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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...
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 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.
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.