President Trump: “We have to do something” about violent video games, movies

a reply to: dragonridr

Once again though these conditions exist in other countries as well and yet school shootings don't occur.

Even when we just focus in on the US this explanation doesn't fit what we're seeing. There are definitely more broken homes in the black community and yet school shootings are almost strictly committed by white kids. So it goes deeper than just coming from a single parent home.

a reply to: dragonridr

I hate to burst a bubble here, but single parents are not a new phenomenon. All down the ages, from the oldest records, to the newest data, there have been single mothers. Whether its war, famine, plague, or simple abandonment makes basically no difference, realistically speaking. Children have been left with one parent or none, all throughout time. Its not a new issue. Hell, the first world war saw entire cities, almost entire counties loose all their adult males, not to mention a fair few lads who were technically not old enough to fight, but went off to war anyway, never to return, not even in caskets.

Whether we are talking about the just post war period, or the current era, the number of parents a child has is largely immaterial, when compared to the quality of the parenting available. For example, my mother is a bloody saint as far as I am concerned. She raised myself and my sister to be inquisitive, interested, to indulge in fascination with the world around us and the physical and metaphysical implications of the things we saw, as well as to be compassionate, empathic people. We have our quirks, our rough edges, as do all human beings, earned through exposure to the world, rather than through parenting in general. She did the best she could to make sure that even though she was the only actual parental figure we had (even when our dad was "around"... a useless man, toxic at worst, and ineffectual at his best), we got the best possible shake.

I really think there is far more to this situation than either parenting in general, or media exposure. There are fundamental flaws in the way society is structured, which are not nearly as much to do with the home, as they are to do with the cold, heartless nature of a nation which refuses to heal its sick without putting them either in debt, or forcing them to pay impossible amounts of insurance. There is something fundamentally wrong with a nation in which a person has to work three jobs, just to be able to fail to make rent on an apartment which is nearly as bad for their health and that of their children, as living on the streets would be. There is something fundamentally wrong with a nation which blames the victims of a banking crisis, for the fact they have to live in tent cities, even now, even all these years later.

But most fundamentally, there is a very serious problem with allowing all the above, which are BOUND to result in people loosing their minds, without providing free and comprehensive mental health care, in such a way as diagnosis if it is necessary cannot be escaped, dodged, or accidentally avoided, and in such a way as to remove people who need to be contained, to a place where they cannot harm themselves or anyone else, and have a chance to be treated and actually HEALED, the damage done to them more by society than by their status or that of their parents taken in hand and dealt with through therapy and careful application of whatever chemical assistance is necessary to treat whatever conditions arise in that person.

Calling out parenting is not practical, even when a person has both parents, if they live in a nation where simply surviving takes inhuman effort and involves two people working overtime. You could make the case that the entire structure, economic and societal of the United States needs an overhaul, particularly when it comes to the notion that hard work always pays, and that those with hard luck should just suck it up and take "responsibility" for things they had no control over. BUT... again, that is not a practical point to make, because even if it is true, there is no solution to that problem while corporatist elements control the narrative.

What is practical, is campaigning to get mental healthcare provision dragged forward about thirty years in the United States, and create a reporting system for people to use, which automatically alerts mental healthcare professionals as well as law enforcement, when someone makes threats on the internet which cause alarm, or behaves in a criminally insane fashion, as Cruz most assuredly did, for quite some time, before acting on his desire to shoot the hell out of a random assortment of kids at a school. Had the right machinery been in place, had any report of actions like he had carried out in the years previous to his opening fire on those children, been passed on to mental health support workers, and had they been able to either treat him safely as part of his normal life, or remove him to a specialised, secured facility for the purpose, people would be alive today who are dead.

That is the practical path here. Trying to attack the root cause of disenfranchisement and a lack of discipline, bought on by an almost fatalistic understanding of the world, created by the fact that their government does not care about people, that the society of which they are a part either wants them to grow rich enough to tax, or weak enough to die, and cares not which, is like attacking the fundamental underpinnings of the conservative position, when conservatives own the government root and branch. It does not get anyone anywhere.

a reply to: karmicecstasy

You make a good point. In the aftermath of Parkland I've seen one of the largest youth movements since Obama ran for his first term. If these kids can keep this passion up until November, or even until 2020, Trump and the GOP may be in trouble. Especially if they continue with moves like this that show how out of touch they are with the children of this country.

Lol. Just lol.

Let's prohibit virtual guns in order to stop mass shootings with real guns. Because fictional video games and movies are the root cause of mass shootings.

We can't restrict guns, but we can and should restrict video games and movies.

What a world we live in.

originally posted by: RomeByFire
Lol. Just lol.

Let's prohibit virtual guns in order to stop mass shootings with real guns. Because fictional video games and movies are the root cause of mass shootings.

We can't restrict guns, but we can and should restrict video games and movies.

What a world we live in.

Bruh, there’s no amendment guaranteeing the right to bear video games.

Personally we need the right to Mt Dew and Doritos, upon which to never be infringed.

I mean, what do you expect him to hear when he staffs the whitehouse with a bunch of old goomers like Sessions, and has meetings with some of the most extreme right wing policy groups you've ever heard of?

I'll admit that I do appreciate a lot of views and policy ideas from the current Admin, but for everything I'm in favor of, there's something like this that comes out of nowhere and hits you upside your head with a stupid stick.

Why stop at video games and movies, Tipper Gore? Let's just ban the whole internet.

Stupid people thinking they have a right to share their opinions, the overall decline in the ability to argue (debate) in the classic sense, the commodification of everything for the sake of profit and shareholders (including art, poetry and science) and the glorification of celebrity -- especially celebrity with no discernable talent is what is driving spree-killers.

Enough already. Shut the damn thing off. :p

originally posted by: Xcalibur254

Also, is he so out of touch with reality that he doesn't realize that games and movies are already rated for violence? Does he not know that it is illegal to sell children an M rated game or an R rated movie?

Yeah, rate a movie "R" and the kids then definitely want to see it.

a reply to: neo96

Before the days of blanks, the movie studios used real bullets during filming. Actors caught up in firefights were really caught up in firefights. Actors and others died on set too.

originally posted by: Xcalibur254
a reply to: jjkenobi

There's plenty that's changed. For example, the ever increasing amount of guns in the US. Does that mean it's a favor as well? No. Because correlation does not imply causation.

Like I mentioned in my OP most other countries have access to these games and they don't have the same problem. We're not even the most lax when it comes to game ratings. We're actually fairly strict. We're not Australia but their approach to violent media is pretty authoritarian.

Actually quite a few countries ban violent video games that we let our children in the US play around the clock. I’ve been a gamer since the late 70s and I’m now pushing 60. I’ve always joked to my wife that I’ve played video games my whole life and was never inclined to actually kill anyone, though I own actual guns. Then I realized I never had SSRIs forced down my throat since I was 5 or 6 because my parents didn’t want to parent or be ause my teachers wanted zombies in class to make it easy on the teacher.

Based on the significant rise of SSRI use/addiction, the lack of parenting today, and the kids that are now allowed to spend every waking hour in front of a screen, I’m not so sure the US shouldn’t start addressing the PC and video games that portray humans killing humans with no consequences. I have always been amazed at the graphic death and carnage allowed on broadcast television, though at least there everyone doesn’t pop back to life like on video games.

I really think folks should understand there are just people with short circuited brains (chemicals), whether they’re born that way or made that way by big pharm and lack of parenting. Once they’re identified, they should have different rules to live by in an attempt to keep society safe. There is no possible way to keep everything they could use to harm others out of society, be it guns, chemicals, or bomb making materiel.

I have to disagree with Trump strongly on this one... the same video games and movies are available in virtually all other nations, and they don't have so many kids committing mass murder. Yes violent games and movies probably are part of the problem, but it's a matter of free speech. I don't want creators to feel like they have to censor themselves in order to get their game released, the same goes for movies. Once again it's an issue of trading liberty for security.

a reply to: TrueBrit

What is practical, is campaigning to get mental healthcare provision dragged forward about thirty years in the United States, and create a reporting system for people to use, which automatically alerts mental healthcare professionals as well as law enforcement, when someone makes threats on the internet which cause alarm, or behaves in a criminally insane fashion, as Cruz most assuredly did, for quite some time, before acting on his desire to shoot the hell out of a random assortment of kids at a school. Had the right machinery been in place, had any report of actions like he had carried out in the years previous to his opening fire on those children, been passed on to mental health support workers, and had they been able to either treat him safely as part of his normal life, or remove him to a specialised, secured facility for the purpose, people would be alive today who are dead.

I'm pretty sure these systems do exist to some extent, on FB if you threaten someones life it will probably reach the police, especially if you're in a place like the UK. However there's a big issue with hauling people off to a mental institution just because they start posting some wacky stuff on their page. I remember that happened a few years ago to a guy who used to be in the army or something, and he started posting about 9/11 conspiracies and how bankers are screwing us over, and he got taken to a mental institution because of it.

It's a very slippery slope the one you suggest, who's to say what actually qualifies as insane rantings and what doesn't? It depends on what the person analyzing it believes. I'm fairly sure at least half the people on ATS would be hauled off to a mental home if these rules you suggest were put into place. The people deciding who's insane and who's not will definitely abuse that power, and they'd most likely be liberal, so could easily use it to send away all the gun toting conservatives who rant about gun rights, claiming they could snap at any moment.

I have a message for Trump. I played a lot of violent video games as a kid. I even played the role of a crusader with a semi automatic against a world government. The game was violent and I gunned down many virtual people. I never once thought about going out and doing the same thing in real life. I never took any drugs for mental illness or threatened to go shoot anyone. There are millions of other former kids who bought and played violent games 20 or 30 years ago when no one heard of school shootings. Violent video games are not the issue. I believe mental illness combined with violent action and words, psychiatric drugs, and guns are the issue.

The closest I came to shooting up people involved paint ball guns and I only had a single shot gun with no military training going up with some guys with paint ball rifles with army reserve infantry tactics training. Those paint balls hurt at close range. Some of the bruises looked pretty cool though. Maybe any kid on drugs with mental illness and violent tendencies needs to be enrolled in a school paint ball program to shoot it out with others and feel some pain to know guns can hurt. Someone would need to check for safety. No frozen or super old paintballs. Rifle speeds turned down below 250ft per second, masks covering eyes worn, etc, etc.

a reply to: Xcalibur254

For your information from Lt Col (Ret) Dave Grossman who disagrees with the premise that violent video games don't 'warp' young minds:

Col. Grossman shows how video games that depict antisocial, misanthropic, casually savage behavior can warp the mind - with potentially deadly results. His book will become the focus of a new national conversation about video games and the epidemic of mass murders that they have unleashed.

www.killology.com...

a reply to: ChaoticOrder

First of all, there is a difference between posting "whacky stuff" and posting something which can not only legally, but reasonably be construed as a threat to peoples lives and well being. And its worth pointing out that in the case of Cruz and indeed many other mass shooters of recent years, there were warning signs in their behaviour, going back years, that were never properly examined. Cruz for example had the police called on him several times over a few years, to deal with his taking pot shots at neighbours chickens with an air rifle, causing criminal damage to peoples property without any form of peer pressure or explicable motivation, and a whole host of other classic expressions of being at risk of flipping his lid.

I understand your concerns about slippery slopes, I really do. Much of my commentary on the political situation both globally, and within my country, could, if taken out of context, be misconstrued as probable cause to put me in a soft room for a month or so. However, context is important, and all it would take for the slippery slope you are talking about, to become a topographically boring, high friction surface, is for context to be taken into account. For example, some of my commentary over the years, particularly at the beginning of my time here, could have been taken as concerning to the mental health services here in the UK... if they had no record of my ever having been involved with the police, if the only place the authorities actually have record of me from a law and order perspective, was not as a very helpful witness, rather than a perpetrator or suspect. Things I have said could be indicators of something else... if I had ever been reported by a friend or family member, or member of the faculty at any educational establishment I ever attended.

What I am saying is that a cross discipline communications system needs to be erected, where arrests, or visits to a house or person for a given reason, can flag up to the mental health services when a person has also made threats against others on the net, and that is NOT happening in the least, because such a system would have found catching a hold of Cruz before he acted, a piece of cake, not the apparently impossible, needle in a haystack job that it has been described as, which, in the absence of such a system, it would be.

I hate all the mass surveillance crap, I despise it. I think everyone who works in that field, everyone who allocated funds toward it, everyone who works janitorial services in the buildings mass surveillance infrastructure operates out of, should be thrown down a pit for the rest of time, with no food or water provided. BUT... this is not that. This is about taking publicly available data, police records of behaviour, and threats made electronically, to produce a threat analysis which actually has validity, rather than a blanket BS model, such as the one which saw the gent you are talking about, hauled off on what could very well have been false pretences.

Obviously, there is a massive difference between talking about conspiracies, and making threats to kill someone. One of these things is how the truth gets told, eventually. One of them is how the young die before their time, and how entire nations blame things which have nothing to do with anything for it, including the tools the perpetrators use and the media a perpetrator gets exposed to.

There IS a way to build a comprehensive, inescapable, but also unobtrusive system to make this work, which does not haul off people who pose no threat, to the funny farm. But it will take money. It will take a MASSIVE upgrade to facilities and staffing levels within those facilities, to manage the REAL number of potential threats of this sort in an institutional setting, AND vast investment in order to make the services involved interlink in a healthy manner, but these problems, unlike the sheer impracticality of removing an unknowable number of firearms from a population which has an absolute right to possess them, CAN be solved.

originally posted by: FyreByrd
a reply to: Xcalibur254

For your information from Lt Col (Ret) Dave Grossman who disagrees with the premise that violent video games don't 'warp' young minds:

Col. Grossman shows how video games that depict antisocial, misanthropic, casually savage behavior can warp the mind - with potentially deadly results. His book will become the focus of a new national conversation about video games and the epidemic of mass murders that they have unleashed.

www.killology.com...

Which video games and which developers?

Most developers aren't based in America, and I'm not interested in purchasing a book.

Everyone wants to use "Grand Theft Auto," is an excuse for American school shootings - Rockstar North is based out of Scotland.

Why doesn't Scotland have regular mass shootings? They have Grand Theft Auto, Hell, that's where the games are made!

a reply to: Xcalibur254

Entertain any solution that doesn't get semi automatic guns out of the market.
That's what they're all about.

a reply to: Xcalibur254

Trump is an idiot and a disgrace.