Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
No evidence video games cause mass shootings
psychosiz1
Member UncommonPosts: 200
Just gonna leave this here, not that any of us are surprised
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/09/no-evidence-that-violent-video-games-are-causing-mass-shootings.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/09/no-evidence-that-violent-video-games-are-causing-mass-shootings.html
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Sometimes I think the Purge movies are ever closer to becoming a reality.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
You can bet that the gaming industry like it tho... A easy way to galvanize people against a outward threat. A quick shift away from the fact that gaming as a industry is as rotten if not worse so than the rest. Now they can play the victim card.
No one that can rub two brain cells together think that games are the problem... Much as rock, pop, ballroom dancing, tv, video or... well... education...
That being said... we are still pack animals and as such prone to overreacting and.. well.. blindly following...
So people will people as usual...
This have been a good conversation
That's such a waste of a political narrative that you can push to violate the 1st and 2nd amendments.
We need common sense knife laws and knife registration
The video game industry is larger than the film industry. Quite simply put that money will speak enough to get the politicians to shut up.
Likewise while everyone is arguing about this. Actual video game issues like loot boxes are being pretty much ignored by political and news reporting bodies.
Along with politicians knowing they won't need to argue about mental health policy or having to go against NRA wallets. For as long as they can froth at the mouth about video games .
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
(Hint - not well.)
Furthermore, and more importantly, even the most brutal or realistic video game deaths do not measure up to sight of actual death. Jim Sterling has shown this in action by airing a recording of a sudden, televised suicide on his channel. To say that his gaming audience was shocked and distressed is putting it lightly.
Anyway, mass shooters have actually been shown to have lower than average interest in video games than the overall population on average. And those that do like video games often have quite unrelated tastes (or should we start banning Dance Dance Revolution because it happened to be the hobby of a mass shooter?). Indeed, a mass shooter is more likely to have a military background than a video gaming one.
There is zero crossover between video games and real life. Has any video game ever had anyone zero a weapon? Even laser sites require zeroing. Does a video game show you how to clear a jam or any malfunction? Etc, etc, etc.
And people grouping all military together is silly. I don't know if it changed but when I was in there was like 16 pogues to every combat arms. Like 30 or 40 something pogues to one infantryman.
My military training never helped me once in a video game, and playing video games never helped me one iota when I served.
I was born as a non-white in the ghetto to immigrant parents. I got in tons of fights every year. I played video games as an escape from real violence. I like rpgs so the games I played were grind killing everything that moved. I still play video games to escape life. That's how I recharge from work, or fighting with my wife, etc. Video games make me less violent. If I didn't have video games to retreat to when I need to relax I probably would have murderer my wife a decade or longer ago.
Also, what should be the master stroke for this argument but no one ever mentions - all the countries with the highest murder rates per capita have almost no common or easy access to video games. The countries with the most video game penetration per household have very low murder rates comparatively. This is from a study I saw about 15 years ago before phones also played video games, so I don't know how that factors in.
I wish that were true. I see a lot of people blaming violent movies, or grouping Hollywood in with games (and violent music), saying its a culture of violence.
I like asking these people about Macbeth and other very violent plays, or violent literary works like the Iliad. Hell, Hercules killed his whole family.
The fucking pearl-clutching hippies on all sides try to ban everything they don't like. A world in which the Predator isn't considered the greatest movie masterpiece ever made is a world that deserves to end in nuclear holocaust.
After WW2 the military did a study of the willingness of soldiers to shoot to kill and found that a very small percentage actually bothered to aim at an enemy and attempt to hit them. It was determined that most people find killing abhorrent and even on a battlefield are not comfortable with intentionally taking a life.
Following the results of this study they began training programs designed to lesson this the effects of this innate reaction and normalize shooting another human being. They've refined the training (one might call it brain washing) down to the point where nearly 100% of trained soldiers shoot to kill.
Lindybeige did an episode on this, and it's worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zViyZGmBhvs
How does this relate to games? We're undergoing that same normalization process. It may even be more intense and effective than what the military has done, as we're often shooting at human characters controlled by real people.
To stress the point, no I'm not saying games cause or motivate shootings. But it's inaccurate to say they haven't contributed at all. You combine someone who is angry or psychotic enough to commit mass murder, with the normalization of killing from hours of gaming and you have a recipe for disaster. Does that mean we should ban games? Not any more than we should ban human shaped range targets.
Steps have been taken against these "isolated" acts. To make such acts harder going forward.
And therein lie the key differences.
1. Gun violence - in the US: common its not isolated. (Mass shootings in 2019 i.e. 4 or more deaths are currently running at c. 1.5 a day in the US).
2. Action taken: play a blame game. Forgetting that the rest of the world plays video games, has cases of bad parenting etc etc etc .
If a game winds people up because its to hard that can be linked to a rise in tension and the potential for violence etc. They checked this against a variety of games including such pillars of violence as FIFA and Tetris. Yes Tetris! (They tweaked the games to wind people up as part of the testing.)
Conversely people who were mowing down monsters, enemy soldiers, tearing through other sports teams etc etc - working off the frustrations of the day basically - were less inclined to tension, the potential for violence.
To me this seems to tie in with reality. After a hard day you just want to "mindlessly chill" - whether that is playing Sudoku or whatever.
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth
John Lennon
Gamers exist all over the world; gun violence not so much.
Are US gamers "different"? Do they all wear special caps with wires directly connected to the brain stem? Pray tell.
You can't believe everything you hear from the left-wing-agenda lamestream media.
Check out the best selling book 'The True Story of Fake News' by Mark Dice. It was so good I bought two more to give as gifts.
--- Edit ---
Nearly everyone I try to tell about the biased, propaganda media laughs and calls me crazy. Just compare Mark's book to anything Jim Acosta has written. Check out the sales and reviews on Amazon. You might be surprised, and if you read the book you might just get an education as to how the biggest names in media have been manipulated and controlled for more than forty years. Mark cites his sources for his talking points ... all eight hundred eighty-one of them.
The True Story of Fake News is one of the best books I've read in the past fifteen years. Now when I see the so-called news from NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS and the Clown News Network (aka: CNN) I just roll my eyes and shake my head.
There cannot be bias in real journalism. Real journalism is about the facts, all the facts, whether you like them or not.
I've got a feevah, and the only prescription... is more cowbell.