Slashdot Mirror
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."
Your analogy is a straw man and does not apply. Airbags were not tested thoroughly with child seats and therefore when they killed children, of course they were liable. In this case, the guy was holding the trigger of the gun down, pointing it at someone, and flipped the safety off thereby intentionally disabling the safety feature intended to protect from accidental discharge. The gun did not misfire, the safety did not fail, the guy disabled it while doing the only thing you're not supposed to do when the gun is off safe.
The only way your argument is comparable to this scenario is if you were to say that someone was driving with their child in their safety seat with the airbag disabled for safety purposes and then re-enabled the airbag just before an impact which then caused the airbag to deploy, killing the child. In this ridiculous scenario, the manufacturer would also not be held liable because the vehicle operator disabled the safety mechanism that was specifically designed to keep the airbag from killing their child.