Grand Theft Auto IV Didn't Drive an 8 Year-Old to Murder

[Monster_user]

The Sheriff's Department's statement has a number of problems, not least that it misspells "PlayStation 3."

Really? Really? You're using THAT as an argument? That they misspellt a word? Are you 9 years old?

At first glance it does appear to be nitpicky.

However, further analysis of this mispelling indicates a lack of knowledge of the subject the officer was speaking on. How can one authoritatively speak on subject, if one doesn't know the first thing about it?

It is possible that I am jumping to conclusions with regards to the officer's understanding of home entertainment, specifically video game systems, but there is little evidence to the contrary. Therefore I state that the issue with this statement is not the misspelling in and of itself, but what the misspelling indicates.

So, while it is a minor issue, the fact that it is evidence of the issue being addressed in this article means it is not the least of the problems.

Also, it is *misspelt*, but that is truly a minor issue.

 

[Gronk]

The Sheriff's Department's statement has a number of problems, not least that it misspells "PlayStation 3."

Really? Really? You're using THAT as an argument? That they misspellt a word? Are you 9 years old?

At first glance it does appear to be nitpicky.

However, further analysis of this mispelling indicates a lack of knowledge of the subject the officer was speaking on. How can one authoritatively speak on subject, if one doesn't know the first thing about it?

It is possible that I am jumping to conclusions with regards to the officer's understanding of home entertainment, specifically video game systems, but there is little evidence to the contrary. Therefore I state that the issue with this statement is not the misspelling in and of itself, but what the misspelling indicates.

So, while it is a minor issue, the fact that it is evidence of the issue being addressed in this article means it is not the least of the problems.

Also, it is *misspelt*, but that is truly a minor issue.

So you assume that just because someone makes a mistake about a detail, all their other points are worthless? So just because the author made this mistake (in my book) all his other points are crap? I guess I can live with that.

Oh, and about that last part: English is not my first language since I'm from Sweden. But I still bet im better at english than you are at swedish, no?

 

[Monster_user]

So you assume that just because someone makes a mistake about a detail, all their other points are worthless? So just because the author made this mistake (in my book) all his other points are crap? I guess I can live with that.

Not simply because of this, no.

If I were to ask you to carry a marble or bead, would you consider that difficult, or minor? Now if I were to ask you to carry two cotton balls in addition to the marble, would you consider that a difficult request to complete? Now if I asked you to carry 1 ton of marbles, and two cotton balls, would a single marble be the least heavy thing you have to carry? No, the marble is not the least, the cotton balls are. A single marble weighs much less than a ton, and is therefore practically weightless. However, added together the marbles add up to more than you can carry.

It is that there is little evidence to support his position, and he brings no evidence to support his position. In fact he focuses not on the actual issue, but a superfluous issue. Not on the disease, but on a symptom of the disease.

That boy sneezed! Quickly put a clothespin on his nose, if we can prevent him from sneezing he won't get sick[er].

Here the "Doctor" focuses on the symptom, not the cause. Like an officer focusing on video games, or guns, and not the actual cause. This is a larger piece of the puzzle, and 1+3+6=10.

Rest assurred, I am not taking any single individual piece of evidence to make a case, I am taking the entirety of the information I have at my disposal. Just because the evidence is circumstantial, and is minor, doesn't mean it is invalid. In that 1+3+6=x metaphor, the higher we can get the sum, the more certain we can be that we came to the correct conclusion.

Oh, and about that last part: English is not my first language since I'm from Sweden. But I still bet im better at english than you are at swedish, no?

You got me there, my Swedish is terrible.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

As insensitive as this sounds:

The gun was a .38 caliber pistol she owned.

The fact that it was her gun makes her eligible for a darwin award.

After all, if you leave a loaded gun in a place where a child can reach it and a child kills you with it, then you're an idiot.

You can say that, because of her age she might have forgotten about it or something like that, but if that's the case, then she probably shouldn't even own a gun as she clearly isn't fit to use it. After all, when someone gets old and is unable to drive anymore, you take their licence off them. Surely that should work for guns as well.

I can't help but wonder: Where did she even store this gun? I mean, this kid was able to get the gun and play around with it and shoot her in the back of the head without her noticing. To me, this shows that it wasn't hidden very well.

Another thing I can't help but wonder: In a country where guns are readily accessible, why are kids not taught about firearm safety from an early age? Either from their parents or at school. A kid being ignorant about this topic shouldn't be an excuse. The solution to this problem is to educate kids from an early age. I know it's grim, but if it stops stuff like this happening, surely it's worth it.

While I've sounded harsh in this post, I do sympathise for the family. I especially sympathise with the kid, for whom this will scar for the rest of his life. But I have absolutely no sympathy for the old woman. As far as I'm concerned, her death was her own fault.

I would absolutely /love/ to see a mandatory gun safety course at the elementary school level in every state in the nation. We had a road safety course at that age when I was a kid that used bikes instead of cars,[footnote]Which had some absolutely amazing common sense stuff to it that I haven't heard since, like how it's okay to ride on the sidewalk (which is a good idea in this area, since it's mostly rural and the streets are not at all bike safe), but you need to get off your bike and walk any time you're going to cross a street[/footnote] so I see no reason why we shouldn't have a gun safety course using bb guns. Unfortunately there's a major culture war over the gun issue in this country. You could be excused for thinking that the NRA speaks for the nation, but the truth is more that they contribute enough to enough politicians' campaigns that congress won't go against them on anything.

What this boils down to is we have some people who think the NRA is right about everything, but we also have a lot of people who are totally anti-gun, with even more people falling somewhere in the middle. The totally anti-gun people aren't powerful enough to actually get guns banned, but they are powerful enough that the hissy fit they'd pitch if we started teaching gun safety in schools would be of biblical proportions. The same kind of pressure from the other end of the political spectrum is why we have abstinence only education on drugs and sex, which works about as well as it does with guns. Hint about how it works on guns: this article is a pretty common end state.

 

[frobalt]

As insensitive as this sounds:

The gun was a .38 caliber pistol she owned.

The fact that it was her gun makes her eligible for a darwin award.

After all, if you leave a loaded gun in a place where a child can reach it and a child kills you with it, then you're an idiot.

You can say that, because of her age she might have forgotten about it or something like that, but if that's the case, then she probably shouldn't even own a gun as she clearly isn't fit to use it. After all, when someone gets old and is unable to drive anymore, you take their licence off them. Surely that should work for guns as well.

I can't help but wonder: Where did she even store this gun? I mean, this kid was able to get the gun and play around with it and shoot her in the back of the head without her noticing. To me, this shows that it wasn't hidden very well.

Another thing I can't help but wonder: In a country where guns are readily accessible, why are kids not taught about firearm safety from an early age? Either from their parents or at school. A kid being ignorant about this topic shouldn't be an excuse. The solution to this problem is to educate kids from an early age. I know it's grim, but if it stops stuff like this happening, surely it's worth it.

While I've sounded harsh in this post, I do sympathise for the family. I especially sympathise with the kid, for whom this will scar for the rest of his life. But I have absolutely no sympathy for the old woman. As far as I'm concerned, her death was her own fault.

I would absolutely /love/ to see a mandatory gun safety course at the elementary school level in every state in the nation. We had a road safety course at that age when I was a kid that used bikes instead of cars,[footnote]Which had some absolutely amazing common sense stuff to it that I haven't heard since, like how it's okay to ride on the sidewalk (which is a good idea in this area, since it's mostly rural and the streets are not at all bike safe), but you need to get off your bike and walk any time you're going to cross a street[/footnote] so I see no reason why we shouldn't have a gun safety course using bb guns. Unfortunately there's a major culture war over the gun issue in this country. You could be excused for thinking that the NRA speaks for the nation, but the truth is more that they contribute enough to enough politicians' campaigns that congress won't go against them on anything.

What this boils down to is we have some people who think the NRA is right about everything, but we also have a lot of people who are totally anti-gun, with even more people falling somewhere in the middle. The totally anti-gun people aren't powerful enough to actually get guns banned, but they are powerful enough that the hissy fit they'd pitch if we started teaching gun safety in schools would be of biblical proportions. The same kind of pressure from the other end of the political spectrum is why we have abstinence only education on drugs and sex, which works about as well as it does with guns. Hint about how it works on guns: this article is a pretty common end state.

People that are against guns would have to realise that gun-safety classes would be teaching kids how to use guns as much as sex ed classes teach them how to have sex. That is to say, of course, that they wouldn't be taught how to use guns at all.

If a gun safety course was done right, kids should learn that playing with guns is not a good idea as you could easily kill someone. This would require teaching kids that death is final, which a lot of parents would probably be against in case it traumatised them or something.

Teaching gun safety is about as close to the middle ground of the debate as you can get.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

As insensitive as this sounds:

The gun was a .38 caliber pistol she owned.

The fact that it was her gun makes her eligible for a darwin award.

After all, if you leave a loaded gun in a place where a child can reach it and a child kills you with it, then you're an idiot.

You can say that, because of her age she might have forgotten about it or something like that, but if that's the case, then she probably shouldn't even own a gun as she clearly isn't fit to use it. After all, when someone gets old and is unable to drive anymore, you take their licence off them. Surely that should work for guns as well.

I can't help but wonder: Where did she even store this gun? I mean, this kid was able to get the gun and play around with it and shoot her in the back of the head without her noticing. To me, this shows that it wasn't hidden very well.

Another thing I can't help but wonder: In a country where guns are readily accessible, why are kids not taught about firearm safety from an early age? Either from their parents or at school. A kid being ignorant about this topic shouldn't be an excuse. The solution to this problem is to educate kids from an early age. I know it's grim, but if it stops stuff like this happening, surely it's worth it.

While I've sounded harsh in this post, I do sympathise for the family. I especially sympathise with the kid, for whom this will scar for the rest of his life. But I have absolutely no sympathy for the old woman. As far as I'm concerned, her death was her own fault.

I would absolutely /love/ to see a mandatory gun safety course at the elementary school level in every state in the nation. We had a road safety course at that age when I was a kid that used bikes instead of cars,[footnote]Which had some absolutely amazing common sense stuff to it that I haven't heard since, like how it's okay to ride on the sidewalk (which is a good idea in this area, since it's mostly rural and the streets are not at all bike safe), but you need to get off your bike and walk any time you're going to cross a street[/footnote] so I see no reason why we shouldn't have a gun safety course using bb guns. Unfortunately there's a major culture war over the gun issue in this country. You could be excused for thinking that the NRA speaks for the nation, but the truth is more that they contribute enough to enough politicians' campaigns that congress won't go against them on anything.

What this boils down to is we have some people who think the NRA is right about everything, but we also have a lot of people who are totally anti-gun, with even more people falling somewhere in the middle. The totally anti-gun people aren't powerful enough to actually get guns banned, but they are powerful enough that the hissy fit they'd pitch if we started teaching gun safety in schools would be of biblical proportions. The same kind of pressure from the other end of the political spectrum is why we have abstinence only education on drugs and sex, which works about as well as it does with guns. Hint about how it works on guns: this article is a pretty common end state.

People that are against guns would have to realise that gun-safety classes would be teaching kids how to use guns as much as sex ed classes teach them how to have sex. That is to say, of course, that they wouldn't be taught how to use guns at all.

If a gun safety course was done right, kids should learn that playing with guns is not a good idea as you could easily kill someone. This would require teaching kids that death is final, which a lot of parents would probably be against in case it traumatised them or something.

Teaching gun safety is about as close to the middle ground of the debate as you can get.

I agree, unfortunately American politics are so polarized at this point that there is no viable way to implement a middle ground. President Obama tried it with a few major pieces of legislation in his first term, and instead of actually compromising with him, the other side took it as a way of getting him to agree to their version of how things should be. Sadly, we've actually gotten /more/ polarized since. It's a total "us vs. them" climate at the moment.

Edit: And actually, proper gun safety classes /would/ teach kids how to use guns, but in the same sense that proper sex ed teaches how to use a condom. It'd have to stress things like trigger safety and which way to point a gun so it doesn't hurt anyone in the case of an accidental discharge, in addition to the more basic aspects of always treating a weapon as if it were loaded and never treating it as a toy.

 

[jef91]

How does the USA as a whole justify having firearms so easily available? I am Australian and I went to Seattle once when I was much younger but now I know more about your country I don't think I will ever visit it again. The pointless defence of "2nd amendment rights" is murdering your people. Are there many organisations that boycott this kind of thing apart from members of government?

 

[Not Gabe Newell]

Hey.

Hey.

Here's a thought.

Instead of taking the easy route and blaming the video game for the violence, let's look at the fact that there was a loaded, unsupervised gun just lying around within a child's reach.

 

[Eve Charm]

Little old ladies, like the one in the article, often have difficulty unlocking those boxes. It would take you, or a child, mere seconds to unlock the box. It could take the grandmother 15 minutes. Then there is the additional time of trying to figure out which way to turn the ammo casing, and how to insert it. Finally there is the near impossible task of cocking the weapon.

These little old ladies may be no taller than a 10 to 14 year old child. So in order to get the weapon out of reach, they have to put it out of their own reach.

These little old ladies want their guns because they are afraid of having thieves break into their homes, or worse. Thieves often target them, because they are easy targets.

Ok if were going to play the weak and feeble card, guns are heavy, and they have a lot of kick to them to so they probably might break something shooting a gun if they are that weak and feeble. Also keeping a gun loaded and ready to fire, the .38 doesn't have a safety and has more of a chance of random misfiring and killing anyone then the 1 in a million chance grandma is gonna get her gun in time to fend off robbers.

Last there is no prove this little old lady had a gun cause " she feared from getting robbed " She had kids in the house and at least from some articles the neighbors knew them well. She wasn't living in newark.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Wow. That was just... sad. On so many levels.

This, ladies and gents, is why I do not and will never own a gun, as much as I like them.

 

[viranimus]

Grand Theft Auto IV Didn't Drive an 8 Year-Old to Murder

This was a tragedy, from start to finish, but the association with GTA was a product of the media - not of reality. Here's what happened.

Read Full Article

Sorry to grammar nazi on this, but...

Normally in the games press, our instinct during a time like this is to bunker down, not fight back, comment on the story and wait until it blows over.

Term should have been hunker, not bunker. While bunker almost makes sense in context, its still out of place for the phrase in question.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hunker

 

[Evil Smurf]

OP, if you can't blame games for the murder, who is to blame? The adults for leaving a gun in the child's reach? The gun manufacturers for encouraging gun use? No, we'd blame ourselves for being ignorant, unsafe idiots and supporting a dangerous industry. We can't have that can we. It's easier to deny all plausibility that we can change gun deaths.

That was sarcastic obviously.

 

[cikame]

Kids touch, punch, kick, lick, headbutt, scream at, everything. It's the human learning process, don't let them learn guns until they're ready to do something other than lick them.

Considering the staggering amount of violent games sold every year you think, if it existed, we'd have conclusive evidence of video games causing murders by now.

The next generation of parents have a huge advantage in that we understand games, no amount of explanation or show and tell would get my parents to understand any of it.

 

[Monster_user]

Little old ladies, like the one in the article, often have difficulty unlocking those boxes. It would take you, or a child, mere seconds to unlock the box. It could take the grandmother 15 minutes. Then there is the additional time of trying to figure out which way to turn the ammo casing, and how to insert it. Finally there is the near impossible task of cocking the weapon.

These little old ladies may be no taller than a 10 to 14 year old child. So in order to get the weapon out of reach, they have to put it out of their own reach.

These little old ladies want their guns because they are afraid of having thieves break into their homes, or worse. Thieves often target them, because they are easy targets.

Ok if were going to play the weak and feeble card, guns are heavy, and they have a lot of kick to them to so they probably might break something shooting a gun if they are that weak and feeble.

My point is that there was a reason why this little old lady kept the gun loaded and within reach.

It may not be a good reason, but she had a reason.

Last there is no prove this little old lady had a gun cause " she feared from getting robbed " She had kids in the house and at least from some articles the neighbors knew them well. She wasn't living in newark.

It is elementary deductive reasoning Mr. Watson. Why else would she keep the gun loaded?

Why do people own guns?

1. For uses in tournaments / hunting.
2. Family heirlooms / Art value
3. Protection.
4. ???


1. Those who use guns in tournaments (or for hunting) fully know all of the rules of handling weapons. They know how to properly secure a weapon, and practice doing so regularly. They respect the weapon for what it is, and would take the best care of it. A person who is interested in gun tournaments would likely pass their knowledge and respect for the weapon to their offspring, thus the child would respect the weapon. Given this information this is the least likely scenario.

2. Family heirlooms / Historical artifacts are typically kept secured, and have no reason to be loaded. GTA IV does not teach a child how to load a weapon, IIRC, so the child would have to learn how to load the weapon through other means. Also, such items are typically within the "do not touch" category, which would make it clear to the child that it is not a toy.

3. Weapons that are purchased for protection are usually placed with the intent discharge the weapon on a moments notice. These weapons need to be easily accessible, and easily loaded and/or armed. Sometimes bigger, more menacing weapons are desired, though the weapon must still be small enough to manage. The weapon in this instance appears to meet all of the criteria for a defensive weapon. If it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is probably not a poodle.

4. If you can come up with a valid alternative, feel free to do so.

The next generation of parents have a huge advantage in that we understand games, no amount of explanation or show and tell would get my parents to understand any of it.

An excellent statement. However, what are the odds that we will find something about our descendants interests that we fear because we do not understand it? Will we judge them as poorly as our predecessors have judged us?

Also, I agree with frobalt, and Owyn_Merrilin, education saves lives.

 

[ckam]

I really find news culture quite disgusting, I'd rather just not have opinions on matters unless they're editorials or something. But now facts are getting cloudy.

 

[Psychobabble]

The fact that the parents ignored the rating system is not the fault of the company, it's the fault of the parents.

A ratings system that is completely unnecessary if violent games can have no ill effect upon children.

The fact that a loaded firearm was entirely within the child's reach is a strawman? No, I'm sorry, it's very much a valid point and relevant to the discussion here. You just want it to be a strawman so you can ignore the fact that the entire incident would never have occurred in the first place if the parents had taken enough care to properly lock up their weapons.

If you had bothered to actually read any of my previous posts before yours, you would have noticed I stated the biggest reason for this tragedy was a child being allowed access to a lethal weapon. However I feel a realistic look at how much if any effect a violent video game had on this situation is also needed instead of the gaming community just saying "this has nothing to do with me" once again and pretending their chosen form of entertainment could in no way have any negative side effects.

Of course it seems you skipped over that part in your hasty effort to post your livid and ill-informed rebuttals. A sad constant behavior in those who have no wish for actual discourse, but only the censorship of ideas they do not care to hear.

If you cannot be bothered to actually read and digest my ideas before criticizing them, I feel safe to ignore any future ill-informed criticisms you may offer.

 

[Ravage]

Wow. That was just... sad. On so many levels.

This, ladies and gents, is why I do not and will never own a gun, as much as I like them.

Right, because it's guns that kill people. I guess knives kill people too. And baseball bats. And bare hands. Water can suffocate people, and make them drown. Damnable, evil water. I guess we shouldn't own any of those either. So, so very dangerous.