Video Games Are Dangerous — Arm Yourselves!
by NorseGamer, HSM Editor-in-Chief
Let’s start with a universal truth: actual gun violence, regardless of the context it’s placed in, is horrific.
Guns are not toys. Guns are tools. And like any tool, it can cause chaos and harm when inappropriately used. Much as we may enjoy simulated violence on a TV screen, we understand that there is a huge gulf between that and being in a real situation involving a gun.
All of us, that is, except for the tiny fraction of people who are psychologically unstable to begin with.
Whenever a senseless tragedy occurs, we as a society try to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. And, in so doing, we legislate and restrict what the population at large can and cannot do, in the name of public safety.
All quite logical. And remarkably Maginot Line in its thinking.
The harsh reality we live with, daily, is that there is a miniscule percentage of any human population which is psychologically unstable. And what keeps the rest of us up at night is the uncertainty of not knowing how to guard against it. Because there’s a chance you could go to a movie theatre in Colorado, or a school in Connecticut, or your local supermarket, and just be in the wrong place at the wrong time when that one person snaps and does a disproportionate amount of damage upon the world.
These incidents are horrific, tragic, and permeate our communal dialogue because they are statistical outliers and utterly senseless acts which scar and wound far beyond the fatalities. No rational human being can condone such horrible events.
But we have to be pragmatic. There are 270,000,000 registered firearms in the United States, whereas there were only 31,224 gun-related deaths total, of which more than half were suicides. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the odds of dying from violent gun crime are quite low, both when compared to the sheer number of guns in the nation as well as when compared against to other means of dying in the USA.
For instance: the number of traffic fatalities last year, nationwide, was 32,885. That means that you have a statistically greater chance of dying in your car on the way to a shooting than you do at the the actual shooting. So what do we do with cars, then, since they are capable of wreaking a disproportionate level of havoc when abused?
Remember the PMRC?
This does not mean that gun-related homicides and suicides are any less tragic or traumatic. Such violence is horrid. However, when such highly-publicized events take place, it’s easy to point to the gun as the problem. It’s easy to point to video games as the problem. Back in 1985, Tipper Gore and the PMRC kangaroo court tried to point to music and provocative song lyrics as the problem.
None of these things are the problem. The problem is that there’s a statistically tiny percentage of the population that’s cuckoo for Coco Puffs, and as a society we really ought to be devoting resources to identifying these outliers and taking away their ability to inflict damage upon the rest of us, rather than tightening a legislative noose around our own necks and giving up personal liberties in exchange for the hollow sense of “safety.”
And this is why today’s NRA press conference — if you can call it one — with Wayne LaPierre was worse than a bad joke. It was a giant step in the wrong direction. Instead of portraying gun owners as responsible adults, he just made every gun owner in this country look like selfish, paranoid, militant fools. We’re less than two months out from a historic election in which this nation clearly swung left on social issues as a result of right-wing extremist rhetoric, and LaPierre just further painted his constituency as a bunch of out-of-touch whackjobs. Brilliant.
Because here’s the conundrum that rational Second Amendment supporters, including myself (with a firearms permit), face every day: this is a country which was founded on violence and is ideologically resistant to the notion of placing too much overt reliance upon the state for survival. But at the same time, even the most hardened Constitutionalist must acknowledge that the Second Amendment, which was written in 1791 and exists for a damn good reason, could hardly have anticipated the scope of destruction today’s level of technology, more than two-hundred years later, could put in the hands of the ordinary citizen. And in the case of nearly every single major shooting incident in recent times, they were perpetrated with guns which were legally purchased.
So here’s the catch: if you want to own a firearm for hunting, self-defense, recreation or as a line of defense against tyrannical government, you also have a civic duty to support government measures, such as background checks and psychological evaluations, to try to keep firearms out of that tiny fraction of the population which will snap and go bugnuts with them. Yet the NRA historically has not supported such measures. And that’s just plain irresponsible.
It is further irresponsible for LaPierre, as the mouthpiece of the organization which has successfully lobbied to allow for such a legislatively permissive environment in which psychologically disturbed individuals can legally acquire tools of destruction, to try to shift the blame to video games, movies, music and anything else.
Let’s say it together: video games do not kill people.
Video games are not the problem. They never were. God, wouldn’t it be great if they were the problem? Then the problem would be easy to solve. Just take out all the video games.
But it’s not that easy. Video games have been around for, what, forty years? So what about the prior four-thousand years of recorded history? Were we all holding hands and singing Enya?
Demonizing artistic expression and entertainment as the work of the devil is a ridiculous argument. Remember when those two kids listened to Judas Priest and committed suicide about twenty years ago, and the parents sued the band, claiming that subliminal messages in the music caused their kids to kill themselves?
No one bothered to ask the question that Bill Hicks asked: “What performer wants their audience dead? I don’t see the long-term gain here.”
Music isn’t the problem. TV isn’t the problem. Movies aren’t the problem. Video games aren’t the problem. If you decide to go shoot up a convenience store because you played a particularly gruesome level in Resident Evil, guess what? You’re the problem, because you’re bleeping insane. And shame on the political powers that be who received funding from the NRA and created such a lax environment that nutjobs could legally acquire such tools of destruction.
Again, we have to be pragmatic. Locks are for honest people. Parental warning labels drive kids to buy the taboo music. Prohibition created a wonderful black market for alcohol consumption. And proposals for gun restriction drive up gun sales. I think we’d all love to live in a disarmed nation without threat of violence. But the genie’s out of the bottle in this country — in the United States we’re five percent of the world’s population, yet we have over fifty percent of the civilian firearms — and it is relatively easy to acquire firearms illegally here, even if the odds of being the victim of violence from an illegal gun are remarkably low. So now the question becomes: what do we do about it?
We do live in a culture that glorifies violence, and this is certainly a dangerous issue to discuss. But that issue has shockingly little to do with firearms. Strip away all the firearms, and you will still have people killing each other (and themselves) with knives. Just look at the outbreak of knife violence in Chinese schools over the last two years, including an incident last week involving a knife attack at a school that left 24 people seriously injured.
Strip away the knives, and they will use clubs. Strip away the clubs, and they will use their bare hands. Thus, the logic of taking away the gun to prevent the tragedy is fallacious, ineffective, and — worse — ultimately does a disservice to the people who could otherwise be helped in greater numbers if we focused instead on what drove them to such a state well before they ever pulled the trigger.
And video games? Video games are hardly the problem. There was even a thread on the Sony forum calling for a disarmament of Home. Good god, really? Home is practically the Romper Room of the PlayStation pantheon. The level of violence depicted in Home is so ridiculously tame compared to the rest of the industry that it can hardly be demonized. If Mortal Kombat failed to turn me into Jack the Ripper, I suspect Home isn’t going to succeed, either.
The gun isn’t the problem, whether it be real or virtual. The problem is whatever drove the person holding the gun to such a psychological state that he (or she) decided that committing a violent act in the real world was the only acceptable solution. Guns are a tremendously destructive tool, yes, but they require a destructive mindset to be abused. The sooner we truly devote ourselves to the taxonomy of that small percentage of lunatics, and legislatively commit ourselves to preventive intervention before these tragedies occur, the sooner we’ll all truly be a little bit safer — regardless of what’s playing on the TV.
December 22nd, 2012 by NorseGamer | 25 comments
NorseGamer is the product manager for LOOT Entertainment at Sony Pictures, as well as the founder and publisher of HomeStation Magazine. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, he holds a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and presently lives in Los Angeles. All opinions expressed in HSM are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the views of Sony DADC.
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This guy made me laugh. Video games do not kill people!
I enjoy my first and second ammendment rights.
Wayne LaPierre clearly does not understand the constitution. And that his whole conference today got absolutly no where.
Thank you Norse!
The incident in China had 24 person seriously injured… no one died. Guns are not THE problem, but the easy access to it and especially assault rifles are part of the problem.
If we all agree we live in a society that glorify violence. What do we do about it? No videogame, movies and the like does not create the problem. But is it possible that by over emphasing it for an easy profit we are pushing more fragile mind over the border?
Peoples on both sides need to stop just pushing agenda and start thinking or nothing will change. Not for the good for sure.
The full spectrum of the Chinese school attacks over the last two years has left 21 dead and 90 injured. And that’s without any guns whatsoever.
Yes, this is a lower body count than the recent incidents just this year here in the USA which involved guns. So it can be argued with validity that fewer people are at risk from violent gun crime in a society where guns are not readily accessible. Conversely, it can also be argued that removing guns, while scaling down the level of carnage, doesn’t do anything to actually address the problem — namely, mental instability. And exactly how far do we want to abridge our personal liberties, as a country, in an attempt to protect against such a tiny fraction of the population? Therein lies the debate.
Does a society which glorifies violence have a higher propensity for violent crimes and killing? Quite possibly. But as Anders Breivik demonstrated, all it takes is one lunatic — even in a society as comparatively utopian as Norway’s — to cause a disproportionate level of damage.
So what do we do about it? That’s a far harder question to answer, because it requires a giant cultural consciousness shift on a national level, which is highly unlikely to occur. The United States is far too large and fractious a country to subscribe to any one set of cultural ideals. Asking people to stop pushing agendas isn’t going to work; we all have our belief systems, and on hot-button sociopolitical issues like this, in an internet age where we can all listen to only the news sources we ideologically agree with, the odds of consensus on damn near anything are dwindling rapidly.
Ironically, Wayne LaPierre has done more to hurt his own cause and that of the NRA than his opponents ever could have. How much political change comes of this remains to be seen. I personally don’t see this going much further than possibly a renewed ban on assault weapons, which might make everyone feel safer, but still doesn’t do a bloody thing to address the real cause, which is lunatics who need to be identified and isolated.
From a purely amoral standpoint, it’s a great time to invest in gun manufacturers. Funny how economics works, particularly in the face of moral outrage.
How can anybody defend the right to bear arms, specifically semi-automatic assault rifles, with comparisons to knife attacks?
Multiple knife attacks in China = 21 dead in 2 years
Single gun attack in USA = 26 dead in 10 minutes
Stats buffs are welcomed to factor in the per capita difference between China and the USA but it’s not really necessary. The basic numbers speak for themselves. There’s a moral behind the saying “Don’t take a knife to a gunfight.” Anyone would rather face a maniac with a switch-blade than an AK-47.
The stats about motor-vehicle accidents don’t mean much either. The word “accidents” rules out the comparison. A large number of gun-related deaths are intentional in relation to what I’d imagine are a miniscule number of intentional car-related deaths. People don’t get into their car with the intention of killing people. (Watching some people behind the wheel may bring that statement into question, I suppose) If so, the kid in Connecticut would have just driven his mum’s car through the wall of the school.
Rationalise with all the statistics that you like. Y’all just have too many guns over there.
The NRA might like to say that mental illness, and not guns, is the root of the problem. Of course, all the gun-lovers in the USA would be strongly in favour of increased government funding to treat the mentally ill. Not.
As for the link between gamers and killers, it seems kind of weak to me. The vast majority of gamers, just like the vast majority of gun-owners, are decent and stable people who wouldn’t hurt anyone. It’s the easy access to a loosely controlled public arsenal that’s the problem.
168 killed in Oklahoma City bombing by a truck full of fertilizer. Almost 3000 people killed in the 9/11 attacks by box cutters and airplanes. The people that choose to kill other people are the villains not their weapon of choice.
Mental health problems are the main thing to be worried about here. No one in their right mind kills innocent people.
Almost without exception, shooters in mass shootings carry more than a few guns. Assault rifles do have larger round capacity but someone with two revolvers in one deer rifle could kill 21 people.
If laws are passed to prevent owning assault type weapons then it will be the law-abiding people that do not have them. The black market and criminal underground will supply only the people that should have them in the first place. And the mentally ill will always find some way of carrying out whatever their sick mind tells them to do.
The nature behind the Second Amendment was not to give citizens the right to have guns for the fun of it. It’s intent was to give the rights to citizens to protect themselves from their own government.
As far as video games inspiring people with mental health problems to act inappropriately, I have seen no proof of that being the case. There are Violet books, violent movies and even violent music. If you can be manipulated by any of these outside sources, your mental health is what is in question.
Because we often don’t understand what could make a person decide to kill innocent and complete strangers I feel we can to try and rationalize it and in the process we grasp at straws and look for scapegoats.
typo… shouldn’t have them
Thankfully, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 were isolated incidents though. Not the all too regular occurrences of these shootings. I’m sorry but placing fertilizer in the same category as guns is a load of, well, fertilizer. It has destructive potential to be sure but it’s certainly not the weapon of choice.
And this bit about arming the population for protection from a tyrannical government is laughable. Especially when a good chunk of America categorises the current administration as tyrannical. It made some sense 200 years ago perhaps but now? C’mon. Remember that “the government” has access to such things as fighter planes, drones, tanks, Navy SEALS and nuclear weapons. A semi-automatic rifle from Walmart is not going to be too helpful, I’m afraid. LOL. Maybe Walmart should start selling nukes to keep the playing field level. I’d hate to be the one doing clean-up in that aisle though.
I hesitated to get into a whole gun rights debate on this board because I know that it’s such a sensitive issue. It seems to me that Americans’ gun worship is a mental illness in and of itself.
Guns dont kill people, but im shocked at what guns can be purchased legally in some countries, who needs army spec rifles with scopes and laser sites to go hunting, the ability to shoot a insect from a half mile isnt the idea of hunting. Thing is does that make people think a less powerful gun is less harmful and in effect dont treat less powerful firearms with the respect they deserve. Its not games and television with the problem, its mankind, we have always killed our own species, we are just getting better at it.
Gary’s right. I fail to see any good reason for Joe Soap to *need* an M16 or an AK. Really? A great big dirty rifle for uhmm, self-protection!? From what exactly, a feckin zombie epidemic!? Course, I’m British so we just stab at each other with knives or slash each other with broken pint glasses. Infact, some nightclubs only have plastic glasses around here. But if yoov bin lookin at mah burd ah’ll still smash yer teeth in pal!!! Meh, take away the loonies toys and he can still do some major damageI suppose, but I still think there need to be stricker limits on guns over there. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying guns are the exact problem here, I just think a little more control wouldn’t go amiss.
Games certainly aren’t the problem, if any media can be blamed for an increase in gun crime it’s ironically the “news” itself. I read an interesting thing the other day that showed a spookily close correlation with school shootings/gun crime and media coverage. See, the more the “news” glorifies a killer in its coverage the more of an anti-hero they become and the more attractive they become to other unhinged, desperate, on-edge people; which in turn leads to a repeat of the incident on more unfortunate victims. If our “news” would stop doing things like
A) reporting on the media that “interested” the killer
B) listing the arms they bared for preparation of the crime ( glorifying the weapons)
C) Give reasons and make excuses as to why they might carry out such horrendous actions ( ie, my daddy never hugged me)
D) Repeat over and over scenes from the crime on TV. Particularly of the sheer terror on victims faces.
All of these things only serve to glorify the actions of a sick individual, and spur on other nut-jobs to try the same thing for their own slice of “fame”. So yeah, I’m pointing my finger at YOU news stations! Ye who thrives on the atrocities, misery, pain and suffering of others for “coverage” and ratings and viewers.
I agree with you wholeheartedly Krazy. I think that the media has gotten totally out of control in these situations. The reporters sit there looking sad and serious but still shove mics in the faces of eight year old children and ask them what happened. I haven’t really watched the news at all for over two years now, or read newspapers either. It is all the same garbage as far as I am concerned. It used to be that the news was interesting, now it is mostly bias reporting or someones opinions on a subject. They are supposed to be reporting things not telling us what they think or glorifying them.
All I will say is this…
If gaming is the issue, then comics are also the exceptional tool towards violence.
Seriously, this is nothing more but fighting for media control. Absurd at best.
Thank you for sharing this.
Norse you really hit the nail on the head here. I don’t own a gun myself, but my ex did and they were always in the house, so I agree that ownership is a good idea. If you teach a child early on what they are capable of, they won’t look at guns the same as others who didn’t have that training. My son learned to respect what a gun can do by watching my husband shoot things early on. We always kept them locked up and safe from abuse too.
I can’t believe that people are still using that old “video games are the problem” rhetoric. If that was the case I guess that before they were invented there were no shootings. This new trend toward school shootings and mass murders truly didn’t start til the past thirty years or forty years or so. I think I know the true culprit but it has nothing to do with games or movies or anything of the like. Anyone of faith will know what I am talking about.
I do agree that people don’t need semi auto weapons to hunt with, but the problem with too much restrictions is it is a slippery slope to more and that wouldn’t be a good thing. Then the only people who had guns would be the criminals. And there is a lot of statistics now that show that right to carry states have their gun crime as well as other crimes go down substantially not go up.
Great read as always Norse.
I will never understand that fear of loosing more rights and liberties with a sticter guns control you have in the USA. It’s that way in most occidental countries and it doesn’t seem to be hapeening, and I don’t think we have more “illegal” weapons in Canada or in the UK either.
Great article Norse. Video games do not kill people and I whole wholeheartedly support the right to own guns. HOWEVER this industry is not doing itself any favors by parading out this non stop shooting people games. This heat the industry is feeling has 100% brought on by ourselves and we have to deal with it.
People look at this and try to understand why we need to play these kind of games and the best we can do is say it’s art, it’s protected by law. We make excuses for these kind of games and as long as we keep doing this we will feel the heat and that’s just the way it is.
Being a parent (and a parent of a child with autism at that), I’ve had just about all I can stand with this topic being shoved down my throat at every turn on the internet.
It’s easy to be an outside source and point fingers at who is really to “blame” for all this. Because that is human nature. We want *something* tangible to blame, something that we can solidly define and say, “there, *that* is your bogeyman, *that* is our enemy.” Heaven forbid that finger should actually fall upon our own quite fallible nature, regardless of national origins. Because that is not a quantifiable, tangible thing. And it is the very source of the problem. The news media’s current state of dubious integrity and obsession with human misery certainly does not help matters, but we certainly don’t do anything that would incentivize them to change their ways, either
Were an alien race come into contact with Earth and intercept the various reports from global news media, they could easily be excused for thinking that the US is like the Kim Kardashian of nations. And I say that having lived and traveled outside of the US myself, and having had the chance to watch the news media of other countries. It’s even more troubling when you think about how downplayed or even forgotten similar atrocities committed in less “famous” countries (Norway) are. I heard very little about the murder that took place in a suburban neighborhood near where I lived in Toronto, where a “quiet, unassuming man” kidnapped a fellow neighbor, raped and butchered her in his basement, then tossed her remains in the nearby Rouge River, but boy, did I know all there was to know about the Bush-Kerry election!
Fingerpointing will not solve anything. Self accountability may not either, but it’s a start.
Couldn’t agree more. You said it with the words I lack. The last thing we need is another witch chase. I might had sound like fingerpoiting but it wasn’t the idea. Things won’t change tomorrow. Probably not in the next decade either. But we need to look at our own mindset today if we want to move it in the right direction.
Kudos to Ted also. I totally agree with your post.
There are some games like Grand Theft Auto and Postal that I wish the people that did them had done something else. They seem to have the same training by setting up situations and seeing what you do as pilot cockpit simulators do for training pilots. If we were to decide to ban these types of games, the problem is can someone draw the line? The answer is no. So even if it can be proven that this software effects people, it does not even matter. Censoring software has the same problems as censoring speech. So as long as people are making games that I would rather they wouldn’t, I know we are free. And that is so much better than the alternative, it is worth dealing with the consequences.
Ive played nearly every violent game and watched just about every decent violent film you can name, and I still know that its wrong to shoot someone or go running people down in my car. I know there aint no cheats, there isnt no reset button, there isnt no extra lifes in real life, I know that the person I just walked by is someones brother, dad, son, daughter, mother, sister and how would I feel if one of my family was killed. Lets take societies issues and try and find something to blame them on. We know there are screwed up people out there, yet we give them the chance to buy weapons so someone else can fill they pockets with money. The best money example I found wasnt a gun, it was a knuckle duster, the knuckle duster is something you put in your pocket and put on your knuckles for a better punch even, home has got a version free from X7, so why on earth would someone buy the gold version with 10cm spikes attached that I saw in a shop window. A low powered, limited size clip hand gun is still good protection but not from a fully automatic rifle. a single shot bolt rifle will kill a deer. But could imagine the shame of going on a hunt carrying the weakest weapon. Theres a small percentage of society that cant be trusted, take the naked guy that chewed on that other blokes face, so you cant ban everything but for crying out load lets not give them the ability to go on a commando style rampage
If songs can inspire people to do the right thing (If I Had A Hammer, Blowing In The Wind), can not songs inspire people to do the wrong thing?
Who has more influence, the writers of laws or the writers of songs? I don’t know. It’s too general a question but both do influence and inspire people to do things sometimes.
And if not songs, why not movies, video games, TV shows whether fiction or talk (include radio in the latter)?
Heck, people gotta’ talk about some thing. Sometimes it’s the weather, the family or whatever is on the news.
I remember feeling uncomfortable seeing people carrying weapons in Central Plaza. I got used to it. More recently I had a weird outfit that had a doctors top with stethoscope and a machine gun in his hand. After the recent tragic shootings in real life I removed the machine gun. I didn’t feel comfortable with it.
I’m generally not for outlawing songs, the printed word, video games, movies etc but there should be some rules or guidelines. On SONY’s Home, SONY sets the rules. In society, various forms of government or other groups of people set their own rules whether a state, town, or store. Or in the case of this magazine, the editor(s). Can I swear here? Probably not.
But maybe the songs I mentioned had no influence over anything at all in the whole wide world.
But people gotta’ talk about something and some of the talk is constructive.
I don’t think that dead due from the NRA talks very well and that was his big problem.
Edit: I don’t think that dude from the NRA talks very well and that was his big problem.
I’m sorry. I tried but my typing and writing is sometimes atrocious.
I am sorry that this article did not stick to the title proprosition, that violent video games do not in and of themselves lead to violence. There is much to discuss on that issue, and broadening the scope to include all of gun control does a disservice to the more focused discussion.
However, if it is gun control in general that is under debate, the scope of this article is too narrow. By focusing on the issue of mentally unstable mass shooters, some larger issues are being ignored.
The statistical breakdowns on gun violence by the FBI make it clear that insane people shooting up public places are a very small component of gun violence in the US. Most of the incidents take place during crimes and arguments; the latter category includes domestic violence — people turning guns on other family members.
Guns can easily be acquired without even minimal background checks and legal controls. Sales at gun shows are notoriously unregulated, and many online gun sales don’t bother with checks. In “sting” operations conducted by the FBI, it was easy to find online sellers who assured the buyer that he could by a gun, even when the buyer admitted he could not pass a background check. Inmates questioned about how they had obtained their firearms stated that most of them had come from unlicensed resellers.
The huge number of guns manufactured in the US is also causing problems in other countries. Inexpensive US-made firearms are now the weapons of choice for criminal gangs in many countries. The level of gun violence in Mexico, El Salvador, and several other Latin American countries approximates that of an active war.
The sober truth is that insane mass shooters are a small part of the larger problem. I believe that responsible gun owners would want guns to be obtained and used responsibly. This is the discussion that should be going on. Comparing guns to knives and improvised bombs is not a productive argument.
Some links for further discussion:
FBI crime statistics
Gun crime statistics by US state
US gun deaths by day, since the Newtown shootings
Bravo!
Again for the record I am for the right to own a gun, but I just don’t feel it’s worth it. Look at the neighborhood watch shooting in Orlando last march. A 17 year old with his whole life ahead of him is now dead and the shooter who’s life is now a nightmare has to live with that the rest of his life. A gun takes the equation to the very last and final level. I agree it’s not the mass shootings, it’s the everyday violence of our society that doesn’t understand that guns don’t solve problems, they create them.
Well stated, Seal
Video Games are not dangerous. Humans who want to deprive other humans of the ability to defend themselves are dangerous. The world has not seen another Hitler since the end world war two. This is in no small measure due to the democratic nation called the U.S.A. If you want to see what can happen to a United States where the 2nd amendment is repealed, then you should read the Handmaiden’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
video games lyrics