Two bills target video games following Sandy Hook tragedy | Hacker News Reader

Two bills target video games following Sandy Hook tragedy

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I don't personally care for the existence of video games and movies that are super violent just for the sake of being violent.

But here's the thing - plenty of other countries have full access to all these video games, movies and even their fair share of mentally ill.

What they do not have is constant mass slaughters like this, and that's because they don't have the guns-are-toys mentality we do and open access to as many guns as you want, as powerful as you want, without tracking, liability or lack of social pressure to stop.

Sadly nothing will be done and in a decade we'll have a mass-killing anniversary for every day of the year and everyone will just be desensitized. Instead we'll have armed guards at every place where more than 10 people gather and like the TSA everyone will say "oh well, what can you do".

Or, you know, we could just stop spazzing out in reaction to vanishingly-rare events. You can't shrink-wrap the world.

Especially when readily solvable problems like obesity and drunk driving kill exponentially more every year. But hey, that's how social fear and hysteria works.

Even non-drunk driving is dangerous. Apart from the array of problems associated with obesity, you have specifically heart disease, lung cancer, stomach cancer, less specifically other types of cancer... Just considering disease (or simpler, anything that falls under "old age"), and it's easy to see humans aren't very effective killers of each other, compared to what else is out there. Among all causes, for the whole world, the estimated rate is 1.8 people who die per second. If ck2 is really concerned about the total number of deaths per month, I hope he donates to various transhumanist-influenced organizations whose goal (or side-effect of their main goal) is stopping death entirely.

Uh, over 1000 people have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook a month ago [1]

That's not a rare event - it's just distributed far apart enough in the news and localized to the point where you purposely do not notice.

I think it would be a great service if every national news program would open with a list of the names of everyone killed by guns and drunk drivers, every day. It would only take a minute but if you did it every day, people would start to get a hint.

PBS News closes with all the people (mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings) killed in the military every night, it could be like that.

1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/1...

Most of them were suicides, which really shouldn't count in this statistic.

How many were obtained illegally? How many were suicides?

How many more people died from more preventable causes?

Sound bites are sound bites are sound bites.

Isn't the proper question "how many deaths happened in other countries of the same population density" ?

Because I assure you, it's lower in the UK, Japan, etc.

You cannot just say "oh well what can you do, it's the price we pay to have our toys".

As someone else pointed out, including suicides in gun death statistics is pointless: they would have found another method had guns not been available.

I looked into the stats briefly on murders per 100k by country, and the US was somewhere in the middle of the pack. If you assume that removing guns would eliminate those deaths (I doubt this), we were actually quite safe. If on the other hand you assume that those deaths would have been caused in other ways - we are still in the middle of the pack.

As someone else pointed out, including suicides in gun death statistics is pointless: they would have found another method had guns not been available

That implies that suicide is a rational act committed by rational actors. The fact that suicide prevention fences on bridges absolutely have been proven to work refutes that.

Regardless, it is misleading to include suicides when talking about gun violence, just how it's misleading to only talk about rifles when talking about gun violence.

> The fact that suicide prevention fences on bridges absolutely have been proven to work refutes that.

Have they been proven to prevent suicide, or to prevent suicide by jumping from a bridge?

I always thought those were to stop people from throwing crap at cars/trains anyway; I have never seen them on bridges that just go over water. I've also noticed that you can often judge the niceness of an area by what they put along the sides of bridges: if nothing then it is probably a nice area, if a fence then it is not notably nice but kind of average, if a corrugated steel then it is probably a fairly shitty area.

Yes, they do prevent suicide, putting up a fence on bridge A will not increase jumpers at nearby bridge B

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_bridge#Prevention

Suicide is not a rational act, common sense does not apply here.

That seems like a very poor experiment to me. What happens to the total suicide rate in a city when suicide fences go up?

A cursory reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_prevention suggests that it is widely understood that reducing access to easy methods reduces the overall incidents of suicide. This makes intuitive sense to me: it's common for people to be hospitalised for attempted suicide and then make a full physical and mental recovery - this outcome is less likely if a gun or bridge is involved.

Let's be honest, the biggest factor is organized crime, and the strongest correlates are with the drug trade.

You're right. Let's ban cars. Though that's a bit too extreme, let's only ban assault vehicles. You know, those black SUV's that look a little too much like military vehicles. That is a good solution to the number of people killed by drunk drivers.

Nah let's remove speed limits and drink all you want when you drive. Because people should have all the freedom they want and people are rational and intelligent. Screw the rights of other people to be able to drive safely.

Heck, why restrict fully automatic M16s and bazookas - why dare impose limits at all. People are rational and intelligent their freedom should not stop where others begin. In fact you should be able to drunk drive and carry around your loaded M16 out the window down the highway.

We should be like the middle east with people firing fully automatics in the air anytime they want and gangs roaming around in pickups fully armed.

The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and it's a start.

Guns are not toys and that's the whole problem, people want to play with them because they think it's a game.

>The gun bans they are trying now are the only place they can start. Because anything more sane would insanely be ignored. At least they are trying and it's a start.

The thing about legislative efforts, is that on an issue where there are parties who want to take certain laws to one extreme or the other (Ex: Banning all guns.) and the sliding scale is freedom vs regulation, there will inevitably always be push from both of the extreme sides. So even if you enact "reasonable" gun laws, there will always be parties trying to push them forwards or backwards. This means that the sensible thing for guns rights organizations to do is turn even a minor gun regulation into a shitstorm so that the opposing forces on the other side have to spend all their energy maintaining reasonable gun laws.

Internet activists may want to take notes.

As long as people enjoy killing animals, guns will never be illegal in this country. There are plenty of lefties in the senate who really enjoy killing animals so guns are always going to be legal.

What they are trying to restrict is the use of guns as toys and I have zero problem with that. I think hunting is ridiculous and horrible in this day and age but I guess that's part of the compromise I have to do. I am not accepting anything further than that though, guns are not toys.

There are environmentally sound reasons to control the population of wild animals. A population boom/bust cycle wreaks havoc on the environment. We've already interfered with nature on this continent to such a degree it cannot self-regulate. I don't enjoy killing animals, but those that I know who hunt are in fact doing us all a public service we would otherwise have to pay the government to do.

> Guns are not toys and that's the whole problem, people want to play with them because they think it's a game.

This doesn't describe any gun owner I've ever met. Like most people who want to ban guns, you're arguing out of complete ignorance.

As an Australian, I thought I should point out that despite the Straw Man argument above, this is actually what happened in our country.

Our death rate due to firearms has reduced by half since our automatic/semi automatic buyback program initiated in 1996 and yet, the number of guns sold last year was the same[1] as pre-1996 levels.

[1] http://www.theage.com.au/national/australians-restock-the-gu...

This really is about the perfect analogy. Vague statistics refracted through hysteria and political shenanigans ending with unhelpful legislation.

The US has one of the highest suicides-by-gun rates in the world.

But why are we talking about guns? This isn't a gun conversation, this is a mental health conversation. Give people a free and easy way to seek help for mental conditions and this problem just... goes away.

Uh, nearly 1000 people have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook a month ago.

Sigh. We're done here.

We dont have "Open access" and we cant buy guns as powerful as we want (no full auto, nothing over 50mm, certain shotguns, sbr...etc) we have tracking, lots of media preasure. So not sure what you are getting at. Look at ca with strict gun laws, bahas a AWB has limits on hangun purchases and registration. They still have very high gun violence. The problems lie in how kids are raised.

As somebody who played tons of these newfangled murder simulators for years, I can say with 100% confidence that the worst ideas I ever had as a kid came from cartoons, not video games. [0]

Games don't mess around with casuality very often. Usually when you do lethal things, they kill stuff. In cartoons, very dangerous things are portrayed as being something you can walk away from with only soot on your face or a lump on your head. To give you an idea of how bad we're talking here, there was a time very early on in my life when I didn't know that strangulation could kill people.

I'm not even joking. [1]

[0]: Keep in mind of course that one person is a single data point, not a set. (And not even a rigorous data point at that.)

[1]: Thankfully nobody died.

Why is no one targeting music that advocates gun violence? Video games and movies are pretty obviously works of fiction. Some rap music, for example, advocates murdering real people in real situations

Throwing another art from another medium under the bus isn't going to help things. If anything, doing so just legitimizes these ridiculous laws. We should be against these shenanigans regardless of the medium in question.

It might help things. If we threw in books for example suddenly the 1st Amendment implications would become very clear to everyone. Right now pretty much only video games are involved, and a very large portion of the population considers these to be alien, "not art" and frankly just a second class "speech medium".

Music (well, rap music) probably sits somewhere between the two.

Music only caused violent and undesirable behavior in our parents' generation, obviously.

After reading the bill, I'm not opposed to it on practical grounds. For a $60 game, it's $0.60. Who cares. Furthermore, the revenue would go exclusively towards the treatment of mental health conditions, which is just fine with me, as I believe the real cause of these violent outbursts is a lack of support system for those who need it most.

What I disagree with in this bill is the use of the privately run, industry controlled ESRB as the measuring stick for what is and isn't violent. Not only are they terrible at accurately rating games (in my opinion), they're not even being given the chance to distinguish between violent video games and other kinds of mature video games (complex plot, general adult themes, etc.) ALL T rated games or higher would be taxed, regardless of the level of violence in the game itself. That's simply inaccurate, and displays a very fundamental lack of knowledge on the topic. Don't try to regulate what you don't understand, please.

Not to mention the fact that, if this wins, it's further legitimizing the absolutely absurd notion that video games are the cause of these exceptionally rare and exceptionally violent outbursts. I can't agree with that.

The thing is, once you accept a 1% tax on violent video games, you've accepted in principle that violent video games warrant government interference. Then the question becomes how much the government should interfere, rather than whether it should at all.

Violent video games are free speech. Specific types of speech shouldn't have special taxes placed on them. I feel the same way about a 1% tax on violent video games as I would about a 1% tax on books containing witchcraft-related themes.

Media should not be taxed based on it's content. Permitting that puts the government one step away from being able to create de facto bans based on content by merely cranking the tax rate.

Why shouldn't media be taxed based on its content?

What research has been done on this?

When I played FPS games, I would have visualizations of walking around with a gun (in a game world). These continued for a few years after I stopped.

Now I don't have them.

I was never violent, nor had any urge to violence. But I had tons of violent images. That's an interesting effect. Did anyone else have anything similar, and is there any research on this?

Reminds me of the well known "Tetris effect" where you see falling blocks long after you stop playing the game. I have experienced both sensations, but have neither shot nor dropped bricks on anyone.

Interesting. I figured it was something like that, since the images didn't match any though patterns I was having.

Same thing happens with falling arrows and DDR

True story: I got DDR not long before the second time I took the SAT. The night before the test, I played until around 4 AM. On test day, this is what I saw every time I blinked: http://i.imgur.com/hTk7Q.png

I'm a heavy player, and unfortunately I've never had the joy of seeing arrows flying around me during the day.

Research has not been done because it's stopped politically every time they try.

That was one of the executive orders issued today, to study the connection if any and it's already being attacked viciously. The results will certainly be ignored as well.

The research is pointless.

Suppose you do the research and it tells you with great certainty that mentally unstable people who play quake are more likely to visit their local mall with a grenade launcher. What do you do? The video game is still free speech, and there is no way in hell it meets the 'imminent lawless action' test even if it has such an effect.

I find it hard to believe that video games (or movies, songs, novels, etc,) even extremely violent ones, could compel someone to murder unless they were already seriously mentally ill. Such an ill person, deprived of violent media, would not miraculously be cured nor would they pose any less a risk to those around them.

What about violent books, conversations, thoughts, and lectures at school? (Have you ever read a history book? They're twice as violent as Grand Theft Auto.)

Violence in books is textual, so it's going to be far less vivid for the reader than a video game where you actually cause the violence. Additionally, violent books/conversations/thoughts/lectures often focus on the negative aspects of violence rather than glorifying it the way movies and video games do.

Some would disagree: http://www.merrycoz.org/yc/BADLIT.HTM

It's a familiar horse to beat, this NEW media is special, and different and scary.

It happened with jazz, rock&roll, comic books, movies, novels, heavy metal, many scapegoat has met the whip of the righteously ignorant. It's always been a meaningless argument, totally void of scientific fact.

Were there wars before fiction? Was there crime before video games?

Ever read American Psycho?

Honestly far more disturbing than any game I have ever seen.

Games, cartoons, books reflect the society we live in, hence they would portray violence.

I would argue the opposite. Violence is very dramatic and exciting, it's always going to appear in fiction more often than in real life for that very reason.

Sigh. Let's blame video games and mental illness instead of tackling the real problem. This is going to work out great.

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