Congresswoman Defends Violent Videogames

[Marshall Honorof]

Congresswoman Defends Violent Videogames

Nancy Pelosi believes that good gun laws, not media censorship, will prevent violence.

There's no shortage of politicians using videogames as scapegoats for real-world violence [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/121926-Connecticut-Considers-Violent-Videogame-Tax], so it's refreshing to see one go out of her way to defend them. Speaking with a contentious host on Fox News Sunday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi took a firm stand that fantasy violence and its grislier real-life counterpart do not necessarily correlate. Representative Pelosi believes that, instead, better gun laws may go a longer way towards curbing violent behavior.

Chris Wallace, a host of Fox News Sunday, grilled Pelosi during an on-air interview, claiming that there was already sufficient evidence to damn the movie and videogame industries. He urged Pelosi to "shame" her "friends into Hollywood" into modifying the violent content they produce. Pelosi replied that she shared Wallace's concerns, but not his approach . "I'm a mother, I'm a grandmother," she reminded Wallace. "But [the evidence] says that, in Japan, for example, they have the most violent games and the lowest death - mortality - from guns. I don't know what the explanation is for that except they may have good gun laws."

Other studies the worst graduation speech in recorded history [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/17/ten-country-comparison-suggests-theres-little-or-no-link-between-video-games-and-gun-murders/], but it's a pleasant change of pace to see a politician come down on gaming's side.

Source: Huffington Post [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/10/nancy-pelosi-video-games_n_2657169.html]

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[Vault Citizen]

Before I read the article I had to pinch myself pinch myself and then double check the headline to see if I had read it correctly.

 

[Zombie_Moogle]

Sensationalism & rabid scapegoating countered with facts & reason?

It's truly sad how rare this is to see

 

[Mr. Omega]

I hate that this debate has devolved into gunners vs gamers. But since it has, I suppose having one of the top people of one of the two major political parties on "our side" is a decent development.

I'm not in favor of a gun ban anymore than I am a game ban, but our gun laws have some very big loopholes that need to be closed, which the Pro-Gun side has said they will actively oppose. So while I wish this was a nuanced discussion of the many problems facing our society today, I can at least appreciate that the "good guys" and "bad guys" of what this debate has become are going out of their way to establish which side is the "good" side and which is the "bad" side.

 

[Saviordd1]

Oh dear god
My heart stopped

DOCTOR!!!!!!!

[small]No but seriously, I'm glad we have someone on our side for once[/small]

 

[ShirowShirow]

Looks like SOMEONE gets it. Hope for this world yet.

 

[T3hSource]

Wait,who is she pleasing with this? The parent companies of the gaming publishers or?
Politics as all about pleasing the guys who have the most money,at least in corporate 'Murica,and that's rarely done by giving reasonable arguments like this.

EDIT: However a reasonable argument heard from general media person is always a joy to hear, so nothing is lost.

 

[Atary77]

Nancy, you got my vote! Why can't more people agree with her?!

 

[Orks da best]

Everyone vote this woman! Now Now Now Now Now Now Now Now!
Thats an order!

She logic in a world of lies and half truths.

 

[Coach Morrison]

My only thought while reading this article was

GIVE HER ALL THE VOTES!!!!!!!!!!!

but in all seriousness, YAY LOGIC!!!

 

[Namechangeday]

Thank you for supporting us gamers, whoever you are. But there is a possibility that no ones gonna listen to you. Thanks for sending the message anyways

 

[The Material Sheep]

The living dead do have some sense after all. You just cannot get a very flattering picture of that woman these days, albeit this isn't her worst.

OT:

Always ready to compliment someone I disagree with often for something I think she does semi right. Would be nice though if people could just figure out that crazy people do crazy shit and they will hurt others when they do it regardless of any legislation. You can't even minimize the effect of it. Glad she is at least arguing against the scapegoating of something I enjoy when very few others are. So props to her for this!

 

[zaheela]

Just listening to that slime ball Wallace try their usual tactics of getting them to blame what they want is enough to make me cringe. It's funny how he doesn't mention how constant news coverage of such tragedies plays a part too... He goes after entertain ment like tv shows, movies, and especially video games, but what happens if we turn the tables?

 

[Dense_Electric]

She had me up until she started on gun laws. Games can provide inspiration for a crime as readily as guns can provide a means. Most of us would agree that that doesn't mean we should blame games when someone goes and shoots someone after playing GTA IV, so why would you blame the gun? Both are merely scapegoats to excuse a violent individual.

Furthermore, an assault weapons ban would be especially ludicrous. The VAST majority of gun crime (by which I mean between 99%-100%) is committed with non-assault weapons. Most of them are committed with semi-automatic pistols, most of the remainder with shotguns or bolt-action or semi-automatic rifles that don't qualify as assault weapons. Yet I don't hear anyone advocating that those should be banned. I believe I read a statistic somewhere that said something like fewer than 50 murders in which a firearm was used involved an assault weapon since the 1970's. This is the equivalent of advocating that Lamborghinis should be banned because people die in car accidents.

 

[Zeren]

She had me up until she started on gun laws. Games can provide inspiration for a crime as readily as guns can provide a means. Most of us would agree that that doesn't mean we should blame games when someone goes and shoots someone after playing GTA IV, so why would you blame the gun? Both are merely scapegoats to excuse a violent individual.

Furthermore, an assault weapons ban would be especially ludicrous. The VAST majority of gun crime (by which I mean between 99%-100%) is committed with non-assault weapons. Most of them are committed with semi-automatic pistols, most of the remainder with shotguns or bolt-action or semi-automatic rifles that don't qualify as assault weapons. Yet I don't hear anyone advocating that those should be banned. I believe I read a statistic somewhere that said something like fewer than 50 murders in which a firearm was used involved an assault weapon since the 1970's. This is the equivalent of advocating that Lamborghinis should be banned because people die in car accidents.

I'm going to quote you since you made every point that I came to make in this thread. Kudos to you.

 

[Ickabod]

Nancy gets a lot of grief, but damn. Nice to see a politician not scapegoating the issue.

 

[TheEndlessGrey]

Unsurprisingly, I'm in agreement with the general Escapist consensus that games are not the cause of violence, but why is everyone so willing to point the finger at more, stricter, gun laws while at the same time banging their heads on the desk about people pointing the finger at violent games.

"I'm a mother, I'm a grandmother," she reminded Wallace. "But [the evidence] says that, in Japan, for example, they have the most violent games and the lowest death - mortality - from guns. I don't know what the explanation is for that except they may have good gun laws."

I don't know... but maybe it's this thing (which I have been speaking out against for over a decade.) Or maybe it's just a completely different society than ours, with some of the key differences being that their population is 98.5% ethnic Japanese, and it's only been about 150 years since their caste system collapsed. They've modernized tremendously, but their society still carries a lot of the echos of their former feudal society. To put it in context, that system collapsed around the same time as the American Civil War. While there have been tremendous strides in our ideas since then, we still have a lot of racial baggage to sort out. Very different societies, the US and Japan, I don't think gun laws explain the difference any more than violent games.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

While I'm as grateful as anyone else to have just one person in the US establishment sticking up for games, her argument still isn't a particularly good one. While some very violent games indeed do come out of Japan, the Japanese market doesn rely on anywhere near as much gun violence as the US and Europe, or at least not true-to-life (for want of a better term) depictions of guns. You can't put Call of Duty and Mortal Combat side by side and say that one is 'more violent' than the other, because they're two completely different kinds of violence.

 

[Legion]

She had me up until she started on gun laws. Games can provide inspiration for a crime as readily as guns can provide a means. Most of us would agree that that doesn't mean we should blame games when someone goes and shoots someone after playing GTA IV, so why would you blame the gun? Both are merely scapegoats to excuse a violent individual.

Furthermore, an assault weapons ban would be especially ludicrous. The VAST majority of gun crime (by which I mean between 99%-100%) is committed with non-assault weapons. Most of them are committed with semi-automatic pistols, most of the remainder with shotguns or bolt-action or semi-automatic rifles that don't qualify as assault weapons. Yet I don't hear anyone advocating that those should be banned. I believe I read a statistic somewhere that said something like fewer than 50 murders in which a firearm was used involved an assault weapon since the 1970's. This is the equivalent of advocating that Lamborghinis should be banned because people die in car accidents.

While I agree that statistically removing assault weapons is not going to change much considering how most killings are done with pistols, I do not agree that blaming guns is the same as blaming games, not entirely anyway.

Blaming games is saying that experiencing fantasy violence is akin to wanting to commit it in reality. Anybody with a brain can point out that millions of violent games are enjoyed worldwide and the percentage of those people who go onto kill is so small it's insignificant.

The same cannot be said for guns. Banning guns (which wouldn't work for countless reasons anyway) hypothetically has a more logical argument. Let's say for example, as impossible as it is, that all guns were completely wiped from the planet as well as all knowledge of how to create them. The death toll from murder would drop significantly. Not because guns cause violence, but because they make it so much easier to do so.

If one of those psycho's went into a school with a knife they'd still cause damage, and almost certainly some death's, but it's a lot easier for a group of people to tackle a single man with a knife than somebody with the ability to kill an entire room of people without moving from the spot.

People often reply to that argument with something along the lines of "They'd make a bomb instead", but the difference with that is that if they wanted to, they could do that anyway. Removing guns does not make creating explosives any easier, it just means less people getting shot.

Although like I said, banning guns would never work for some very obvious reasons. The most obvious one being that you'd simply be removing guns from the kind of person not likely to use them as a tool to murder. The kind of person who is willing to murder is not the kind of person who is going to hand over their gun to obey the law. So really a ban would just mean more criminals with guns, while law abider's do not have them.

People may respond to that in regards to other countries where they are illegal, but bear in mind that those countries don't have millions of them in homes through-out the country already. It's not a case of them being taken away, it's a case of them not having been there in the first place.

So no, banning guns is not going to fix the problem, but that's not to say that guns aren't an issue at all.