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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!
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.
Seriously. If we ban any games, it should be Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or Temple Runner, which have become the crack cocaine of modern society...
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 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
I'm honestly surprised that Angry Birds has avoided controversy.
You control a bunch of birds, who are enraged by something or other, and conduct a series of suicide bombings targeting pigs(of all ages, combatants and noncombatants) and their infrastructure. Unless you succeed in porcine genocide, you lose the level.
I somehow imagine a 1 for 1 sprite swap called "Jihad Jump!" would not be a smash hit to quite the same degree...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
In the USA, fortunately, no one person holds all the political power.
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.
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.
Lead exposure has also been proven to reduce repeat offenders if applied in the 9mm, 40cal or 45cal doses.
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.
I think it's a symbiotic relationship. You have somewhere around 4 million people in the NRA and it's certain that these corporations see these people as customers. They want their loyalty. You do realize that these people buy tons of their stuff don't you? You really think they're interested in pissing off NRA membership? The tail is not wagging the dog here, both sides like each other. NRA members have a positive view of companies like Ruger and Colt.