Posted June 14, 2014
I don't have the numbers in front of me but they're not terribly difficult to web search and find if someone is interested. If 1,000,000 people play a violent video game and one single person with a history of mental illness snaps and kills someone and they find that game on their computer, they blame it on the video game even though 999,999 people did not do the same thing. Even if the one person in a million says outright that they did it because the video game inspired them, 999,999 people did not. The video game did not make the person do anything, their mental illness did and if they weren't playing that video game, they'd be doing something else and eventually they would end up likely doing the same type of tragic violence anyway.
Society is angered by such tragedies and in the aftermath of every such tragedy a large chunk of the population seeks answers and have a psychological need to put the blame on the event on something or someone regardless of whether not there is any rational reason to do so or any scientific basis behind it or not. People want to blame someone or something and then burn the witch to get some form of vengeance justice and feel good about it like the did something to prevent such things in the future.
An example of this is many years ago some children were on a schoolbus and kids will be kids... one kid took a sharp pencil and stuck it through the back of the bus seat to poke the person in front of him as a prank. At that instant the bus driver had to slam on the brakes to prevent a collision with another vehicle and the pencil went through the seat and stabbed the child in front in the ass causing a severe injury. An investigation was done and all sorts of hoopla ensued with the result being that the school board banned all children from carrying pens and pencils on school busses because the parents demanded some justice be done in the name of safety of the children.
So basically a single off the wall stupid incident of children doing stupid unsafe things caused a regulation to try to prevent the same once in a millenium freak accident from ever happening again. It's both unenforceable and unlikely to ever happen again ever anywhere without any laws or rules, but parents needed someone to blame. Imagine a world where every time you get injured or have something bad happen to you a law is passed that bans something like that pencil. Maybe you slip on the floor in a grocery store because someone knocked over a bottle of olive oil, so they ban the sale of olive oil in grocery stores because it is dangerous - even though corn oil is still legal to sell until someone repeats the process with corn oil and it gets banned to.
This crap gets pretty stupid really fast. It's completely a tragedy when there is some school shooting, or other violent crime committed anywhere in the world, and while it is understandable that people seek answers and people want to protect each other and prevent such crimes from happening in the future, rarely if ever does blaming it on some object and passing a law banning the object or whatever ever solve the problem. You can't stop humans from being humans and no laws can protect us from ourselves and simutaneously have what we think of as democratic freedom.
People need to just accept the fact that there are good people out there and bad people, well people and unwell people and that sometimes good or bad people can and will do bad things that nobody could have prevented with any law, especially unenforceable laws, and the costs to democracy and freedom for continuously eroding our freedoms by doing such things as trying to ban violent video games, ban pencils on the school bus, or ban olive oil in grocery stores does nothing in reality to protect us and is just a false veil of security people want to hide behind that does nothing more than to ignore the true underlying problems in society that lead to such violent behaviours and mental illness.
Solving these problems is not something the government can do by passing laws, or schools by tightening regulations etc. Rather solving these problems is a societal thing in which every person in society needs to start caring more and more about every other person in society regardless of personal differences of opinion, political and religious views, and have more compassion and empathy for all fellow human beings and less selfishness, sense of entitlement and other negative personality traits. When society starts to exercise more compassion and empathy toward others at large, we'll see a shift towards less violence out there. But people have to want to do this themselves and make a conscious decision to try to be better towards all others all day every day and practice it as much as possible regardless of whether other humans reciprocate and do the same. Whether that will ever happen is anyone's guess, but IMHO it is the only way that can shrink all forms of violence globally and have a more civilized planet.
The Center For Non-violent Communication is one of the groups out there that contribute to this end, and is something that people can benefit from who are interested in helping to make the world a more friendly and compassionate and empathetic place. Hopefully we will see organizations like this have an impact on global society in the coming decades and have an impact on all forms of violence, focusing on the underlying problems rather than scapegoating movies, videogames, and pens and pencils.
http://www.cnvc.org/
Having said all of that, I absolutely love violent video games, movies, TV shows, blood and gore to the max so long as it is fictional, or at best loosely based on true events or historical in nature (such as films/games about World War II for example). I abhor real world violence/death/tragedy and find it rather upsetting. I can play the nastiest of gory anarchic video games such as Postal 2 and laugh my ass off slaughtering innocent people by the dozens, and not have even the slightest urge or thought to do such a thing in real life or to see or hear about someone else doing such a thing in real life. It's all just silly video game fiction of doing dumb highly taboo shit within the framework of dark taboo humour in my eyes.
