The NYTimes has a nice article about this balderdash
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/opinion/collins-looking-for-america.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
What I found interesting is how the whole can be different from the parts:
first-person shooters alone are harmless, shooting clubs or sports as well, but
the combination of both can apparently be toxic for troubled teenagers. A bit
like a chemical reaction.
-J.
Sent from AndroidJames Steiner <[email protected]> wrote:I think this line
of reasoning ("using guns and violent games make people go crazy and shoot
people, therefore, restricting access (even more) to guns and games will make
less people shoot people. ") is balderdash.
Correlation is not causation.
Guns and games did not make the person troubled.
There are many teens/adults who have access to both real and virtual gun sport
who do *not* shoot up schools, malls, or post offices. This is demonstrated by
the simple fact of the millions of sales of both guns and gun games every year,
compared to the lack of millions (or even dozens) of mass shooting murders
every year.
Likewise, the wild success of Angry Birds did not create a run on slingshots,
nor cause a single undesired building demolition.
While we're theorizing without rigor, I assert that access to gun sport and
virtual violent games provides a healthy outlet for acting out violent
feelings, and working out frustrations.
Sans guns, we might have had a stabbing, a homemade bomb, or perhaps something
else. Note the school mass *stabbing* in China the same day, with 22 people
stabbed. Granted, no deaths reported. I guess that's a comfort?
See also, the patriarchy, which teaches that violent outburst is an appropriate
form of expression--for men.
Note that in 30 years, 61 of 62 gun-using US mass murderers have been men.
[see Mother Jones, July 2012, for criteria and sources]
And that suggests another key point: these incidents are rare: just 62 in 30
years. Each has it's own particular and peculiar circumstances. To pick just
one thing they may have in common, then assert that "fixing" that one thing
will prevent any future incident is, at best, naive, and in other proportions
arrogant, lazy, and disingenuous.
Perhaps it's true that there can be no shootings if there are no guns, but that
is never going to happen, without a perfect descent into utter fascism. In any
case, as long as there are people who want to kill people, people will find a
way to do it. So we must look in another direction. Like a way to help people
*not* want to kill people.
~~James
On Dec 16, 2012 2:08 PM, "Jochen Fromm" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> The recent shooting at Sandy Hook, Conneticut,
> reminded me of the shooting in Winnenden 3 years ago.
> In 2009, a teenager killed 15 people at a School
> in southern Germany. It turned out his father owned
> many guns legally and took him occasionally to a shooting
> club. The son played frequently shooting games like
> "Counter Strike". The combination of learning to
> kill people in virtual worlds and learning to shoot
> in the real world was toxic for the young troubled
> teenager.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting
>
> The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting now
> seems to be similar: the mother owned many guns
> legally and used them, she went through target
> shooting with her son. The son apparently liked
> violent video games (probably first-person shooter
> as well). Again the combination of learning to kill
> people in virtual worlds and learning to shoot in the
> real world was toxic for the young person and
> certainly contributed to the disaster
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_shooting
>
> If we want to prevent these shootings happening
> again, then we must either make it much harder
> for children to go to shooting clubs and to
> participate in shooting sport, or we must make it
> much harder for underage persons to get first-person
> shooter games. Or both. What do you think?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_sport
>
> -J.============================================================
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