US Senator says games are a bigger problem than guns | Hacker News Reader

US Senator says games are a bigger problem than guns

arstechnica.com

93 pointsSwifty107 comments

It's interesting that "violent games" and "violent music" often get blamed (often by the same people), but "violent films" or "violent novels" less often. I would guess demographics are a big part of it: lots of people who don't think of themselves as potential killers like horror films, but they think of video games, or black metal, as something only weird obsessives are into, because people in their circles aren't into them.

I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films, than I am by people playing Call of Duty or buying Dimmu Borgir albums, but ymmv.

edit: That isn't to say that I think violent films should be banned, either. But I'm more weirded out by the fact that some really gory stuff is really popular, than I am by anything that comes out of the game or music industries.

I said it before (and other people made useful rebuttals) but I find it interesting that people are quick to condemn pro-anna and thinsperation type imagery, but they'll also defend violent video games.

If someone really wanted to get a law on the books they'd take an existing game, re-skin it to be full of children, "Jews" and "blacks", and build some levels in schools and shopping malls, release it anonymously, and then tip-off the most vocal press.

And I find it a bit confusing that people spend billions on influencing others, but that we never refer to the research when discussing this.

People did this quite a bit back when Doom was big, and it caused some controversy, but I don't know of any laws that arose from it.

>I said it before (and other people made useful rebuttals) but I find it interesting that people are quick to condemn pro-anna and thinsperation type imagery, but they'll also defend violent video games.

You're sort of right about that being interesting, and the fact is that condemnation and censorship of pro-ana and thinspo material is generally misguided.

But it's sort of different. Pro-ana and thinspo imagery are generally promoted by people with the very mental illness that those movements are blamed for, and should be viewed as a symptom, not a cause.

I think people could make some pretty hateful games, yes, and some people probably do (but they aren't that popular, as far as I know). But isn't that true of any uncensored medium? People publish white-power books, and books about how Hitler was great, and we're not (at least in the U.S.) pushing for laws about those. Heck, Stormfront is on the net with no age-related access controls. It's just sort of a fact of uncensored media that you'll have to live with some pretty unpleasant stuff. What I don't see is games being uniquely dangerous, or having the unpleasant stuff in unusually high concentrations.

Really? Its pretty well understood that women come off badly in video games. Either super-sexualized, or just props to be beaten and killed.

And now somebody will point to 1 or two games that don't. That's called 'the exception that proves the rule'.

I agree there's a ton of sexism in games, yes. I don't see them as so outrageously different from our general culture as to be the source of a unique problem, though. Certainly not as the explanation for why the U.S. has such unusually high levels of violence for a developed country.

I mean, American culture and media are full of sexism, some of it pretty absurd. Beer ads are super-sexist, for example, and those are allowed to be shown at prime-time to children, despite peddling both sexism and alcohol. And the treatment of women in Hollywood is extremely problematic as well. I'm willing to believe that games are even more sexist than the already pretty low bar for media in general, and that's something worth criticizing game developers for, but it seems strange for a Senator to single them out. I would be really surprised if Lamar Alexander is the one to lead a general charge against sexism in the American media.

Other media is temporary entertainment of an escapist sort. Viewed/read and forgotton.

Video games are immersive environments. Roleplaying continues for scores of hours. You might spend longer in one game than watching all of Star Wars put together.

And you are the protagonist in a video game! You are PERSONALLY doing all that misogynistic violence. Its fun! You get points!

I think video games are fundamentally different than all other 'media', to the point that video games aren't media at all. They are closer to a club, or a school, or a gang experience than they are to a book.

And I've played hundreds of games. I have a room at home dedicated to the playing of games, with machines arrayed around a large round table with power strips mounted below, built for the purpose. So no I'm not here to slam games through ignorance.

But we do our cause a huge disservice when we pretend not to 'get it', when we paper over the real differences between our hobby and other entertainments.

I guess that part I just don't agree with. I feel much more immersed in novels than in games, myself. Games are just escapist entertainment, whereas novels have changed my worldview, stuck with me for years, and made me feel I was there. I can't think of a game that has been more than entertainment for me, and I've played quite a few also. Heck, even in sci-fi situations, Ender's Game felt much more immersive than Doom. All that stuff about "demons from hell" and "being on Mars" in Doom I just saw as sort of silly skin on top of what's fundamentally some abstract gameplay. And it's hard to take the skins of Counterstrike or CoD any more seriously than that.

More to the point, though, the scientific evidence that games change behavior more than other media just isn't very compelling, despite lots of money spent trying to prove it (some of it in the positive direction, as people with "serious games" grants try to prove that games are uniquely positioned to enact positive behavior change).

You say novels have deeply impressed you - at a conscious level, with moving themes and new ideas. Despite violence, evil characters and events, maybe even genocide. They all happen in novels.

Compare a video game - you kill an NPC, scoop up some loot, scrounge around breaking all their crates and pots, then move on. Not thinking about it, not caring what it is you're doing or what it means to loot a body or take the pathetic remains of some poor wretch's miserable existance. Ha! This gun is way worse than the one I'm wielding! Throw it in the trash, or keep it to sell for coin.

Clearly they are very different experiences. You can't tell me killing innocent bystanders, looting strangers' homes, fencing stolen goods not once but 10,000 times to get to the final level - none of this penetrates, not even a little? You mention Doom which is disengenious - that was riveting when it came out because of the tension, the surprises. But we're way past that now. Now we hear the screams of carefully simulated civilians, see their blood, then loot their wallets and cars.

Why? What moron thinks this is entertainment? It substitutes shock for any scrap of intelligent gameplay, until it becomes meaningless. Until its just abstract gameplay.

Anyway maybe I'm off the mark here. But until we admit that something is going on here that's different from a book or movie, we've not begun to figure out whether it matters.

People make that argument yet men are almost always victims of the most brutal deaths in cinema, specifically without the camera looking away.

> And I find it a bit confusing that people spend billions on influencing others, but that we never refer to the research when discussing this.

I don't. Demagoguery can always support people's agendas; research not so much.

> I'm personally rather more disturbed that people actually enjoy watching the Saw series of films

Isn't that the truth. I appreciate this is largely preaching to the choir, but it seems increasingly bizarre that sexual content (including simple nudity) is so often censored, while graphic violent acts are everywhere in mainstream entertainment. What are people afraid of?

It's always amazed me that we seem to try harder to protect children from seeing a nipple than we do to prevent them from seeing depictions of people being killed.

There was some fascinating research on this in the 90s. Apparently most Americans were more concerned about violence in movies than sex. But thought their neighbors were more concerned about sex than violence.

Our beliefs about other people's beliefs affect what issues we'll complain about in public. With the result that there is more care taken in our ratings to prevent children seeing sex than violence.

I had never thought about it that way. We've found ourselves in a situation where we're more embarrassed to be caught watching something with nudity than violence because we made assumptions about other people that may be incorrect.

Isn't there a name for this kind of fallacy? It's on the tip of my tongue. There was an anecdote (an example, rather) where each member of a family wants to go outdoors while assuming that everybody else will choose to remain indoors, and, out of being "considerate", everybody chooses to remain indoors. Comedy or tragedy ensues.

Edit: Found it: Pluralistic Ignorance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance. Uncited, but interesting statement: "...Pluralistic Ignorance can be caused by the structure of the underlying social network, not cognitive dissonance."

I thought the name for this situation was groupthinking : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

"Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people, in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an incorrect or deviant decision-making outcome"

Also, Google, "Abilene Paradox" - sounds eerily similar...

And not just being killed, but being dismembered while still alive...

It's about the typical reaction to each image. A normal person will repulse from depictions of gore and violence because most people are not naturally inclined to that kind of imagery, so it's less important to regulate because its effect on the vast majority of the viewership is not dangerous, though contributing to the desensitization toward violence and crime is obviously counterproductive and individuals should take care to control their personal intake.

Pornographic or erotic imagery is different. It taps into a natural impulse that almost every person has and most likely doesn't promote particularly virtuous deployments of that inclination. Sex, and by extension sexual imagery, has a very powerful pull on most people and the use of sexual impulses must be tightly controlled if reasonable social cohesion is to be maintained.

Will and Ariel Durant, prominent historians from the mid-1900s: "No man, however brilliant or well-informed, can dismiss the wisdom of the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires; if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group."

I find that description extremely apt. Sexual imagery provokes a more fervent reaction because it has a much more dangerous effect on a much wider segment of the populace than violent imagery.

And by people you mean Americans. Here in Europe the world is a little different.

A few years ago a large advertising festival ran jumbo ads across Slovenia. They were everywhere. The only thing on them was a pair of naked soaped up boobs.

Nobody even batted an eye.

I haven't heard of "violent music" getting blame in a long time. I think video games kind of took over that rhetoric just because people, mostly children, are immersed in the game in which they are shooting and killing things. Whereas with a movie and even lesser with music they are just watching/listening someone else's story.

Video games haven't broken into the art barrier just yet.

How about this: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2013/01/...

"The results showed that early fans of different types of rock (eg, rock, heavy metal, gothic, punk), African American music (rhythm and blues, hip-hop), and electronic dance music (trance, techno/hardhouse) showed elevated minor delinquency concurrently and longitudinally. Preferring conventional pop (chart pop) or highbrow music (classic music, jazz), in contrast, was not related to or was negatively related to minor delinquency."

Though the study isn't so great at the whole causation-correlation thing.

I was speaking more about a "Marilyn Manson caused Columbine" type of thing.

I thought it was KMFDM?

I'm skeptical people have really changed their views due to a considered reasoning that, well, we were wrong about music, but the real culprit is games, because they're more immersive, etc. I think they're just serving the same cultural scapegoat position as music did. In the 1990s, people reflexively blamed KMFDM or Marilyn Manson, and today they reflexively blame videogames. I don't see much evidence that the people blaming the latter have thought it through more—and some of them are the same people. In particular, I think politicians like Lamar Alexander are just desperately grasping about for something unpopular to deflect the pressure away from guns.

Oh I completely agree. I'm just saying that right now video games serve as a "better scapegoat." I'm sure if virtual reality becomes popular in the next decade we will have a new "better scapegoat."

Yeah -- this idea that it's this "other" group of people who are the problem is real prevalent pretty much everywhere, on all sides, in this gun debate. I know it's an easy, captivating argument, but that "other-group" argument seems to be part of the problem itself.

Well I do think violent films are called out, though definitely less often because games are relatively new. IIRC there were many people attempting to link the Columbine shooting and the Matrix, which had just been released.

I must say I can't watch films like Se7en, American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Clockwork Orange without being thoroughly disturbed; this is true to a lesser extent with novels, but I can control virtually everything about the experience. I guess what I'm trying to say is it wouldn't surprise me at all if any number of these media encouraged past people to commit crimes, but that doesn't imply they wouldn't have done anything had they not seen/read/played whatever inspired them.

The problem with this type of issue is that the topic is complex, it is hard to get anything like clean evidence, people start with strong opinions, and attempts at careful analysis immediately get derailed. We could try to reduce it to its component parts. But that fails, as Calvin points out at http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/im....

But that said, here are my personal beliefs:

- Exposure to violence in mass media (including games) is probably correlated with overall violence in life across all of society.

- The individual correlation is very, very small.

- There are widespread confusions about cause and correlation that come up over and over again.

- Long term comparisons have trouble dealing with the confounding influence of a long-term decrease in violence in our society, with possible causes from changing mores to reduced lead to parents not resorting to corporal violence to who knows what.

- No simple correlation exists between levels of gun ownership and violence in a society.

- The "assault weapons" (yeah, that term is not well defined) that get used in high profile mass shootings are, on the whole, less often used in crime or to kill people than handguns. Even if a ban was effective, it would be unlikely to produce any noticeable effect.

- There is no way that, given how polarized our politics are, that anything resembling an assault weapon ban is getting through this Congress.

- The Supreme Court in Heller made it clear that governments have limited power to regulate the kinds of arms that are available, but has not ruled on what those limits are. There is a real possibility that assault weapons bans, like the one that just passed in New York, are going to be struck down on constitutional grounds.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled argument...

The "assault weapons" (yeah, that term is not well defined) that get used in high profile mass shootings are, on the whole, less often used in crime or to kill people than handguns. Even if a ban was effective, it would be unlikely to produce any noticeable effect.

A corollary to this is a guess that the handful of high-profile mass shootings just aren't good proxies for violence in general. I think many people view it as the "straw the broke the camel's back", an extreme example of a general class of problems that finally got people to take the problem seriously, like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire did for water pollution. But an alternate hypothesis is that these rare events are very different (in causes and solutions) from the more common kinds of violence, so the discussion focused on these handful of anomalous data points is not very useful for figuring out how to reduce violence overall.

Exactly. A better mental illness safety net likely would reduce mass shootings. Tackling drug gang violence is more likely to have an impact on homicide rates.

See http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editoria... for discussion of an approach that saves lives year in and year out, but does not reduce mass shootings.

It's when stories and comments like this come out that I realize just how alien America is sometimes.

Most of this comment is nonsense. But many of you can't see that because you're American. It's quite obviously nonsense when you're outside America. On THIS issue, your politicians are absolutely nuts, your citizens are absolutely nuts.

We can all tell it is utter nonsense because you can look at all the other countries in the world that don't have these weird mass murders at anywhere near the frequency per capita. All of them have violent video games. Few of them have massive gun cultures.

Yet Americans are seriously debating this. It's like some crazy countrywide delusion.

But it's not just your gun culture, it's something else. Who knows what part of the American psyche causes it. Perhaps it's the dark-side of the American dream. You have massive homicide rates compared to the rest of the stable developed world. When it comes to murder you're a backwards country. You're down there with Belarus and Georgia.

That's really, really weird. And it's not video games. Or we'd all be joining you.

So it's not really very complex at all. It's got nothing to do with video games.

> Most of this comment is nonsense. But many of you can't see that because you're American.

You're not even trying to sound reasonable.. is there even a point in there?

I've lived in both the U.S. and Europe (and have family in both places), and see it as fairly complex. I don't really see Europe as having many solutions, though, except that I do like the European economic and social-safety model better. Europe does not do well at all with violence except in pretty narrow cases: monocultural to the point of being pretty racist nation-states, with a sort of extended-family village mentality. Once you try to have any kind of diversity in Europe, people get shot, even if the differences are pretty minor! Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the French banlieues, anywhere with mixtures of populations and cultures and you've got trouble. I live in Denmark currently, and it has low overall violence, but seems to basically consider multiculturalism the root of all evil, and everyone assimilating to fit within a narrow range of acceptable Danishness as the #1 strategy to keep everyone from harming their neighbor. Seems like a pretty depressing approach to peacefulness.

And on the high-profile mass-shooting cases, there's little difference at all: Europe has its Utøyas and Erfurts, too. There's a lot less drug-war going on, though, or at least whatever drug trafficking is going on is more out of sight.

It is complex, because the U.S. is a very, very complex society. In many parts of Europe you're looking at a much less diverse and separated population compared to that of the States. Public discussions in the U.S. have a vast number of voices coming from a similar number of interests and backgrounds. This convolutes and masks various points of public discourse in ways/degrees I'm not sure you see as much in individual European or Asian countries. But this is only my two cents.

I do admit I haven't spent much time in abroad (I'm in the U.S.), but living my whole life here I find it a full-time job at times to follow public debates in an educated manner and make meaningful decisions at the ballot box.

For your information I grew up in Canada. A long time ago I would have immediately agreed with you.

But then I made the mistake of posting my views on Usenet. Unlike most people on either side of these arguments, I actually followed up on the deluge of references I got in return from both sides. And did my best to create an informed opinion for myself. Here are some basic points off of the top of my head from what I have learned over the following two decades.

- Gun ownership and gun violence are nothing like linearly correlated. For example Canada has a third the guns/capita that the USA does, and a fifth the gun violence.

- The USA's violence problems are tied closely to racial problems. Over half of homicides are committed by blacks, and over half of the remainder by hispanics, despite the fact that there are more whites than either of those other racial groups. I just ran across a reference that I'm not sure is trustworthy indicating the the homicide rate among US whites is actually 0.32 per 100,000. If true then that is down with Singapore and Iceland - and is under half of most European countries.

- When two areas have easy transport between them, the one with more restrictive gun rules tends to experience worse gun problems tied to crime.

- There is some evidence that removing guns increases levels of violent crime, but reduces odds of death during that crime. Whether you consider this an improvement is likely to depend on your politics.

- I've seen and found believable (but have not researched) the claim that in the short term after a major gun ban, the use of guns in crime actually goes up. (It is believable because criminals still have their guns, and have less fear about using them.)

- No matter what the truth is, there is no way in the US system that we actually could ban guns. It would require changing the Constitution in a way that most Americans do not like.

>"the the homicide rate among US whites is actually 0.32 per 100,000. If true then that is down with Singapore and Iceland - and is under half of most European countries."

you're forgetting that the vast majority of those other countries might also find a large part of their violence being committed by "minority groups"

I'm not forgetting, I'm just not bothering to dig deeper.

My point is that the vast majority of the crazy homicide rate in the USA can be attributed to the existence of large minority populations with huge problems of all sorts. I am not aware of any other Western country with similar demographic issues. Once you sort out that, the portion of the US homicide problem that is explainable by the prevalence of guns is nowhere close to what most non-Americans naively assume it to be.

If someone had access to statistics on comparative homicide rates only among the majority ethnic group in different countries, I'd gladly look at it. It frankly seems hard for me to believe that US whites score so well on that score given the size and diversity of the circumstances of the white population. But no matter what the answers are, you're going to have a hard time coming up with objective, unarguable evidence saying that guns are more than a tiny fraction of the problem in the USA.

In an ethnically homogeneous country (and not all are), the minority is likely not one readily distinguishable by skin color alone. There are the Yakuza, Kkangpae, and Ah Kong (the latter mostly Chinese Singaporeans). European nations often have issues with right-wing groups (and in some cases ethnic Muslim minorities). But the distinct racial and cultural division (and history) present in the US is fairly distinctive.

I'm American, and I'm not nuts, at least not when it comes to guns. Our problem is that we worship our Constitution as a source of morality. We don't have the ability to ask whether this "right" makes sense in a modern context.

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Yeah, those all make sense. Guns? Why does the right to bear arms grant us the right to own handguns, rifles, and shotguns, but not rocket launchers? Why not landmines? In the future will the Second Amendment grant us the right to lasers? Does it only include lasers that have a rifle shape or a handgun shape? What about phasers? Only if they have a barrel? Will future phaser nuts buy off-market adapters to set their phasers to Kill?

We can keep on trying to interpret this vague amendment; or we can grow up and realize it is a stupid amendment that wasn't made with much forethought, repeal it, and learn to think for ourselves.

Last week Eleanor Clift of Newsweek (put as much stock in her opinion as you wish, she almost always leans left) opined the Second Amendment applied much more to establishing militias to help put down rebellions in the early days of the U.S. (and I do know the threat of rebellion(s) then was quite high).

Personally, I'm not sure yet just how many people share this view that rebellion suppression was one of, if not the primary motivator for that language, but it does weigh on my mind as part of the overall debate, and factors into my weighing of how backward-looking AND forward-looking the amendment was/is.

My impression of the history is that the 2nd appeared at a time of change in the USA. At the point it was written it was clearly an individual right. By the time it got ratified, in some states it was seen as an individual right, and in others it was seen as a right to organize militias.

The legal question about which way to interpret it in the courts was not settled until 2008. Now we have clear precedent saying that it is an individual right, and moreover one that thanks to the 14th restricts state and local government's ability to regulate. See http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us... for the text of that decision if you want to form your own opinions on what it now means.

(Note, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)

Thanks for the link, I think that will be very helpful filling in gaps in my knowledge and thought that applies to this topic. An excellent source!

I've been in a few America-nonAmerica debates over this subject recently. What surprises me is that it seems like the nonAmerican generally can't get past the existence of the 2nd amendment, when most of the debate on the American side is what policies are or are not compatible with the 2nd amendment.

Anyway, I guess it's fine to disagree with the 2nd amendment and believe it should be overturned, but it's not exactly a useful point to make.

Anecdote: My kids are preschool age. Obviously we regulate what and how much TV they watch; I don't let them watch violent stuff or stuff that's agressive on TV but occasionally things slip through the net like power rangers or spider man cartoons, etc. I live in the UK and I have noticed that often when they play a game that involves a lot of aggression they put on an American accent, it was amazing the effect one episode of power rangers had. I haven't spent much time in the US but from consuming plenty of US media, it always seems like violence and aggression in general is a big part of American culture and is portrayed as heroic, rather than tragic. I don't think you can change that through legislation.

Thanks for your personal beliefs. Who are you?

I just updated my profile with a little bit of information.

The rest you can find with Google.

I've been reading about bayesian stats and likelihood ratios lately.

So, a likelihood ratio is P(X|A) / P(X|~A) .

If you define X as "likely to commit gun violence", then A would be the way to identify X.

Here, he's saying that A="plays violent video games". The problem is that not only is there a poorly correlated relationship between gun violence and video games, there's also plenty of gun violence by people who don't play violent video games. So the likelihood ratio isn't great.

It's the same with "is mentally ill". Even if you screen for mental illness, you're going to get a lot of false positives and false negatives.

The problem is that people keep trying to identify "A", and I suspect there isn't even a root cause. To me it seems like it's more a matter of multiple contributory causes that reach tipping points. System dynamics, if you will. For instance, if you reduce the allure of "preparing for the end of the world", that could have a system-level impact. Or, if guns looked feminine, that would probably do it too.

Is mentally ill doesn't have binary outcomes. Mental issues are set on spectrums (spectra?), usually from normal to extreme or extremely low to extremely high, normal in middle, and each human has an analog value on each spectrum for each disorder. With the latter, we expect a Poisson distribution.

A particularly tricky aspect for the purposes of this discussion is that the positions on those spectra are somewhat circularly defined when looking at outcomes, at least as defined in the DSM, the most common U.S. diagnostic manual. Many of the conditions have outcome-related diagnostic factors right in the definitions: whether the person is experiencing significant distress in their life, conflict with others or their surroundings, inability to work a job, etc. The pragmatic goal is to avoid over-diagnosing things that aren't actually causing people problems, but as a result it's tricky to isolate causal factors. Even worse if you're diagnosing people in retrospect: of course someone who went on a shooting rampage is going to meet all those criteria, after the fact.

Well, yes - I meant it as shorthand for passing a screening test, since that is what they all talk about. Passing a screening test for mental illness will have a lot of false positives, and a lot of false negatives.

"Mentally ill" is one of those mysterious designations, anyway. No one really knows what it means. Is there a set of symptoms such that if you have them, you're definitely mentally ill, and if you don't, you definitely aren't?

I actually wrote a paper in university about whether violence in games and tv causes violent behavior in real life. It turns out that the US has spent tens of millions of dollars since the 1950s on studies trying to prove that violent media does in fact cause real-world violence. After the decades of studies, and the gobs of money that's been spent, still not one shred of conclusive evidence has supported the notion that games cause violent behavior.

Here's a link to a draft of the paper if anyone's interested: http://goo.gl/TJQaU

Didn't James Holmes dress up like the riddler/joker, record an insane voicemail greeting in joker character, cover his apartment in batman posters, and shoot up a theatre playing batman? Clearly it was call of duty and gaia that made him do it

At least this senator could've found some sort of phony empirical evidence before scapegoating. Guess the violent movies are the root of all evil card is played out

Parenting is the real issue here. If you can't teach your kids the difference between reality and fantasy, you have failed.

I had caring parents who love video games. I have been playing violent games since my dad got Doom for our N64. I am a well-adjusted individual with a good job, a happy relationship, a stable living condition, and plenty of friends.

Why didn't video games turn me violent? It's probably because while my parents love games, they didn't let me sit in front of them 24/7. They made sure I did my work, had an after-school job, was involved in clubs, etc. The same applies for any other medium, like TV. Everything in moderation.It's not the job of the video game industry to make sure kids are only playing x-hours per day, it is the parents'.

It might also be because video games have a poor correlation towards gun violence in general. Video games exist in other countries that don't have our style of gun violence. Of course, I suppose it's possible that those other countries have superior parenting, as well.

I agree with what you are saying but compare apples to apples. The Senator tried to blame (maybe also blame) games for the shootings when many are calling for limiting gun /gun variety ownership. So to be fair, we should mention that not everyone with a gun shoots his classmates either.

There is no evidence that sufficient experience playing (say) Doom deathmatch will turn anyone into a mass killer. 'Moderation' is probably a red herring.

Indeed. I think the best correlation may be that if someone is already inclined to commit mass violence, they may be able to improve their technique for practicing murder with a violent video game by studying various reactions by human and computer players.

This, of course, is equally true for watching any violent movie, and even just the news these days. But don't let that get in the way of some good sensationalism.

I don't think there is a real issue here, because there's a lack of good evidence that video games are linked to real-life murders in the first place, regardless of parental influence.

Sure, there's some evidence that playing violent video games increases aggressive play in young children, but to connect the dots from that to shooting sprees is like concluding that because baby dolls encourage maternal role play in young girls, exposure to dolls will lead to higher teen pregnancy rates. It's an insane generalization in the first place, and there's no reason to even bring parental responsibility into the discussion.

Arguing that good parenting obviates the need to restrict violence in games is like arguing that good driving obviates the need to wear seat belts.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing for restricting violence in video games. I am pointing out that demanding eternal vigilance from everyone is generally an ineffective solution for systemic issues. Indeed current trends towards single parents and two working parents trend towards worse parenting on the whole - not better.

My parents were never around I played ultra violent games all the time, would watch porn with my friends (stole his dads porn cache), would watch ultra violent movies and listened to gg allin and any other extreme bands like the mentors plus a healthy dose of gangster rap and I've never killed anybody nor did I end up some crazed sexual deviant. None of my friends from back then have murdered anybody either.

These people do this because they are certifiable fruitcakes. Their brains don't work and if Batman doesn't exist it would be something else like religion or catcher in the rye. Crazy people are crazy.

Every spree shooter is exactly the same a flaming narcissistic nutjob. Except those 2 colombine kids they were sort of the combo breakers then it was back to monotone speaking, thousand yard staring wackos like Cho/vtech

This is Lamar Alexander, one of the top senate recipients of NRA contributions (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/12/18/nra-and-congre...), so this sort of misdirection is rather unsurprising.

Oh, that guy? Co-sponsor of PIPA and COICA, and therefore by definition one of the baddest of the bad guys? Yeah, this is exactly the sort of inane blather you'd expect from him.

I think you might be thinking of Lamar Smith.

I think you are right, since Lamar Smith has been a prominent baddie, but it is still true that Lamar Alexander co-signed PIPA and COICA.

Also, the misdirection seems to have worked on HN.

Let's see.

USA - strict laws against violence in games (PEGI ratings etc), liberal gun control, 4.8 intentional homicides per 100 000 citizens

Poland - liberal law regarding violence in games, strict gun control, 1.1 intentional homicides per 100 000 citizens

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

PEGI is a European thing, and game ratings have no legal significance in the US.

"The plural of anecdote is not data."

"Using a quote out of context just makes you look like an idiot"

Is it out of context? Two datapoints with a multitude of confounding factors do not actually tell us anything of value.

That's not even a quote. :)

I am as skeptical about laws regulating video games as you seem to be, but laws about video game violence in the United States are hardly 'strict.' After all, the agency that rates video games, the ESRB, is run by the industry itself. And I am unaware of any legal obligation to take part in the ESRB.

Finally, the U.S. doesn't use PEGI ratings, a group of nine European nations do. But you are right in saying Poland has liberal laws — game publishers do not have to have their games rated by PEGI.

USA - strict laws against violence in games

Actually, laws banning violent video games have been ruled unconstitutional, see Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association[1]. The laws weren't that commonplace before the Supreme Court ruling, either.

[1] = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchant...

I think video games is a bigger problem than guns, because video games affect people. But the First Amendment limits what we can do about video games and the Second Amendment to the Constitution limits what we can do about guns.

Wow. He's managed to combine "they say the darndedst things" with "that pesky constitution, always in the way of the best ideas".

I'm sympathetic to the cause of limiting the power of weapons available to average citizens, but with this guy on my side, I'm not sure the opposition has much work to do. By dragging another amendment that people are passionate about into it, he effectively makes his case impossible to argue.

US: Huge number of guns, access to violent games Rest of world: access to violent games

US: lots of gun deaths Rest of world: not lots of gun deaths

So either 1- lots of guns = more gun deaths, or 2- lots of guns combined with violent games = more gun deaths

No way to tease out the two variables, unless there are places with lots of guns and no violent games that we can look at.

YES. Seriously why isn't anyone recognising this ?

The exact same violent video games and movies available in the US exist in many Western countries (New Zealand, Australia, UK, Singapore, Ireland, Scotland, France). But there is no where near the same issues.

In Australia I could get lost and end up at any house and be guaranteed I am not going to be killed for no reason.

Do you honestly think if you get lost and knock on a strangers door you'll just be indiscriminately killed in the USA?

Remember that the statistics are all talking about relatively small numbers. Take USA's 0.00004 vs Australia's 0.00001 it's technically correct to say '300% more likely', but it's still a very small chance.

tl;dr Your more likely to commit suicide than be murdered in either country.

I have heard speculation that violent video games are inversely correlated with actual violence, in light of the fact that violent crime is way down over the past thirty years or so.

The reasoning is, people who are predisposed to violence can get their kicks from violent video games, in their own homes, rather than going out and shooting people.

It is just a theory, but it is no less plausible than the opposite theory.

And I remember reading that the drop in crime was correlated with the disuse or ban of leaded gasoline when the cohort was in infancy or young childhood.

US Senators are a bigger problem than guns and video games.

Statists are always looking to point to people's freedoms as being the problem. The vast majority of gun violence is actually State-driven: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9bRDNgd6E4

That guy in the video is a crank. I watched the first eight minute (until he brings out a poverty graph). He a)leaves out the massive reduction of poverty in the US in the first half of the twentieth century and b) brushes off Social Security's massive success in reducing the elderly's poverty rate.

You stopped watching when he brought out a poverty graph? Did you think the data was wrong?

He wasn't arguing about the elderly's poverty rate. It's not relevant to the video.

There is a famous saying here, for such people: " If someone tells you to jump in a well, would you? "

Voilent games can also be seen as a punching bag to vent out your anger, without hurting somebody in actual. It is not always the case that kids turn voilent in real life because of them. Parental guidance is needed at every step of life, blame poor parenting if you have to :?

There is a famous saying here, for such people: " If someone tells you to jump in a well, would you? "

Bad example: I wouldn't but a lot of kids are easily influenced.

And no, I don't support a ban or censorship of games. I see this and guns as part of life, bad stuff happens some times, like when you cross the street and a car or a lightning might hit you.

True, the games should be in moderation as well, but I have seen numerous instances of negligence on part of parents. Your kid is 12, why let him play PG-13 games? A lot of people, need to be strict in this case.

this is indeed a very complex situation, like a algorithm, for which we know one of the 'possible answers' but not the answer as of yet.

On a second thought, I do think thats not the best possible example :/

Voilent games can also be seen as a punching bag to vent out your anger, without hurting somebody in actual.

It can also be seen as "practice" for people that are addicted to cruelty and dominance. I don't know about you, but when I play online I am often amazed at how low people can go, and how some never tire of being mean. And I'm not "raging" either, I can usually hold my own and generally care zilch about winning or loosing random pub games; but compared to how fun it is to play with "normal people", those sociopaths really do stick out, and it's obvious they live in a world where they have everything and all the peers they could want, and nothing that reminds them of the fact they have a problem - games and gamers don't do that usually, they're the silent accomplices.

But sure, if it keeps them from abusing animals or whatever, I'm all for it. But there's just no way of telling if it does that, or if it just grows a hunger for something more real. I don't feel comfortable shrugging it off. None of this can or should be solved with laws, it's all about debate and culture. It should be legal, but I frown upon it, and I want to be explicit and vocal about it and step on people's toes. Just because some got used to it, just because so many people do it, doesn't mean it's not fucking pathetic. But so are other things, movies for example. Not picking on violent video games, or violence... more the shallow display and glorification of it.

Well I think the senator should be more worried about those amalgamated automatons roaming around our steppes, breaking our penny-farthing bikes and soiling our women's petticoats.

These godless contraptions are invulnerable even to the senator's modern blunderbuss, and are fueled by the pills he needs to live.

It is only through the responsible use of freedom that people can continue to remain free. Freedom used for selfish ends leads to bondage. History has proven over and over again that in cases when self-serving attitudes spread throughout the culture that they are ripe for picking by their enemies with freedom soon lost. Freedom used responsibly always is to the benefit and welfare of others.

George Washington: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indespensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars."

To those of you who out there who are consumers of this type of material... buyer beware.

How about an experiment. Subject a group of people to violent video games and knives. Give another group of people automatic assault weapons. Create tension in the group over the course of a year, and see how many people get killed.

The article ignores the real issue-- the impact of violent video games and movie content on children. There's no First Amendment right for kids to access violent content.

I disagree with your assertion. Some violent depictions can trivially be political speech, and "think of what the children will do" is simply not a compelling reason for the government to limit any political speech, especially when there is such a tenuous scientific link between viewing that content and long term health impact.

Consider The Bully Project film from 2 years ago; the MPAA rated it R because they consider it to be too violent, even though it is literally actual footage of bullying in schools. I find it difficult to accept that 15 and 16 year olds should be legally forbidden from watching something that has direct and important relevancy on their lives and could, from a reasonably objective view, actually improve the lives of bullied kids. Just because you are 16 shouldn't mean you have no rights.

Yeah pretty much just because you aren't 21 you have few rights. Its strange - by legislating a number (legal age) we can disenfranchise, economically marginalize, and socially stigmatize whole groups of people. And no constitutional protection helps.

In my research I came across what I think is the best explanation for the cause for violence in our society. I believe video games are just another symptom but not the cause and effect.

"Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality." - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/13/the-spirit-level

That doesn't explain the mass rampage murders, which have been all committed by wealthy or upper-middle class perpetrators. Plus, violent crime in America is decreasing even while poverty is increasing.

Violent crime is decreasing, period. It is spurious (if not intentionally misleading) to suggest that this correlates in a meaningful way with changes in poverty.

Yes, recently an article was posted here (WSJ) that correlated unleaded gasoline with violent crime. That's actually believable.

IIRC, Freakanomics had a section correlating legalized abortion with a drop in crime ~18 years later. Also plausible. But, of course, not necessarily causal.

On the other hand, violent games may actually reduce violence, because people with violent tendencies may be using the games to get their "fix" in a way that doesn't actually hurt anyone.

Good luck, Senator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchant...

Yet another excuse to not get tough on gun control, all thanks to a badly worded Second Amendment.

The reality is without serious gun control the massacres in the US will continue.

If games are a bigger problem than guns, war is a bigger problem than games.

Don't forget to blame the comic books!

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