Nathan F wrote:By blaming video games, they get away with making a statement that will draw little criticism from most and get "for the children!" points from a lot of people. The only ones who end up calling BS are those gamers among us who are aware enough of what's going on to be outraged.
While the argument you made is quite cogent and leans towards a philosophical bent that should be more prevalent in politics (civil rights vs. civil safety), they would be absolutely crucified if they said it.
My issue is that it's NEVER been a good argument and doesn't even track with historic trends. There is actually a whole lot less violence and crime in general in American cities than there used to be, and it's not because media were more violent in the 80s. New York City is one of the most safe cities in the country now as opposed to being one of the most dangerous, for example, and the rapid drop in murder and other crimes in the early and middle 90s is something that sociologists still haven't entirely figured out. The point is that violence in society doesn't at all seem to really track with gun laws, violent media, or any other single issue and when groups like the NRA jab out a gnarled finger at "vidja games!", it makes them sound like they don't actually have a good response, but feel pressured to cough up
something, because they feel that if they don't have a response at all, they are surrendering on the issue.
What I don't understand is why bother. After all, groups like the NRA take it as an article of faith that guns will ALWAYS fall into the wrong hands and there will be violence. That's one of the reasons they encourage gun ownership for self-defense is that they are claiming, up front, that there are bad guys that prey on other people and they had better be armed themselves to level the playing field. Based on that logic, there is always going to be
some gun violence and there isn't really anything you can really do about it, in practice, because you can't really tell at sight the bad guys from the good guys* until after they go nuts with a gun on someone. The problem is when you decide to argue a single issue society problem like "violent media" or "not enough Jesus in schools", you are undermining your point or at best introducing irrelevancies.
(*telling the people that shouldn't ever have guns from people responsible enough to own them is a non-trivial problem that I don't see can be answered. I'm not talking about the Loughners or Lanzas of the world or gangbangers. There are plenty of normal law abiding citizens who probably shouldn't have guns either that often seek them out. For example, in Phoenix, there was an incident where a guy with his girlfriend were pulling out of a fast food driveway and nearly ran over a mentally challenged guy walking his dog. This got into a screaming match, what with the guy nearly hitting the guy's dog, and the man in the car pulled out his gun and shot the mentally challenged guy. The man later claimed that he didn't feel his or his girlfriend's life were actually in danger but claimed that the guy he shot had a weapon of some sort (which the police never found because it didn't exist), but due to Arizona's laws, they couldn't arrest the guy because they couldn't explicitly show that he was lying. That guy should have never had a firearm in the first place due to being an irresponsible prick with poor conflict resolution skills, but unfortunately we don't have a magic brain scanner to determine that ahead of time. Thus, the argument becomes whether or not that you accept that bad things will happen like that and how much you are willing to restrict on the part of all citizens to try and stop it.)
