Less Crime in U.S. Thanks to Videogames

[Treblaine]

Well, it's still implying causation from a correlation (a big no-no), but at least their correlation is correct (as opposed to all the people blaming the imaginary increase of crime on video games).

It's a reasonable theory, and some work ahs gone to proving it :

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1804959

The fundamental mechanism of this theory is sound, that violent criminality is less of pure product of aggression and more a product of opportunity with certain demographics.

The studies relating aggression with violent video games are also without context, is it ONLY violent video games that do this?

I'd also like to see what other consumable media inspires aggression in a similar way that certain video games do. Does a rant from Glen Beck make the viewer more aggressive? Is the crowd at a sporting event made more aggressive by the state of the game, I mean just look at how many riots have succeeded big sporting events, most notably in Vancouver. Though that would be a case of both aggression AND opportunity: large crowds, group identity, etc.

 

[Hamish Durie]

you know as soon as i find out micheal atkinsins address i will personnaly print this out then shove it in his face then laugh.
PS. if anybody has already locted the former atterney gerneral please let me know

 

[Treblaine]

It makes sense, how often do riot police have to be deployed at LAN parties? And how often are riot police needed at sports games? Vancouver?

And don't all these street gangs dress in faux sports clothing? Just recently sports team rivalries escalated to the point of mail bombs being delivered.

I love my brother, but he plays a lot of sport and he is a dick.

im sorry but this just reminds me of this:

It's scary how much this reminds me of trying to convince people that the Earth is older than 6000 yrs.

It's relevant for how creationist will also use "science" to support their belief, only apply it is such a narrow way it is irrelevant to real world applications. Like applying laws of entropy to "disprove" the possibility of aspects of evolution.

All the studies linking video games to "aggression" have been of the most spurious kind and no evidence of aggression that is a detriment to society, like violent crime. Like play a violent video game then more likely to honk a horn louder in a player-vs-player game, what relevance is that to domestic abuse, gang wars and armed robbery? Where is the evidence it has a chronic degenerative effect?

It's bullshit because it's without relevance. The Milgram experiment famously showed that authority can drive people to do REALLY violent things, torture people - as far as they know - until they DIE! Yet as a society we continue to reinforce values of respecting/obeying authority while media on right and left pontificate about how how "hey, maybe video games are all to blame for crime" they didn't have them when I was a kid (when crime rates were higher but seemed lower because they were kids who didn't know what was going on).

THAT is the "bullshit" we call that that comic misrepresents as an anti-science perspective.

It's not the studies themselves nor the provable scientific results where the objection is. It is the spurious conclusion from those results trying to apply them to the real worth through a prejudiced perspective of "video games different, bad".

 

[briankoontz]

Huxley's Brave New World depicts a world with virtually no crime - the mere cost is an infantile, sedentary, non-intellectual, terrorized population. One question as our world becomes increasingly totalitarian is how many readers of The Escapist want it that way, making it all the easier for them to enjoy their precious video games.

 

[Treblaine]

Huxley's Brave New World depicts a world with virtually no crime - the mere cost is an infantile, sedentary, non-intellectual, terrorized population. One question as our world becomes increasingly totalitarian is how many readers of The Escapist want it that way, making it all the easier for them to enjoy their precious video games.

Well what we want is our art form to be unfairly censored. And if they are blamed for violent crime then they most likely will be.

Video games don't make an "infantile, sedentary, non-intellectual, terrorized population" any more than a bridge club or building model airplanes do. It's an engaging and stimulating pastime both emotionally and intellectually and IN ABSOLUTELY NO WAY does it count as government terrorisation of the population. And NO BODY here or anywhere want it that way.

The "Brave New World" comparison is utterly irrelevant.

Why is it so hard for people to accept the role that poverty and the illegal drug trade has in violent crime? Of unemployment and social deprivation? Alcoholism and drug-dependency? The formation of street gangs? The well accepted factors of chronic crime are almost mutually exclusive from owning and playing video games.

 

[RelexCryo]

Also, letting Americans carry guns has consistently resulted in less crime than banning us from carrying them, and banning alchohol- which kills twice as many people as guns each year, and leads to a large amount of spouse and child abuse- actually made things worse in the United States by leading to the rise of power of the Mafia and criminal organizations in general. Legalizing alchohol actually made things better by taking their primary source of income away.

Isn't it amazing how many things, that seem like they should be banned, actually make things better when we are allowed to have them? Crazy world we live in.

i know this probably is not the forum to debate gun politics, but the US has one of the absolute highest rates of gun violence if not the highest... especially when compared to European countries. would't it make sense to ban them for two reasons.

1: making it as hard as possible for a criminal to get them, admittedly a weak reason i know

2: alot of gun violence is perpetrated in the heat of the moment, i.e a violent argument or some other conflict, where emotions are involved, and because of this people are capable of killing each other because of a heightened emotional state and the ease of getting a gun and shooting someone. making it harder for people to kille each other is a no brainer in my opinion, sure there will still be murder, but it will only be committed by people who have had to meticulously plan their crimes.

either a gun ban or raising the cost of bullets to the extreme, like 5000 dollars for one bullet.

Swizterland has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. They hand out assault rifles to the vast majority of male citizens. America has high crime because of horrible living/social conditions, a survey conducted by the U.N. found that some parts of the U.S. are as horrible as a third world country.

Preventing citizens from carrying guns has consistently resulted in more crime in the U.S., while allowing us to carry guns has consistently resulted in less. Most people are not going to murder each other, period. The vast majority of gun murders in the United States is committed by career criminals, not normal people in a sudden fit of rage.

sigh we shouldn't even try to debate this we are not going to see eye to eye no matter how many facts we sling at each other...

in regards to switzerland check out their gun politics. the swiss are pretty much unique within europe, their internal politics have not changed in roughly 150 years they still uphold a citzens militia rather than a professional military... this also means that the populace is constantly in "training", the weapons they are given are not simple consumer items but rather objects that reflect their duty to their society, and the martial culture that has existed for centuries, in other words they are given the weapons for the specific purpose of being able mobelize and defend their country at a moments notice, their education of firearms is institutionalized. they grow up around guns in a completely different way. all this can hardly be compared to american gun culture, or any other country's firearm politics.

also the countries attitude to the rest of europe is somewhat participatory but in no way bound by any formal commitment. when i was thinking of europe i was thinking about the EU im sorry for not being clearer.

you are absolutely right that it is a question of societal structure, it is for that very reason that i believe guns can only exacerbate these issues, especially when weapons are not given proper reverence. gun ownership should be followed up with education and a license, to at least instil some sense of responsibility, kind of like a drivers license. gun violence is almost always fatal, and if not then it is crippling, and it is incredibly easy to perpetrate.

people kill people but guns make it way too easy...

People in the U.S. generally need a liscence to carry a gun. Moreover, there are so many guns floating around the criminal underworld at this time, that it would take decades to disarm them, even if a full nationwide ban on handguns was enacted. This is assuming that criminal gangs don't just smuggle in handguns manafactured illegally explicitly for blackmarket sale, and there are many organizations which do this. Marijuana, cocaine, and liquor when it was outlawed, were/are all widely availabe, despite nationwide bans.

The end result is that criminals generally have guns despite the law, if the sentence for murder does not deter them then no additional criminal penalties will, and since police are not psychic, they cannot know who is and who is not carrying a gun.

Ultimately, all these factors combbined create a scenario where letting citizens carry guns generally creates less crime.

 

[O maestre]

Also, letting Americans carry guns has consistently resulted in less crime than banning us from carrying them, and banning alchohol- which kills twice as many people as guns each year, and leads to a large amount of spouse and child abuse- actually made things worse in the United States by leading to the rise of power of the Mafia and criminal organizations in general. Legalizing alchohol actually made things better by taking their primary source of income away.

Isn't it amazing how many things, that seem like they should be banned, actually make things better when we are allowed to have them? Crazy world we live in.

i know this probably is not the forum to debate gun politics, but the US has one of the absolute highest rates of gun violence if not the highest... especially when compared to European countries. would't it make sense to ban them for two reasons.

1: making it as hard as possible for a criminal to get them, admittedly a weak reason i know

2: alot of gun violence is perpetrated in the heat of the moment, i.e a violent argument or some other conflict, where emotions are involved, and because of this people are capable of killing each other because of a heightened emotional state and the ease of getting a gun and shooting someone. making it harder for people to kille each other is a no brainer in my opinion, sure there will still be murder, but it will only be committed by people who have had to meticulously plan their crimes.

either a gun ban or raising the cost of bullets to the extreme, like 5000 dollars for one bullet.

Swizterland has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. They hand out assault rifles to the vast majority of male citizens. America has high crime because of horrible living/social conditions, a survey conducted by the U.N. found that some parts of the U.S. are as horrible as a third world country.

Preventing citizens from carrying guns has consistently resulted in more crime in the U.S., while allowing us to carry guns has consistently resulted in less. Most people are not going to murder each other, period. The vast majority of gun murders in the United States is committed by career criminals, not normal people in a sudden fit of rage.

sigh we shouldn't even try to debate this we are not going to see eye to eye no matter how many facts we sling at each other...

in regards to switzerland check out their gun politics. the swiss are pretty much unique within europe, their internal politics have not changed in roughly 150 years they still uphold a citzens militia rather than a professional military... this also means that the populace is constantly in "training", the weapons they are given are not simple consumer items but rather objects that reflect their duty to their society, and the martial culture that has existed for centuries, in other words they are given the weapons for the specific purpose of being able mobelize and defend their country at a moments notice, their education of firearms is institutionalized. they grow up around guns in a completely different way. all this can hardly be compared to american gun culture, or any other country's firearm politics.

also the countries attitude to the rest of europe is somewhat participatory but in no way bound by any formal commitment. when i was thinking of europe i was thinking about the EU im sorry for not being clearer.

you are absolutely right that it is a question of societal structure, it is for that very reason that i believe guns can only exacerbate these issues, especially when weapons are not given proper reverence. gun ownership should be followed up with education and a license, to at least instil some sense of responsibility, kind of like a drivers license. gun violence is almost always fatal, and if not then it is crippling, and it is incredibly easy to perpetrate.

people kill people but guns make it way too easy...

People in the U.S. generally need a liscence to carry a gun. Moreover, there are so many guns floating around the criminal underworld at this time, that it would take decades to disarm them, even if a full nationwide ban on handguns was enacted. This is assuming that criminal gangs don't just smuggle in handguns manafactured illegally explicitly for blackmarket sale, and there are many organizations which do this. Marijuana, cocaine, and liquor when it was outlawed, were/are all widely availabe, despite nationwide bans.

The end result is that criminals generally have guns despite the law, if the sentence for murder does not deter them then no additional criminal penalties will, and since police are not psychic, they cannot know who is and who is not carrying a gun.

Ultimately, all these factors combbined create a scenario where letting citizens carry guns generally creates less crime.

i concede to your point things have gotten beyond control of the government, and cannot be stabilized without having to violate the personal freedom of the citizens. however i hope you agree that the gun culture in the US is not... healthy? people should learn to respect guns as the instruments of death that they are, perhaps copying the swiss model to some extent and institutionalizing gun ownership, to some degree, perhaps adapting it to serve the martial culture that already exists within the US.

however naive it may be, my hope is that one day, being in possession of a weapon will be enough to judicially separate the guilty from the innocent, or rather more precisely differentiate between meticulous and malicious criminals,and what could be excused as accidental criminals.

make no mistake i am in no way for leniency, in fact i really think that the current range of sentences are no where near punitive enough. once the crime is committed you deserve everything you get, accidental or not. but i believe that if the country was to hypothetically start over, with a firearms ban in place, it would be a lot easier to exercise justice. as well as fewer needless deaths.

 

[eriktheguy]

It's relevant for how creationist will also use "science" to support their belief, only apply it is such a narrow way it is irrelevant to real world applications. Like applying laws of entropy to "disprove" the possibility of aspects of evolution.

All the studies linking video games to "aggression" have been of the most spurious kind and no evidence of aggression that is a detriment to society, like violent crime. Like play a violent video game then more likely to honk a horn louder in a player-vs-player game, what relevance is that to domestic abuse, gang wars and armed robbery? Where is the evidence it has a chronic degenerative effect?

It's bullshit because it's without relevance. The Milgram experiment famously showed that authority can drive people to do REALLY violent things, torture people - as far as they know - until they DIE! Yet as a society we continue to reinforce values of respecting/obeying authority while media on right and left pontificate about how how "hey, maybe video games are all to blame for crime" they didn't have them when I was a kid (when crime rates were higher but seemed lower because they were kids who didn't know what was going on).

THAT is the "bullshit" we call that that comic misrepresents as an anti-science perspective.

It's not the studies themselves nor the provable scientific results where the objection is. It is the spurious conclusion from those results trying to apply them to the real worth through a prejudiced perspective of "video games different, bad".

Yes, usually the problem is that scientific evidence and rational thought are used by people who want to prove their answer, instead of finding the answer.

 

[Treblaine]

however i hope you agree that the gun culture in the US is not... healthy? people should learn to respect guns as the instruments of death that they are, perhaps copying the swiss model to some extent and institutionalizing gun ownership, to some degree, perhaps adapting it to serve the martial culture that already exists within the US.

Hang around on some US gun forums (like I have) and you'll see that is very much the case that there is a healthy and responsible attitude to guns.

People go on LONG tirades about the slightest infraction of gun safety rules, like:

"Hey buddy, why you got you finger on the trigger, you about to fire some shots into the air!
RULE NUMBER 1! Finger off Trigger till you are about to fire!"

"Nice one dumb ass, you swept the camera with your muzzle."

It's a personal insult to imply a man isn't being safe with his weapon, everyone piles on to brow beat him to be more careful. Active members of the "gun community" are very keen to keep their activity protected so take a lot of responsibility to make sure that their guns are handled safely, responsibly and kept out of the hands of criminals, and to report those who have gone off the rails.

They certainly do a better job than the BATF, America's federal agency dedicated to gun-control policing, in their notorious "Gunrunner Scheme". Google search "BATF operation Fast and furious"

I'm usually not one for conspiracy theories, but I can't help but consider this as a political move on BATF's part to bring about tougher assault-weapon laws as if american guns are found being used in a Mexican Narco war, that would make the UN Small Arms Treaty that will piss on legal gun owners from a great height for what onerous restrictions the put on imports. BATF is hardly America's best run federal agency, responsible for disastrous handling of Waco and Ruby Ridge and a laundry list of serious criticisms of their conduct and even their essential mission.

 

[Pyramid Head]

That's always something i actually find frustrating. A lot of the conservative policies aimed at violent video games and harshly ineffective defense measures operating under an assumption that violent crime is rampant in the U.S when the rate has consistently been going down for over a decade. Should i be the one to point out that California's law is pointless when the ESRB already demands that retailers request an ID before selling an M rated game? Hey, California, you've already got financial problems out the ass, trying to enforce a law that the industry was already enforcing on it's own is idiotic.

Oh well. Stupid people say stupid things and support the divorced from reality conservative parties, and water remains wet.

 

[puffy786]

I like how people keep having one-sided arguments here about whether video games cause violent behavior or no.

Well this is a video gaming website.

Anyways, I never trust "experts", since this "experts" can be literally anybody, and if a source says "Our 'experts' believe that [insert argument here]" when not telling who a "exepert" is. But the philospholy of that video games keep people off streets make sense perfectly. I mean its not a arguable fact, people take lots of time to play games. Its not like "You do it in a game, so you'll do it in real life." argument which has statistics backing it up and can easily be argued to be false.

 

[scotth266]

Conservatives

Uh, bro? Fact check: Hillary Clinton is not a conservative, and neither is Senator Yee... both of whom are well-known video game haters in the US (Clinton spearheaded the assault that lead to the formation of the ESRB, while Yee drafted California's anti-videogame bill that was only recently shot down).

Politicians of ALL political affiliations hate video games.