Yesterday, we discussed how various people have used the massacre in Connecticut to call for everything from gun control to new social programs and prayer in school. Now, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), a long advocate for censoring music and speech, added his own take: crackdown on violent video games. Lieberman described Adam Lanza of having a “hypnotic involvement” with the games and called on Congress to get involved.
Of course, it was not Lanza history of mental illness. Lieberman’s focus is on the games he played — the same games played by hundreds of millions of kids and adults who do not run to their local school to mow down students. However, Lieberman insists that “[v]ery often these young men have an almost hypnotic involvement in some form of violence in our entertainment culture – particularly violent video games. . . And then they obtain guns and become not just troubled young men but mass murderers.”
The basis for his concern with regard to Lanza? “Rumors” that he played the games. It was enough however to go to the floor of the Senate to call for yet another area of government regulation of speech and association.
Lieberman recognizes that the games seem to leave a surprising number of people in a non-murderous state, but that is just a fortunate side note: “Thank God, not all of them become murderers, but some of them do and we have to ask why.” I prefer to ask why we are talking about video games instead of the history of mental illness demonstrated by Lanza. And that is not even a rumor.
Wizard, thank you. But this is one of those times I am not glad to be right. I really had such higher hopes for us all. Once. When I was terribly ignorant, that is.
DonS, for protection. There was an incident about 6 months ago a couple of miles from here in which some young kid kicked in a door of an old couple’s house. The story goes that he attacked the wife, the old man ran upstairs and grabbed a gun and shot and killed the kid. initially it was reported as completely random, which really scared the hell out of me. I moved out of St. Louis City in large part due to the crime. It was later reported that there was a lot more to the story (long story, http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/dardenne-prairie-homeowner-shoots-kills-man-who-broke-into-house/article_833046c8-79ae-11e1-a6e5-001a4bcf6878.html).
I was hoping my wife would learn to shoot it with me, as I often work long hours and she is here alone with the kids. But she was and is adamantly opposed.
In more social times, I had a few friends that were police officers and went to the shooting range a few times with them. We shot the guns they used on the force (I can’t remember what they were called – I am a complete gun ignoramus). I was surprised at how difficult it was to aim. I always thought it was weird when I would visit those friends on their off days, their guns would literally be laying on their dresser or on the kitchen counter. They were bachelors and had no reason to put it away. I am a city boy and guns are foreign to me.
Gene, you are so right. My terminology was loose loose loose. I would definitely call Holy Joe a neolib sooner that a classical liberal, although it is quite difficult to nail down someone as unctuous as he, or him 😉
Juris, sounds like you and your wife have an area of disagreement — although you don’t say what drives your wish to purchase a handgun. If that little detail didn’t exist, I would say, sure, get a gun see how that effects you.
I have a couple of guns, a rarely shot: a .410 single shot shotgun which I got maybe 30 years ago, with the advice of a good ol country boy I worked with; bought it a the downtown pawn/gun shop. The purpose: to deal with rattle snakes and copperheads. Haven’t had to use it for that purpose, and I’ve shot it maybe a couple of dozen times at a outdoor range. And I have a 9 shot revolver H & R .22 cal that a friend gave me, I think actually, because he was interested in getting some more interesting and high powered stuff. He’s very much into the mechanical and boom boom fascination. Anyway it’s a fun little gun and I’ve shot it also a couple dozen times, usually with the friend who gave it to me. Not in 5 years or so. I also had a .22 cal single shot bolt action rifle that I got at a local farm store maybe35 years ago. Just for plinking. We lived in a place where I could shoot it in the backyard (like all the locals did, but with bigger bore stuff, usually on Sun morning, instead of church I suppose 😉 Even had my daughter do a couple of rounds into a target when she was maybe 10 years old which, I imagine, she wouldn’t even remember. Cartridges would sometime jam getting them into the chamber. I sold it at a yard sale when we moved.
So, having a gun around. For what? Protection. Then it best be loaded and accessible. For preparation if the Feds try to abrogate all our “god given rights”? Who knows how that whole scenario would go down, but it’s kind of like having your own militia. It’s not really a realistic scenario for me. They’re stealing our nation piecemeal as it is? To check it out and maybe work it out of your system. I can understand that.
Anyway, long winded. I respect your wife’s pov, and she probably knows you pretty well!
And just to supplement, I am not naive enough to think that stricter gun laws would have prevented the Sandy Hook tragedy.
Wizard:
” YOU SHOULD NOT EVEN READ OTHER PEOPLES POSTINGS, AND OPINIONS !Yea Know what…. Stop Replying to me, cause I’m just gonna BLOCK YOU !!
Have a good Life.”
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To block out annoying communications from the heavens, I’d suggest pulling the tin foil down tighter around your ears. Oh and before you do, I want to tell you there’s an easy way to keep people from reading your mindless drivel. You can probably figure that out.
Oh and on the good life: You, too.
Deity, out!
DonS,
Not to nitpick, well, actually to nitpick, I think you mean “between the pols of the neoliberal and neocon persuasion”. 1) There really aren’t many if any true liberal pols out there and 2) the primary difference between neolibs and neocons is they are both fascist pushing for respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship and undermining the rule of law with a slightly different take on how to use the military to gain their respective ends.
The main difference is the neoliberals favor of governance according to market criteria and neoconservatives seek valorization of state power for putatively moral ends. Both are anti-democratic, authoritarian and ultimately fascist although it is hard to gauge which one has the more totalitarian bent as they favor competing modes of inducing oppression. Both types inhabit the far right of the political spectrum in practice because of their bent to authoritarianism and disrespect for the rule of law regardless of their roots (which is at the extremes of both end of the political spectrum in an odd cross fertilization of flavors of fascism – the neocons came from the Reagan Democrats and the Neolibs from the traditional conservative movement). They can be found mostly in the GOP (neocons) and the Libertarian Party (neolibs) primarily because of economic preferences, but there are Democrats who fit the neoliberal mold too such as Nancy Pelosi.
A true classical liberal would never put up with any of that jingoistic corporatist gibberish from either group.
Jefferson would want to burn the lot of them.
Just to clarify the terminology.
DonS, I don’t believe in coincidences either. In the interests of disclosure, I am not a gun owner but would like to purchase a handgun (my wife says no and wears the pants). After actually taking the time to do some background research, I am convinced that we need more strict gun laws in this country. I never thought I would say that, but the numbers don’t lie. The points in Fareed’s article hammer it home for me.
I just want to revise my statement @7:10 . . . there really isn’t that much distance, in a practical sense, between pols of the liberal and neocon persuasion. (far afield though that is from the topic of this post!)
Juris, I think it’s not a coincidence that there has been a concerted effort, including the NRA’s coming out to introduce and deflect the discussion onto mental health and video games as the prime culprits. Even Holy Joe Liberman, treading the razor’s edge of “yes I’m a liberal” “yes I’m a neocon” (i.e., he’s a fraud for hire) jumps in the act with a nod to gun control and a big “look over here” to video games and mental health. To repeat myself, Colt Firearms Company, Hartford Connecticut.
Not that these issues of foci would probably represent a serious concern for the anti-regulation/2nd amendment uber alles types — though I hesitate to generalize in this austere forum 😉 — simply they conform to the maxim “anything but that” (looking beneath the covers of the arms industry).
Malisha,
It seems so self cleer in your words, which also complement Juris’.
Juris,
Yes I saw similarly in a post by Zwick on UK regs. Tnx for the world view and anchoring it here.
In six visits to Japan from ’65 to 2008 I never saw ANY violence. Which proves naught, except my experiences there. Believe me, japs get drunk as kites, as it is the only time that it is allowed to be a bit silly. Sad for them.
But stats do in this case.
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Guns first, Attitudes later. The latter has been a problem for centuries. Guns are the new factor. Murder will still happen, just not so frequently.
A good article to add to the debate.
Excerpt:
“The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.
So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t. The United States could do better, but we take mental disorders seriously and invest more in this area than do many peer countries.
Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries. Youth in England and Wales, for example, are exposed to virtually identical cultural influences as in the United States. Yet the rate of gun homicide there is a tiny fraction of ours. The Japanese are at the cutting edge of the world of video games. Yet their gun homicide rate is close to zero! Why? Britain has tough gun laws. Japan has perhaps the tightest regulation of guns in the industrialized world.
The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.
There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide — a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-the-solution-to-gun-violence-is-clear/2012/12/19/110a6f82-4a15-11e2-b6f0-e851e741d196_story.html
I got the paragraphing all wrong. I was trying to do it a new way, but hey…
DigitalDave, most people who have matches do not become obsessed with their power, eager to practice starting fires, or desirous of buying acetylene torches because they’re so much more efficient than matches. What’s happening with the gun culture in this country has a lot to do with something that is not related to the weaponry itself: IMO, that is, the over-inflation of the aggressive-male (or aggressive-hostility-addicted female) desire to control more than can be controlled. We are, as a society, in a peculiar position with respect to that phenomenon for which I am now going to coin a phrase.
Malisha,
As per your Enlightening Observations, which are accounted for; obviously by your intense study of Psychology, many People should be open to your Level of acknowledgment ……. To You I say BRAVO!!!!!
Wizard,
You got him pegged better than I have. I did not know that it was a God complex that he suffers from. I thought it was the insecurity of considering ideas that frightened him. Like he favors droning kids, and fought for it for two days here. Why. It was motivated by our need of security from the terrorists there. If my recall is to be trusted.
All of us need our teddy bears, but they take different forms. Now mine is……..!
Guns are the WMD of interpersonal violence. They are to human beings what H-bombs are to nations. Guns take killing into a whole new order of magnitude. And then there are assault weapons that take guns to another order of magnitude of killing.
This has been an interesting discussion, but let’s remember what’s at the heart of this debate.
Matches are dangerous, but playing with them in a room soaked with gasoline is really about the gasoline, not the matches.
Wizard,
We don’t use honorifics here, so you can drop the Sir and call him by his moniker. But if you were being ironic, then that’s another thing.
Excuse my earlier mispelling your moniker.
Wizard:
“Why ? Because their up All Night (whether or Not you Know this!) Lack of Sleep! Not Good!”
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Well, to state the obvious before I was an adult I was a child who stayed up at night reading or watching these things. Oh the horror!
Maybe you can get a seat in your wife’s class since I think you may need it more than the kids you sit around disparaging for being kids.
mespo727272,
It seems to me that you “get off” on correcting the Observations, and opinions of other people, as to your Beliefs… which unless you Forgot to put the word :
“GOD” in front of your Call Name : god-mespo727272, YOU SHOULD NOT EVEN READ OTHER PEOPLES POSTINGS, AND OPINIONS !
Because it’s obvious, that you are a
“Righteous know it All”
Yea Know what…. Stop Replying to me, cause I’m just gonna BLOCK YOU !!
Have a good Life.
Thanks, guys, for the mini-debate. Very worthy as to providing exhibits, and some logic, some abused. It was quite an experience.
Puzzling:
The trailer, was very instructive in showing the sales techniques used in a very short time. “Teen-aged” temptresses, yet older who used all her finger tricks to help us get the message, “strong language” in which only sorely repressed teens would find catharsis by hearing it, the slick “authority” guy, who finished off with a wink and some finger trick to show that he was cool and would not lead us wrong in our search for manhood.
Mark:
Reaching for proof in the pile of newspapers usually is a wise choice.
Analyzing the perp is seldom the way to go. People are too complex as to motivations, and it is not all recorded. Good try at defending a major promotion method used in deforming our youth. That was not your intent, but the effect is the same. I was hoping that you would come requiring prior courses in analysis of such a film as Puzzling exhibited , as a prerequisite to viewing.
Wizzard:
You are one of the essentials of life today. The “embedded” reporter, who wears sound cups to avoid the din, but can’t help seeing and recording it for us. There are reports from studies etc. which support you.
Teens don’t wake up before 9AM (cause not determined—on screen activity?) As to your other stuff, it has been proven time and again.
From kids sassing adults, to following the herd as the only way to go as a teen. “How do I make myself different, but still be cool like the others?”
Messpo,
Who finishes off with something the village logician would cover his face for.
He compares films of (somewhat) living value and reality-based with clear pain shown and happiness—–with video games. And asks the question: Do we want to abolish them too? I would answer, knee jerk bill of rights defender that I am, orf course NOT.
BUT, we do require labeling. And seem to lack a way to prevent works which do not fit the scale of being suitable for youth or young adults.
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So again, thanks to all, and that said with fullest respect for your rights to express yourself here. But we are all open for criticism here, even JT who occasionally lets a typo get by to the horror of the purists (of what type, I wonder?).
I claim not to sit on a higher perch, not at all. I am humbler than the least of you, but free to use whatever little I have in my head.
That is what free speech shines like this one are for, IMHO. Use it or lose it.
I watched the trailer supplied by Puzzling. This is typically what you call a “shooter game” where the action takes place from the players eyeball perspective while you see a view of your weapon of choice for aiming. I remember playing the same style game in the 90’s called “Wolfenstein”. It seems all that has changed is the sophisticated detail of the animation an updated (though not much so) choice of weaponry. This game is a decidedly un-creative use of the latest technology and probably boring after awhile. I am against censorship of these games because of First Amendment issues, but also because there is no convincing proof that they lead to violence. Whenever tragedies such as these occur people will always find simplistic answers to them. In this instance we have a simplistic thinker, with ties to the industry via Colt, attempting to steer the discussion away from the gun rights issue. Pornography used to be banned because of its harmful effect on children, which was a cover for religious censorship. Protecting our children is the first refuge of those who want to ban something, even in this debate, that is what Bob, esq. has been getting at I think.
However, I’m not out to ban weaponry, but to license and control its dissemination and widespread use. i.e. A law permitting carrying guns in a bar is a recipe for disaster. That’s why in the old westerns so may plot-lines devolved around the Sheriff having cowboys take off their guns when they came to town. The filmmakers and moviegoers generally recognized that everyone packing caused trouble, chaos and a diminishing of legal restraint. Too many today have ignored the morality myth running through these Westerns and focused on the feelings of fear engendered by the wrong people being armed. Interestingly as Bob has also pointed out in his “danger list” their fear is hardly warranted by the evidence. Part of this is the effect of “if it bleeds it leads” journalism and another part comes from the MIC/Law Enforcement/DEA types justifying their insane budgets.
Mike, I hear what you are saying….
But, I’m still looking at “TEXAS”
And from Memory….it seems that their State has Less Violence, due to the fact that its Citizens are carrying side shooters….
Now… how many Wackos would even attempt to initiate an act of Violence with a Weapon, if they see that many other People can Stop them Dead in their Tracks ?
Wizard,
Texas ranks as the fifteenth highest State in violent crime. That means 70% of the States have a lower rate of violent crime. Not exactly an endorsement of its gun policies, or the deterrence to criminality of armed citizens. Most of the States with the highest rates of violent crime have easy laws on gun access, so the argument you’re using isn’t the best for those who would justify an armed citizenry. Google State violent crime rates and see for yourself.
To : idealist707
I most; very much, are Pleased with your response to my Post…. Keep up the Good Observations of which you and everyone has the Freedom of Speech.
To you I say BRAVO !
Wizard:
“ABOLISH Video games !!!!”
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How about violent movies like “D-Day,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and “Excalibur.” I hit a midnight movie or two. Then we could move onto books like “The Iliad & the Odyssey,” “War & Peace,” and even the Bible. Those books kept me up at night, too. Let’s move onto art works like Picasso’s “Guernica” and Goya’s ” A Village Bullfight.”
One can only hope your educator wife doesn’t share your view of censorship.
Sir, your talking about “You” and what has kept “you” up at Night!….
* It seems to me that you are a ADULT…. Well, Unless your a “Kid” I Suppose that my Posting is in Reference to “You” ……
But it was Not Referencing “ADULTS” … my POSTS are in Reference to “What most defiantly Promotes Violent Behavior amongst Our Youth!
*** Therefore, what does not Affect “you” as an ADULT,
has a TRAUMATIC effect on Under-developed (Mentally) Minds of Children !
So… Please Stop Comparing yourself to a CHILD !