The National Rifle Association lay silent shortly after the horrific Newtown shooting in which twenty children and six adults were indiscriminately killed with a military-style Bushmaster rifle. It’s a tragedy that has seized America in grief. Using this moment of silence to assess their options, the NRA tactfully asserts their 141 years of wisdom to shovel the blame onto video games. Just like the dear disbarred Jack Thompson, best known for being outplayed by Penny Arcade.
Okay, I get the NRA’s motives. Video game violence is an easy scapegoat, but it’s been tried before and this strategy has already been tarnished and hackneyed by the aforementioned ex-lawyer.
Read the whole press release here, but below is the excerpt concerning video games.
And here’s another dirty little truth that the media try their best to conceal: There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people. Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI8J_pl60l0′]
This argument is nothing more than a weak attempt at deflecting unwanted attention onto a “corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but if a fight breaks out at a League of Legends tournament, I’m fairly certain that transgressor’s team gets disqualified and the individual is charged with assault instead of the facility erupting into a bacchanalian frenzy of hypnotized blood thirst and programmed violence.
As a silly side note, in the paragraph prior to the excerpt, Wayne LaPierre speaks in the second person plural “you’ve” (Americans) and then shifts to the singular “you” (specific person) in the video games section. Who is he talking to? Where is my research department? Simple subject confusion, while amusing, is not professional.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfBtJr9q_fw’]
Human beings are a violent people, just look at our written history. The bloodshed stretches much farther back, even before people wrote down who won. It’s absurd to blame a recent and young innovation like video games as a root cause for an inherent propensity for aggressive and violent actions. Yes, many video games are violent (Max Payne 3, seen above), they can also objectify and sexualize women (also seen above in the Lollipop Chainsaw video), and offend in any number of ways, just like any other media (including books). Look at what’s currently happening in India where a journalist was killed during an anti-rape rally, or for that matter look at Libya, Egypt, and Syria. This is news that we’re neutrally exposed to and passively absorb. Violence breeds itself organically; video games are a recent product of the world, and they did not produce violence. How old is murder?
Do you think exposure to violent video games encourages violent behavior?
Excellently put!
Let’s look at the four games he names:
* Mortal Kombat doesn’t involve guns, it involves unrealistic fantasy martial arts. America is not plagued by spree karate kicks
* Splatterhouse is an ultraviolent game where you fight and hack up fantasy monsters, not people
* Bulletstorm, going off wikipedia, _is_ a game with guns but it’s again over-the-top fantasy violent with silly jokes and against fantasy baddies
* Grand Theft Auto involves shooting people and taking their stuff and is notorious for letting you murder prostitutes for money, a thing that really happens to real women.
So of four games he names, only one bears a resemblance to violent acts that happen in real life. Grand Theft Auto is the only one you could really argue would make someone think of acting the violence out on real people, since that’s what you do in the game. And AFAIK, nobody has found a casual link yet and researchers have indeed had a look.
(Okay, he names five, but the fifth is a fucking Flash game you play for free – it’s not part of the video game industry. And barely anyone had heard of it until now)
You are indeed correct, but you left out the crucial point: The NRA is scapegoating video games in order to draw attention away from the real culprit, guns. As many other people have observed, lots of other countries have access to exactly the same video games we play in America. Yet these countries have much lower rates of gun violence because they have stricter gun control policies. That is what Wayne LaPierre wants you to ignore.
The NRA wants us to suspect the quality of the rivets on the Titanic rather than the appropriateness of ramming an iceberg at full speed.
Sorry, but I’ve got to be a grammar nazi here; “you’ve” is not plural, it’s a contraction for “you have.” Unlike other languages, English does not have different words for the singular and plural second-person pronoun, unless you count the regional idiom “y’all.”
Sorry, but if you have to be – or ‘have got to be’ as you state – a grammar Nazi here, then you should keep in mind that “y’all” is also a contraction, not an idiom. You might want to check on your definitions of linguistic terminology as well as the commonality of such words as “y’all” in order to be more clear about the differences between ‘regional’ and ‘standard’ varieties of a language.
James MacQuarrie : I think you’ve misread the text. To expand on what you said, modern standard English has no real tools for the speaker to distinguish second person singular and plural; we can only infer based on context. So here, the author is not stating that “you’ve” is second person plural. Rather, the author is pointing out that the referring “you” and “you’ve” in Lapierre’s speech don’t share the same referendum. Does that make sense?
Aaron Kashtan : I don’t disagree that the article could have continued to encompass that, but I disagree that it should have. The whole point of this piece, I think, is to remove video games as a scapegoat option entirely. Furthermore, it’s not intellectually honest to conclude that increased gun-control would solve everything in the US. Other countries have lower gun-deaths and stricter gun policies, but their population is that of New York city or less (e.g., Norway) and they’re even smaller than some states. Even Canada, comparable in size, has maybe 1/9th the population. While it’s debatable whether or not nation size and population is a determining factor effectiveness of gun-control, an article where the goal is to defend video games against constant NRA rhetoric is not the place for that discussion.
Either way, it was a good read. It teases at some delicious points without straying too far from its thesis.