Call Goes Out For Shooter Cease Fire
- Thread starter Karloff
- Start date
I have mixed feelings about this. First, things like this are usually to raise awareness of something. Take any of the cancer walks: Sure they raise money, but the point is to say, "whoa, there are a lot of people who are either afflicted by this or know someone who is". There is no awareness to be raised by doing something like this. Everyone is going to know about this for the next 50 years. You cannot get away from it now, if you wanted to. It's a tragedy and no one would argue otherwise, but this is simply more sensationalism for a hot button topic. This goes perfectly in line with all the stupid politicians who are yelling, "we have to do something about this!", but then don't even have the slightest clue about could be done to prevent this (the fact is nothing can be done prevent things that are impossible to foresee).
Second: I can't believe the immature attitude of some people in regards to this. You don't have like, you can ignore it. By doing something that is deliberately against the spirit of what it's purports to be trying to do is just stupid. You are not making a statement by purposely playing games you would otherwise not simply because of how they are similar to this event, you are simply being obtuse and it doesn't come off any other way. A day without shooter, OMG, why would anyone ever ask that of me or anyone?!?
As an aside, December 21st, really? Why pick such a sensationalized date? Why not Wednesday the 26th, or Thursday the 20th?
Second: I can't believe the immature attitude of some people in regards to this. You don't have like, you can ignore it. By doing something that is deliberately against the spirit of what it's purports to be trying to do is just stupid. You are not making a statement by purposely playing games you would otherwise not simply because of how they are similar to this event, you are simply being obtuse and it doesn't come off any other way. A day without shooter, OMG, why would anyone ever ask that of me or anyone?!?
As an aside, December 21st, really? Why pick such a sensationalized date? Why not Wednesday the 26th, or Thursday the 20th?
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In all seriousness, no, I will continue to play my games and think nothing of it. While my heart certainly goes out to the families affected by the shooting, games and gamers were not the cause of it. So I will not be a part of this.
In all seriousness, no, I will continue to play my games and think nothing of it. While my heart certainly goes out to the families affected by the shooting, games and gamers were not the cause of it. So I will not be a part of this.
Why should the whole world stop gaming just because one country has hopeless gun control?
How about we go a day without spending any money too, for Greece?
We may as well not eat either, for nations that are starving, and be outside all day for those places without adequate housing.
Look, it's a shitty situation, and no parent should ever have to outlive their children, but not only is an online ceasefire going to achieve absolutely zilch, asking for the whole world to do it is just incredibly arrogant. It's not like anyone asks for a total fire ban worldwide in the aftermath of a gruesome bushfire in just one country, is it? How innapropriate would that seem to people in Siberia, for example?
How about we go a day without spending any money too, for Greece?
We may as well not eat either, for nations that are starving, and be outside all day for those places without adequate housing.
Look, it's a shitty situation, and no parent should ever have to outlive their children, but not only is an online ceasefire going to achieve absolutely zilch, asking for the whole world to do it is just incredibly arrogant. It's not like anyone asks for a total fire ban worldwide in the aftermath of a gruesome bushfire in just one country, is it? How innapropriate would that seem to people in Siberia, for example?
LoL, it was only a matter of time before someone started yelling gun control. By making it about gun control you miss the whole point. A person wanted to take the lives of these people, and no amount of gun control would have prevented that. He would have used homemade pipebombs, or taken a knife and started killing people. It's a mental health issue more than anything.Squilookle said:
My big fear is how the televised media may look at this. While those behind the idea do not intend for this to be used to fuel the fire of video game blame, I can't help but feel the rest of the media will latch onto this and use it as an excuse to spread their anti-video game views.
All the while it's a nice sentiment and my thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those affect by this horrific tragedy.
All the while it's a nice sentiment and my thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those affect by this horrific tragedy.
Sorry about that, I didn't mean to post right away, I was going to expand on what I was saying. My hand jumped to the mouse so quick I could barely stop it. It's not a gun control issue. It's a mental health issue. This person wanted to kill and the lack of guns would not have stopped him.Squilookle said:
Hmm I'm not so sure about that, but perhaps at the outset I should have just said 'astronomical annual gun fatalities' instead of mentioning gun control.Baresark said:
Yeah, no. Like others have mentioned, most sane people can see that video games had nothing to do with the event at all, and doing something like this is almost an acknowledgement that they did, which would just be wrong. Although to be fair I may end up doing it unintentionally, considering I've been playing Skyward Sword and Xenoblade Chronicles recently.
This is a very bad idea. Like stupidly bad. The only thing this will do is somehow link the shooting to playing FPS games (more so than what sensationalist media has already done). Hell it reminds me of stuff like that Earth hour or whatever (the one where you don't use any electronics or anything that takes power), or stuff like give up smoking and drinking for a day. In short it draws stark similarities to those campaigns that seek to get people to give up some vice which they know is bad for them/ the community. In reality this shooting had nothing to do with it, but even with no spinning this makes it look like the FPS community is somehow responsible and this is some sort of penance. Really, really bad idea.
You're right this is about mental health. The thing is though, most people don't recognize their ill, or they just suddenly snap. By having them snap in a situation where access to deadly weapons is readily available you greatly magnify the damage they can cause.
Its a lot easier to take peoples lives with a gun, than with a knife or a bomb. You may not know, but during the same time that this shooting happened a very similar event was taking place in China where a man attacked children with a knife. The main difference was he wasn't able to kill anyone. Hell he injured a lot of people, but the end result was no where near as bad as the recent american shooting.Baresark said:
You're right this is about mental health. The thing is though, most people don't recognize their ill, or they just suddenly snap. By having them snap in a situation where access to deadly weapons is readily available you greatly magnify the damage they can cause.
Too true: Crazy is always Crazy no matter what is restricted. Of course guns do make killing a lot easier than other weaponry.Baresark said:
Video Games have about as much to do with the massacre as Christopher Nolan did with the one a few months back. That being said, I'm still going to refrain from playing any shooters that day. Not as an acknowledgement that video games did cause it but as a sign of respect. I don't see why this is meeting with so much open hostility here...if anything it's that hostility that's going to give fans of the game and the games in general a bad reputation.
This is a marketing ploy by his company as far as I am concerned. Has anyone heard of this guy until you've read the article? He's exploiting a tragedy to give his company essentially free advertisement as far as I am concerned. I am perhaps being a tad too cynical but considering the complete lack of association between his company and event it's a tad off to do something like this.
The problem is that those are more linked to social issues more than anything. Poor people, drug and sex trade, things like that. If people start murdering people with hammers more, no one is going to argue for stronger hammer control. No one is going to deny a carpenter a hammer based on an arbitrary "cool down" period. Guns are the easy go to for this situation, but if you are going to sit there and deny that "astronomical annual gun fatalities" is not a social or mental health issue, you are incorrect. To sound cliche, guns don't kill people, people kill people. I'm not saying that gun control laws are perfect, they clearly need a lot of work. But this didn't happen because he had access to firearms, this happened because he was mentally disturbed. It's easy to sit there and blame guns, but if/when you remove them, people are still gonna die as the result of these plaguing social/mental health issues. Any other reasoning simply denies the existence of the source of the problem in favor of the tool often used.Squilookle said:
Me not shooting things has as little effect on the wider world as me shooting things. I plan to show my respect by being respectful. Might as well have me stop eating biscuits for as much relevance as games have to the shooting. Games had NOTHING to do with that shooting and the gaming community even recognising the event as being linked to their hobby is a sign of accepting it is. I think the people running this just want to feel good about themselves by 'doing something' which I cannot agree with. Nice free publicity fella.
Yeah, I'm probably not going to do this. Whether or not I play any shooters that day is all relative to what I'm in the mood to play at the time, not because of incidents that happen elsewhere.
Do I feel sorry for those lost and their families? Of course I do. Do I find that I'm obligated to do things to show sympathy? Not really, no. Especially when you ask that this only applies to games. What about action movies with guns, or comics with guns, or hell, trashy novels with guns? Should we avoid those too in order to show sympathy? I'm going to guess no, that no one is going to advocate doing any of that.
If I decided to avoid something every time a tragedy happens in the world to show sympathy, I probably would never be able to do anything.
Do I feel sorry for those lost and their families? Of course I do. Do I find that I'm obligated to do things to show sympathy? Not really, no. Especially when you ask that this only applies to games. What about action movies with guns, or comics with guns, or hell, trashy novels with guns? Should we avoid those too in order to show sympathy? I'm going to guess no, that no one is going to advocate doing any of that.
If I decided to avoid something every time a tragedy happens in the world to show sympathy, I probably would never be able to do anything.
I'm not so sure he could have killed 26 people with a hammer before being overpowered, but regardless we're getting off topic- my beef here is with the worldwide call for all gamers to stop playing because of an issue in one country- not with the way that one country handles the problem itself.Baresark said: