. And the NRA doesn't even give a damn about video games; as others have pointed out they were just, mostly successfully, trying to deflect blame)
The constitution isn't a list of rights that you get to have as a citizen. It's a list of restrictions placed on government to protect citizens. Period.
Since she is so determined to control something, how about cockroaches and mosquitoes? The pest control bill of 2013, hurry before summer starts!
If you cited wikipedia in law school, the prof would kick you out of the class and bring you on charges of academic misconduct...rightfully so.
It isn't even an exhastive list of restrictions. The 9th Amendment states, there's stuff we haven't thought of, but that doesn't mean they aren't fundamental rights.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Winners don't get caught using drugs
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Parenting.
Stop blaming the video games for the ills of the world when it comes to violence.
There is a saying: we cannot control what is around us, but we can always control ourselves.
So, in that respect, parents need to instill their child with knowledge and responsibility and most of all, a sense of accountability.
Parents should know what their child are doing and why.
And they should be the one deciding their games.
Video games are already rated for their target audience just like movies.
But many parents want to be 'cool' to their kids and in the process will let inappropriate material for the sake of keeping the peace in the household.
Wise up parents, you aren't your children's friend, you are their guardians, protectors and you are the one with your actions and your teaching that shapes the future of your kids.
The least you could do is take it seriously.
Its not easy being a parent
The best parents are the ones who actually observe their kids and truly get to know their child.
There is a baseline of good and bad, and then as a parent, there are the teaching of our parents before us.
But parenting is about preparing your child for the future, so, like anything else, it means that you must be able to weed out the good and bad from your childhood in terms of parenting and you must apply what is best for your child as you get to learn your child's strength and weaknesses, personality, etc.
Few people actually take the time to do that and be serious about the task of parenting.
Most take the lazy road. "If it was good enough for me, it's good enough for my kid(s)", not realizing that, your kid(s) are not you. They are their own people.
In which universe exactly can you achieve ever greater freedom and liberty by way of ever greater control and regulation of every aspect of people's lives? How exactly does that work?
It works not unlike how copyleft licenses such as the GNU General Public License use the government-granted power of copyright against those who would take away the users' freedom to choose the maintainer of their software.
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&tab=core&id=974186e6ff5bfc7bfed500f5d51af352&_cview=0
She is a troll in every sense and doesn't puff, puff, pass, just puff puff puff puffs. Seriously people elect like this that just suck the intelligence out of the world?
I find it ironic that you suggest that these people are conservative idiots when Feinstein is one of the most liberal senators in the US. How about we just call them idiots
It's hard to just say "idiot" when the surname is one letter away from that of a very famous German-born theoretical physicist.
No, what we really need is stupid Senator control. What on Earth were you nincompoops in California thinking when you elected that ditzy bitch? Or the other two ditzy bitches from your state?
Keep it up; you're only adding to your bad reputation.
Fruits, nuts, and flakes!!
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's a good chance you're making one of those correlation/causation fuckups...
The US rate of auto theft has dropped by nearly half since the release of Grand Theft Auto.
Correlation != causality, just a fun thing to say.
(Source, Wolfram Alpha)
Dude, if you went to public school, it was because the liberals got ahold of the education system, and they also funded that city bus you took to get there. There are good arguments against having public schools, but it was the liberals who set up the system, particularly in New York State, where there were religious and secular charity-run schools before the public system forced most kids to go to government schools in the early 1800s, long before the "progressive" movement.
We didn't have guns in high school in my part of Delaware in the early 70s, but we learned to shoot in Boy Scouts, and we certainly brought our pocket knives to elementary school, and it was simply not a problem. On the other hand, it was the suburbs; the rural kids may very well have brought guns to go hunting after school. And in junior high metal shop, the first rule was always wear safety goggles, but the second rule was "you can't make knives or other weapons"; the teacher was a blue-collar urban guy (and it was ok for him to have a battle-ax on the shop wall ;-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm really tired of you right-wingers constantly attacking Pelosi and Reid for being the House and Senate majority leaders. Neither one of them are extreme ideologues; Pelosi's a bit too conservative for her district, and I'm annoyed at both of them for chickening out when the Republicans attacked them during the 2006-2010 years instead of fighting back and using the Democratic majorities that they had.
Feinstein, on the other hand? Attack away! She supports most wars and dislikes the 1st and 4th Amendments just as much as she dislikes the 2nd, so if you want to say that makes her a conservative, go ahead. Her primary gun control positions are much more traditionally conservative - it's fine for her or her bodyguards to have them, just not for the rabble - but since she's a Democrat 1%er she's including you in the rabble and not just urban poor folks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We don't.
You'd think the community would remember history and not repeat it. Fredric Wertham, in _Seduction of the Innocent_ ,destroyed a genre of comic books in the 1950's making much the same fallacious claims that are now being made against the video game industry. Is this bozo going to be allowed to rise from the dead to wreck another generation's fun in an attempt to destroy the first amendment?
I hope not.
Safety levers that lock the slide are preferred for a variety of reasons. It's considered a minor tradeoff that you can't unload the weapon without disengaging it in exchange for ensuring that the slide can't leave battery during whatever you're doing with it when the safety is on.
With a gun that has a manual safety, you're probably going to have said safety on when carrying it and not paying as much attention to it. When you're loading or unloading the weapon, you should be paying attention. That doesn't mean that my 4 handguns that are of newer design than the 1911 don't have more safeties in them. My CZ75BD doesn't HAVE a manual safety lever, but the testing of it was rather extreme - they did things like load a dummy round into the chamber and then put it a vice and hit the hammer with a sledge. Fired blank = fail. It didn't fail. It has a number of internal safeties to ensure that it only goes off when the trigger is pulled. Even my revolver has a really small firing pin and a block on said pin until the trigger is pulled.
I view your argument kind of like how congress mandated airbags that were powerful enough to kill people by requiring them to be powerful enough to help unbuckled adult males. That was eventually fixed, but it did get a number of people killed.
With firearms, I'll have to ask:
Would you consider my CZ75BD or the Glock line 'defective' because it lacks a safety entirely? The babysitter would have found it ever so easier to shoot his charge that way.
I ask because there are many out there, including quite a few police officers, that consider a gun defective if it FAILS to fire when the trigger is pulled when a round is in the chamber.
I don't read AC A human right
They have to be aware that most people know Sandy Hook was a fraud and nobody died yet they're still using it to push new legislation, ridiculous.
Yes, let's get down on games. It is the games that kill people, not the guns. Make guns more plentiful so other gunslinger wil think twice before shooting. But games? Let's forbid games. They are the real deathly force.
Kids use to go outside and play cowboys & indians and cops & robbers but they can't do that now because it's offensive to indians and robbers. People like Feinstein insist on anthropomorphizing the tool (aka the gun or the magazine) because banning them is an easier goal to attain (and thus looks good on a reelection fundraising resumé) as opposed to dealing with mental illness or making criminal punishment really something people will fear. The video game is no different. The number of guns in the US is estimated at around 270 million yet only a handful are used in horrific crimes by a handful of people. Grand Theft Auto is played by hundreds of thousands of people and less than a hundredth or a thousandth of a percent use it as an excuse to behave badly. The problem really lies in that tiny fraction of people who can't distinguish the fantasy from reality.
The real crime is allowing politicians to avoid addressing the intractable problems while the go for the low-hanging fruit to as to ensure their legacy. Several things need to happen: 1) Term limits. And, no, I don't give a rat's ass about retiring supposedly experienced people because more than likely their experience is more about how to game the system and lining their own pockets than doing real work. 2) Proposed laws need to pass a constitutional test before a few courts before it gets to come up for a vote. People like Feinstein know full well that their legislation is unconstitutional but they don't care because they know it may take 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees before the SCOTUS strikes it down. 3) Authors of laws determined to be unconstitutional should be removed from office or at least censured.
But rock and rap have changed culture. Rock promoted an attitude of self indulgence and mocked principle. The boomers that grew up on that are self indulgent and (compared to the generation before them) lack principle. Consequently, the boomers have dismantled things built on principle like loyalty (as in 'downsizing'), honor/duty (as in divorce), and numerous other examples. Rap pushes an attitude that scorns humility and respects aggressively promoting one's own interests regardless of the impact on other people. Funny how the millennials are mostly turning out like that.
Now of course there are many other factors that influence who people are, especially established values of the people around them, so no one cultural influence will simply rewrite anybody. It's more of a subtle change in people's perception of what is and what should be. Over time, the same relentless influence does seem to exert a gravitational pull on culture. Why do the few remaining Americans from the WWII generation, for the most part, generally try to be civil and polite while Americans from the millennial generation, generally (of course there are outliers) are pretty much alien to the idea of civility?- and will even completely ignore someone saying hello to their face if they have nothing to gain from that person?
Do we really think that the shift towards selfishness and self indulgence has had nothing to do with the cultural influences like rock and rap? So you have people singing, feeling along with these pieces of art, getting lyrics tattooed on their body in some cases, and we're going to say that there is no influence whatsoever on those people? Again, of course there are other influences and music is just one of them, but it's a persistent factor. To say it is not is bury your head in the ideology of free speech- 'free speech can do no wrong' which is some kind of mutant version of an earlier view- 'free speech is so important it must be protected even though some of the consequences may be harmful'.
Maybe in the case of video games we haven't run the experiment long enough. And maybe the impact is different than the monkey-see, monkey-do argument. Clearly people are becoming more selfish in our culture, and are seeing other people more as objects to be exploited,and less as fellow citizens, fellow humans, or really, fellow anything. Clearly we are living in a more 'gimme mine!' culture than 2-4 generations ago. This of course is due to many factors, but I'd like to suggest that first person shooters promote a sense of selfish separation from other beings.Violence, ending someone else's life is the ultimate form of selfishness.
Our culture has other values that make killing actual people unpopular and unrewarding, but what about smaller kinds of everyday selfishness, from manipulating friends to screwing over people in the workplace? Everything I see suggests this has been on the increase. Would you say the millennials are more, or less likely than those from earlier generations to use people? What changed? Of course there's been immigration, much larger number of students in public schools, the economy hitting the wall with the various energy crises, changes in family structure, a decline in community involvement of all kinds, etc- so these things may be difficult to tease out. But I find it very difficult to believe that either violence in video games, or attitudes of self-aggrandizement and self-indulgence in music have nothing to do with any of the cultural changes. Most of ya'll are just such committed warriors for free speech that you're looking for any evidence against censorship you can find and ignoring all else.
It is both. Yes, it has several clauses that restrict citizens' rights, but it is also a list of restrictions to the laws bellow them, and as such it is a list of a citizen's inalienably rights.
What we really need is senator control.
You're saying you can't take ANY limitations on the Second Amendment--we can't do ANYTHING to keep guns out of the hands of certified maniacs or former felons by doing extensive background checks.
SO, let's just drop a load of shit on the First, Forth, and (probably) Fifth Amendments.
What the problem is, the gun lobby is threatening to spank ongr€$$ with its on$iderable h€kbook. Since we the Gamers can't spend billions on owning our own private members of the national legislature--we get our amendments folded in 3 corners and stuffed up our @$$.
... I submit myself as proof. Why just today, I loaded some birds on a giant slingshot to fire at some pigs. This senseless avian-porcine violence could have been avoided had video games been banned. Someone please ban them before I raise some plants to help battle zombies.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
What did you expect from that SILLY BITCH, she was raised & lives in the land of the FRUIT & THE NUTS!!
I could have gone on a long analysis of who was liable or not. I was simply pointing out that I do not believe that the gun manufacturer should have been held liable, and that is was held so mostly from a sense of sympathy and 'somebody has to pay, find somebody with deep pockets' because there was now a paraplegic child to worry about.
I'll simply state that I believe that both the parents AND the baby sitter are to blame. The parents, as you say, for not locking the gun up. I thought about putting it in, but ended up not doing so. On the other hand, the babysitter, if you boil it down, pointed the gun at the child, took the gun off safety, and pulled the trigger. Gross negligence.
But the babysitter wasn't deep pockets. The parents, well, ended up suing themselves for negligence on behalf of their child, winning/losing a big judgement so their insurance would pay. The kid won, of course. But the insurance was only a few hundred k. That goes quick with that level of medical.
Sadly, they didn't discover until after the judgement that the 'deep pocket' gun company wasn't so deep pockets - only a few hundred K before that company was driven bankrupt as well, especially after the court battle. It was a small US Company producing cheap firearms and competing against the big companies, after all. Margins weren't that high, only enough to keep the owner in a middle class lifestyle. There wasn't even much in the way of equity - what wasn't leveraged with debt was burned by the lawyers during the trial.
I don't read AC A human right
Fully automatic firearm = semi-automatic firearm + nailfile + ghetto negro "craftsman"
"FPS" computer games are essentially civilian versions of military simulators, which are used to brain-program soldiers in training, to be able to kill people. Playing FPS indoctrinates your brain to be able to kill, without hesitation, people whom you do not know, people who are unrelated to you, it objectifies the act of murder.
> the crime rate in the U.S. has gone down
Half of infinite is still infinite large. The USA of 305 million people has much more gun deaths in a single year, than Japan of 135 million has in an entire human lifetime, say 80 years. In the USA everybody has a gun-fallen relative or friend or at least closely knows someone who has a gun-fallen loved one. That is not normal and the geek mindset is also not normal, if supporting the american firearms mania.
Americans are too much pre-occupied with the "Lord of Armies" jewish God of the Old Testament and care too little about the christan God Jesus Christ of the New Testament. That is why violance plays such a huge role in US life and way of thinking and that is why jews, the race of warfare, have been holding the entire USA in a yoke to this day. Protestantism is thinly veiled judaism, that worships the God of "herem" genocidal wars. How many redskin indians are still alive in protestant USA? About 20k total. How many indians are still alive in roman catholic Central and South America? Tens of millions. Protestantism is the religion of firearms violence!