As I've said in the past the Limbaughs and (insert Democrat counterpart here) of America have a vested interest in perpetuating "the animosity of one part(y) against another," in much the same manner men like Al Sharpton have a vested interest in perpetuating racial enmity. If partisan strife ever dissipated, so too would their relevance and sources of revenue evaporate, in much the same manner Sharpton's would if racial division ended. They're partisan pimps, who flagrantly stoke duopolistic acrimony out of pure self-interest, portraying it as a patriotic/philanthropic endeavor. So it falls to me to illustrate what the Limbaughs, Hannitys, Coulters, and Ingrahams have continually refused to acknowledge.
Diane Feinstein blamed video games for a school shooting in 2012. Donald Trump blames video games for a school shooting in 2018. Both exploited such tragedies to propose more/new gun regulation. Despite this Trump supporters will deny the flagrant similarities and argue there's some difference between the two. But as usual, the ways in which they're the same are substantive, and the ways in which they differ frivolous. Both blame others entities and plainly believe those entities can and should be held accountable for crimes they didn't commit. They simply blame and hold accountable different entities. The Democrats blame other gun owners, the NRA, Republicans, etc. The Republicans blame the FBI, the Sheriff's Department, Democrats, etc. They may disagree on who's to blame, but both agree that others besides the shooter are to blame, and seek more/new regulation and government oversight under the pretext of preventing its reoccurrence. So while their rhetoric and whom they hold responsible may differ, they are in conformity on the only thing that matters, in that both agree the government should be made more powerful and intrusive to achieve their political goals.
Despite there being no evidence video games cause violence, and it being contrary to simple sense, the myth they do persists. And it plainly persists in the GoP as well as the Democratic party, evinced in a recent exchange on an ostensibly "Conservative" social media page, which featured a letter written by a teacher concerning the Florida shooting that went "viral." (There being no more fitting appellation for the tripe that so frequently ascends to prominence on social media.) An excerpt from which I'll now provide.
Other examples of such revisions exist, and are easily discovered, provided one takes the time and effort to actually look for them.
Her reference to games rewarding players for committing murder is also a gross misrepresentation. First of all, since when is shooting an imaginary person with an imaginary gun, "murder?" None of it's real. Secondly, we see in this sentiment a direct parallel with gun control proponents, in that it makes no distinction between righteous and unrighteous violence; all violence is bad. It's just a flagrantly self-serving generalization that lumps everything and everyone into the same category. Just as all firearm use is violence, and the NRA is a "terrorist organization" that promotes such in the eyes of leftists, all killing in video games is "murder" and all virtual violence promotes such. There is no accounting for the fact that violence is the only reason the west didn't fall to colonial Islam a millennia ago; that violence is the only reason we are free of British monarchical tyranny; that violence is the only reason there are Jews left on Earth, et al. No mention is made of the fact many games, most even, put the player in the role of the hero using righteous violence to defend their honor, to save someone they love, their family, their society, the world, even the galaxy from destruction at the hands of malevolent forces. Likewise there is no acknowledgement or consideration of the fact that in many games, again perhaps most, you're not even killing people. The objects of your ire cover the gamut from people, to animals, to monsters, demons, aliens, robots, fantasy creatures, etc., etc., etc.
Explain to me how the hit game "Monster Hunter: World" rewards players for "rape" and "murder."
It simply doesn't. And anyone who took the time and effort to actually look into it would know that. But we're dealing with a leftist here. Personal prejudice and baseless conjecture take precedence over reason and facts.
Some of the most seminal "shooters" in the FPS genre placed the players in the role of American soldiers fighting German fascism. (How evil.) An experience so popular in the past Activision just released another Call of Duty game with that premise. Another (Freedom Fighters) places the player in the role of a character resisting the Communist invasion of America and occupation of New York. (A game that, in my opinion, should be required playing for all male youth.) But she makes no mention of games that portray altruism, integrity, valor, or patriotism, as to do so would contravene her fallacious narrative, and require she acknowledge that gamers would have an irresistible urge to emulate these traits and behaviors too. Either games influence the people that play them or they don't, and if they do as she contends, to the extent she contends, then gamers should be emulating acts of self-sacrificing heroism they experienced in video games in equal proportion. But they're not. And you'll never see any of these people accusing video games of inducing that kind of behavior. Only the bad they see in society; because they're intellectually dishonest.
The notion that it's all just "mindless violence" grooming "killers" is a lie, coming from someone who's clearly never played video games to any meaningful extent, or simply doesn't care about (or has a vested interest in suppressing) the truth. And in that we see yet another direct parallel between video game critics and gun control proponents. Just as people who plainly know nothing about guns, will presume to lecture those that actually use and have knowledge about them, people who plainly know nothing about video games will likewise presume to lecture those that actually play and are familiar with them. Just as people who've never fired a gun, or have only fired one a few times, presume to lecture us on the dangers of firearms, people who've never played a video game, or have only played one a few times briefly, presume to lecture gamers on the dangers of gaming. In both instances you have abject ignoramuses, who blatantly have no idea what they're talking about engaging in egregious distortions of reality, dictating to those with the most knowledge and experience and denying cogent evidence that contravenes their position.
What does Donald Trump or Diane Feinstein know about video games? Answer: Not a damn thing. But Republican voters, just like Democrat voters, have no problem with him taking it upon himself to be involved in the regulation of something about which he knows nothing, nor is empowered by the Constitution to regulate. On this issue Trump is an outsider looking in. He's a billionaire who's been privileged his entire life. He'll never understand what it's like to know you'll never be anything more than ordinary, or the yearning the common man feels to be more than that, and the accommodation for that yearning a virtual world provides if only for a while. Because Donald Trump's real life is one about which ordinary people fantasize, and will only ever experience virtually if at all. And need I point out the glaring hypocrisy, of criticizing video games for promoting gun violence, when as a presidential candidate Donald Trump proclaimed "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." How quickly the amnesiac American forgets.
Another woman attempts to qualify her position by stating its derived from "from personal experience" observing others play video games. But I've been playing games essentially as long as they've been around. Literally since the Atari 2600 days. We even had an Odyssey. $100 says this woman could not even tell you the difference between those two, or a physical or digital copy of a game, but she and people like her presume to lecture us and should be dictating policy in their minds. Just like people who don't know the difference between a clip and a slide, presume to lecture us on firearms safety, and think they should be dictating policy on guns.
Being a Conservative lectured on guns by a leftist, is like being a doctor lectured on anatomy, by someone who doesn't know the difference between the myocardium and the anus. I mean, who needs to know what a slide is, right? Every part of a gun is the "clip" in the mind of a leftist, nuance estranged ignoramus, just like all killing in video games is "murder."
I'll tell you the real reason they want to regulate "violence" in video games. It's just part and parcel of, and merely another front in the larger culture war being waged by leftists, to emasculate men and turn them into docile women with penises under the pretext of making society "safer." So naturally I am immediately repulsed when an appeal to reform society, turns into a naked "feminist" attack on my hobbies and masculinity, and attempt to rob me of one of the few places left where men are allowed to indulge their innate aggression without actually hurting anyone. Where can I be the liberator of France and raise the American flag over the Reichstag in real life? Because I did it in a video game; the only place I can emulate the heroism of my forefathers. And if Trump and the rest of the commies have their way, males will be robbed of even the fantasy of manly heroism, in their interminable pursuit of a society purged of masculinity.
Pixels are not people. Shooting pixels does not give me an uncontrollable urge to do the same to real people and never has. That's simply unmitigated nonsense. Indeed, one of the things that I personally enjoy about certain games is that they afford you the ability to be the bad guy. I play a do gooder every day in real life. But in some games I can be the villain for a change, and when given that choice I sometimes take it, precisely because no one actually gets hurt by it. It doesn't blur the line between fantasy and reality for me. What manner of moron could believe or be subject to such a thing? By that rationale women who watch Fifty Shades of Grey must suffer in an irresistible compulsion to engage in a depraved S&M fling with a prominent businessman. But such an assertion would never be tolerated. It's only acceptable to portray boys/men as visceral cretins incapable of self-restraint, which is exactly what Trump and those who share his disposition (whether they realize it or not) are inherently suggesting.
Is it the fault of video games or parents if "kids don’t understand the permanency of death?" Since when is it a video game's job to inculcate that understanding in children or people at large? And even were video games responsible for this dearth of understanding, how could that be the case save for abject parental dereliction? How does a child without an innate and/or incurable psychological disorder, mature to have no value for human life whatsoever, without egregious parental apathy in regard to inculcating values? But we live in a post-personal responsibility society. So the solution to parents using video games as babysitters for the women above, is not for parents to become better parents, but to empower government to compensate for and allow them to continue being negligent parents. Parents don't need to teach their children right from wrong, and inculcate critical thinking skills, the state just needs to purge society of all references and allusions to violence, so they may remain lazy parents who refuse to provide the proper edification or police their childrens' entertainment.
Now, I would agree you could indeed probably warp a child mentally, by assiduously exposing them to graphic violence sans any ethical instruction that places such in its proper context for a protracted period of time. But as illustrated earlier, if such a moral vacuum exists, it's leftists that created it and leftists that sustain it. They're not trying to fix that with what they're proposing, they're trying to validate and protect it. They don't just want to eliminate the right to bears arms (leaving us helpless against the monsters they create), they want to eliminate the psychological disposition innate to males, that induces them to resist authority altogether (that we strain not against the yoke of a totalitarian state). Boys who enjoy using guns, without the supervision of the state, may one day use them against the state. And to prevent that they need to not only eliminate access to firearms, but to eliminate the natural aggression innate to boys and men, being the contingent of society most likely to take up arms against a tyrannical state. That is the real agenda behind this.
The argument that gun crime is grounds for this is farcical. In 2015 (according to the CDC) there were 2,712,630 deaths in the United States. In that same year there were 12,979 gun homicides. So gun homicide comprised a paltry 0.4784655481949252% of all deaths in the U.S. in 2015. Now, let's say 100 of those deaths (which I'd surmise is well more than what actually occurred) were caused by "mass" shooters using an AR-15. That would mean 0.7704753833115032% of that 0.4784655481949252% were the result of shootings with an AR-15. By contrast 37,757 people died in automobiles (190% more than killed by gun homicide). But no one cares because that's just 1.3918964252404493% of America's total deaths in 2015. The freedom to travel, everyone will readily concede, is worth the cost in lives. There are over 3,000 abortions in the U.S. every day. That's over 1,095,000 deaths a year; a sum that amounts to over 40% of all deaths that occurred in 2015. Abortion killed 8336% more people than gun homicide in 2015, and (based upon the figure I provided) 1094900% more people that AR-15s. But according to Trump, the Democrats, and the complicit media we have a gun problem in America. And thus guns (especially AR-15s), and video games which induce people to use them in acts of random violence, need more regulation. You know, for the safety of the people and whatnot, but especially the children; that leftists would throw into trash cans, or dismember and sell for parts, if they were simply unwanted by their mothers.
Based upon these figures, if video games are causing gun violence, they're doing a terrible job of it. The "link" that exists according to Trump, if it exists at all, when viewed in the broader context of causes of death in the U.S., is statistically insignificant by comparison and a non-issue. This is just another example of stupid or disingenuous bureaucrats, augmenting the size of government and scope of its authority to "fix" imaginary problems, which remaining deliberately unfixed provide a pretext for more of the same in perpetuity. These measures won't solve anything, because they're not meant to solve anything, as solving the problem would eliminate the necessity of future/further government intervention. And this perverse anti-logic validated regulatory boondoggling, which has long been the epitome of leftist/Democrat thought and conduct, is now coming from Republicans; the head of the Republican party at that.
So again I ask. What is the non-rhetorical difference between a Republican and Democrat? Hell, as this (and previous installments) plainly evince, even the rhetoric is becoming indistinguishable. Again I ask. With Republicans like this, who the hell needs Democrats?
I'm done with the GoP in any serious capacity. Done. My days of voting straight along party lines are well and good over.
Since essentially the outset of his campaign the evidence that Trump is an ideological leftist (if not a Democrat operative) has been accruing without cessation. That trend unfortunately continues unabated, and apparently, will continue to do so interminably. To the litany of instances in which Trump has mirrored Democrats on issues he now adds blaming video games for gun violence.
Once again I ask the question. Why is a "Republican" incessantly taking the same position on issues as a Democrat and facilitating the Democrat agenda? Because this is not new. I've seen it before.
Diane Feinstein blamed video games for a school shooting in 2012. Donald Trump blames video games for a school shooting in 2018. Both exploited such tragedies to propose more/new gun regulation. Despite this Trump supporters will deny the flagrant similarities and argue there's some difference between the two. But as usual, the ways in which they're the same are substantive, and the ways in which they differ frivolous. Both blame others entities and plainly believe those entities can and should be held accountable for crimes they didn't commit. They simply blame and hold accountable different entities. The Democrats blame other gun owners, the NRA, Republicans, etc. The Republicans blame the FBI, the Sheriff's Department, Democrats, etc. They may disagree on who's to blame, but both agree that others besides the shooter are to blame, and seek more/new regulation and government oversight under the pretext of preventing its reoccurrence. So while their rhetoric and whom they hold responsible may differ, they are in conformity on the only thing that matters, in that both agree the government should be made more powerful and intrusive to achieve their political goals.
Even were studies not done that found no definitive link between video game violence and real world violence, it should be obvious that one has no direct connection to the other. To say seeing virtual violence in a video game induces in the player an urge to emulate those acts in real life, is tantamount to saying watching an episode of the Sopranos induces in the viewer an urge to join the mafia and "whack" people. It's basically an inadvertent argument for the non-existence of free will. Even if engaging in violence in video games did induce such urges, it would only be a problem if people were incapable of suppressing those urges. Obviously if there were any such substantial causative and paucity of inhibitive factors at play, the vast preponderance of the population would be murderers, as there are tens of millions of "gamers" and graphic violence is a staple of modern (leftist produced) film and television (i.e., most Americans are subjected to such regularly if not assiduously).
It's a testament to the abject hypocrisy and/or stupidity of leftists in particular to blame film, television, and video games for violence, when most film, television, and video games are produced by political leftists, thus blaming themselves. Quentin Tarantino, the maker of Kill Bill (depicted above), is a political leftist (like the vast majority of Hollywood film makers and actors). Alan Kertz, a developer on EA's popular "Battlefield" game series, is likewise an overt political leftist. His Twitter profile depicts him holding two Thompson submachine guns and describing himself as a "liberal feminist."
Sure, he calls himself "masculine" too, but no Conservative would refer to themselves as a "liberal feminist." And if there's one thing Kertz is plainly not, it's Conservative, or even Republican.
There's also Manveer Heir, another game developer on EA's "Mass Effect: Andromeda" (widely panned by gamers for its overbearing leftist bent), whose penchant for posting racist Tweets expressing his antipathy for white people is well known among the gaming community.
Clearly not a "Conservative" guy. You never see Conservatives complaining about "white supremacy," because Conservatives don't waste their time complaining about problems that don't exist. There hasn't been a credible white supremacist movement since the Nazis, and an inconvenient fact to which all leftists are ignorant (or intentionally ignore), is that it was white people that opposed and defeated that movement. Had fate been left in the hands of "people of color" like Manveer Heir, the entire world would now be under German National Socialist dominion. It's completely forgotten today that an entire division (13th SS Handschar) of the German National Socialist (Nazi) army was Arabic, and you can rest assured no leftists will go out of their way to point it out.
The fact is these industries are literally thronged with radical leftists that routinely proclaim and peddle their Socialist sentiments, both in real life and through their creative mediums, while reveling in "artistic" gratuitous violence of their own and others' making. Yet leftist bureaucrats have the audacity to accuse us of fomenting and supporting violence with our gun rights. We're expected to simply accept without protest the pretentious and hypocritical ire of leftists lamenting a circumstance that, by their account, they cause through mediums they control. If video games cause violence then leftists, through extension, cause violence. Because all the major game publishers and developers are left leaning or outright SJW meccas.
Despite there being no evidence video games cause violence, and it being contrary to simple sense, the myth they do persists. And it plainly persists in the GoP as well as the Democratic party, evinced in a recent exchange on an ostensibly "Conservative" social media page, which featured a letter written by a teacher concerning the Florida shooting that went "viral." (There being no more fitting appellation for the tripe that so frequently ascends to prominence on social media.) An excerpt from which I'll now provide.
"Until we, as a country, are willing to get serious and talk about mental health issues, lack of available care for the mental health issues, lack of discipline in the home, horrendous lack of parental support when the schools are trying to control horrible behavior at school (oh no! Not MY KID. What did YOU do to cause my kid to react that way?), lack of moral values, and yes, I’ll say it-violent video games that take away all sensitivity to ANY compassion for others’ lives, as well as reality TV that makes it commonplace for people to constantly scream up in each others’ faces and not value any other person but themselves, we will have a gun problem in school. Our kids don’t understand the permanency of death anymore!!!"
I agreed with some of her points initially, to a degree anyway, but it rapidly descends into utterly subjective emotionally driven malarkey. I responded thusly.
"Lost me at video games. Been playing video games for almost my entire life, and I've yet to 'shoot up' anything. [...] Stop using video games as a scapegoat. They're no more violent and graphic, and even much less so, than any number of television shows or movies. A child inculcated with a solid moral foundation will not be swayed into mindless homicidal sociopathy by video games, or any other influence, and one without such may be by any number of influences. Video games, movies, television, music, etc., are all a product of the culture, and looking to remove them is only treating the symptoms instead of the illness; i.e., blaming video games is no different in substance than blaming guns."My response was, naturally, promptly met with yet more ignorance laden, hyperbolic nonsense, criticizing the addictiveness of video games, comparing them to drugs, and accusing them of dehumanizing others in the eyes of gamers, etc. I conceded that there is an addictive element to video gaming, but that in and of itself does not constitute a correlation to violence. By that hyper-reductionistic rationale, smokers are more likely to be murderers than non-smokers, because they have an addiction. When have you ever heard of someone robbing/killing to sustain their video game habit? You haven't; because video game addiction, though it may have similar or common attributes, is not heroin addiction. If you read someone was murdered over drugs you'd find nothing unusual about that per se; it's common. If they told you someone was murdered to procure money for a World of Warcraft subscription you'd find that very unusual; it's very uncommon. What these women are describing, as you'll see going forward, is simply not reality. It's a fantasy of their own making. As illustrated in (an excerpt from) the response to my remarks above.
"I understand that the vast majority of people will play violent video games and not become mass murderers, and anecdotally you turned out just fine (by criminal standards), but surely you can concede that awarding points for rape or murder is not elevating or stabilizing any positive cultural values that we would like to see in people."Do you see how, just like gun control advocates, she wants to base the rule on the exception and not the standard? According to her 99.95% of people should be punished for what .5% of people do. (And that's not a random figure I pulled out of thin air by the way. More on that later.) And I don't concede that point; because I've never seen it. Her reference to "awarding points for rape and murder" is a gross misrepresentation of gaming. Perhaps somewhere out there exists some obscure title that does this, but I am aware of no game (and I've played more than a few) that awards players points for raping people. Quite to the contrary, many game developers are striving for less sexualization (not more) of video game characters (particularly female characters), as a direct result of complaints from leftists/feminists. The developers of the game Overwatch for example, changed the way one of the game's characters posed, after someone complained there was too much emphasis on her ass in the original pose (left side in image below) making it "sexist" or whatnot.
Other examples of such revisions exist, and are easily discovered, provided one takes the time and effort to actually look for them.
Her reference to games rewarding players for committing murder is also a gross misrepresentation. First of all, since when is shooting an imaginary person with an imaginary gun, "murder?" None of it's real. Secondly, we see in this sentiment a direct parallel with gun control proponents, in that it makes no distinction between righteous and unrighteous violence; all violence is bad. It's just a flagrantly self-serving generalization that lumps everything and everyone into the same category. Just as all firearm use is violence, and the NRA is a "terrorist organization" that promotes such in the eyes of leftists, all killing in video games is "murder" and all virtual violence promotes such. There is no accounting for the fact that violence is the only reason the west didn't fall to colonial Islam a millennia ago; that violence is the only reason we are free of British monarchical tyranny; that violence is the only reason there are Jews left on Earth, et al. No mention is made of the fact many games, most even, put the player in the role of the hero using righteous violence to defend their honor, to save someone they love, their family, their society, the world, even the galaxy from destruction at the hands of malevolent forces. Likewise there is no acknowledgement or consideration of the fact that in many games, again perhaps most, you're not even killing people. The objects of your ire cover the gamut from people, to animals, to monsters, demons, aliens, robots, fantasy creatures, etc., etc., etc.
Explain to me how the hit game "Monster Hunter: World" rewards players for "rape" and "murder."
It simply doesn't. And anyone who took the time and effort to actually look into it would know that. But we're dealing with a leftist here. Personal prejudice and baseless conjecture take precedence over reason and facts.
Some of the most seminal "shooters" in the FPS genre placed the players in the role of American soldiers fighting German fascism. (How evil.) An experience so popular in the past Activision just released another Call of Duty game with that premise. Another (Freedom Fighters) places the player in the role of a character resisting the Communist invasion of America and occupation of New York. (A game that, in my opinion, should be required playing for all male youth.) But she makes no mention of games that portray altruism, integrity, valor, or patriotism, as to do so would contravene her fallacious narrative, and require she acknowledge that gamers would have an irresistible urge to emulate these traits and behaviors too. Either games influence the people that play them or they don't, and if they do as she contends, to the extent she contends, then gamers should be emulating acts of self-sacrificing heroism they experienced in video games in equal proportion. But they're not. And you'll never see any of these people accusing video games of inducing that kind of behavior. Only the bad they see in society; because they're intellectually dishonest.
The notion that it's all just "mindless violence" grooming "killers" is a lie, coming from someone who's clearly never played video games to any meaningful extent, or simply doesn't care about (or has a vested interest in suppressing) the truth. And in that we see yet another direct parallel between video game critics and gun control proponents. Just as people who plainly know nothing about guns, will presume to lecture those that actually use and have knowledge about them, people who plainly know nothing about video games will likewise presume to lecture those that actually play and are familiar with them. Just as people who've never fired a gun, or have only fired one a few times, presume to lecture us on the dangers of firearms, people who've never played a video game, or have only played one a few times briefly, presume to lecture gamers on the dangers of gaming. In both instances you have abject ignoramuses, who blatantly have no idea what they're talking about engaging in egregious distortions of reality, dictating to those with the most knowledge and experience and denying cogent evidence that contravenes their position.
What does Donald Trump or Diane Feinstein know about video games? Answer: Not a damn thing. But Republican voters, just like Democrat voters, have no problem with him taking it upon himself to be involved in the regulation of something about which he knows nothing, nor is empowered by the Constitution to regulate. On this issue Trump is an outsider looking in. He's a billionaire who's been privileged his entire life. He'll never understand what it's like to know you'll never be anything more than ordinary, or the yearning the common man feels to be more than that, and the accommodation for that yearning a virtual world provides if only for a while. Because Donald Trump's real life is one about which ordinary people fantasize, and will only ever experience virtually if at all. And need I point out the glaring hypocrisy, of criticizing video games for promoting gun violence, when as a presidential candidate Donald Trump proclaimed "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters." How quickly the amnesiac American forgets.
Another woman attempts to qualify her position by stating its derived from "from personal experience" observing others play video games. But I've been playing games essentially as long as they've been around. Literally since the Atari 2600 days. We even had an Odyssey. $100 says this woman could not even tell you the difference between those two, or a physical or digital copy of a game, but she and people like her presume to lecture us and should be dictating policy in their minds. Just like people who don't know the difference between a clip and a slide, presume to lecture us on firearms safety, and think they should be dictating policy on guns.
Being a Conservative lectured on guns by a leftist, is like being a doctor lectured on anatomy, by someone who doesn't know the difference between the myocardium and the anus. I mean, who needs to know what a slide is, right? Every part of a gun is the "clip" in the mind of a leftist, nuance estranged ignoramus, just like all killing in video games is "murder."
I'll tell you the real reason they want to regulate "violence" in video games. It's just part and parcel of, and merely another front in the larger culture war being waged by leftists, to emasculate men and turn them into docile women with penises under the pretext of making society "safer." So naturally I am immediately repulsed when an appeal to reform society, turns into a naked "feminist" attack on my hobbies and masculinity, and attempt to rob me of one of the few places left where men are allowed to indulge their innate aggression without actually hurting anyone. Where can I be the liberator of France and raise the American flag over the Reichstag in real life? Because I did it in a video game; the only place I can emulate the heroism of my forefathers. And if Trump and the rest of the commies have their way, males will be robbed of even the fantasy of manly heroism, in their interminable pursuit of a society purged of masculinity.
Pixels are not people. Shooting pixels does not give me an uncontrollable urge to do the same to real people and never has. That's simply unmitigated nonsense. Indeed, one of the things that I personally enjoy about certain games is that they afford you the ability to be the bad guy. I play a do gooder every day in real life. But in some games I can be the villain for a change, and when given that choice I sometimes take it, precisely because no one actually gets hurt by it. It doesn't blur the line between fantasy and reality for me. What manner of moron could believe or be subject to such a thing? By that rationale women who watch Fifty Shades of Grey must suffer in an irresistible compulsion to engage in a depraved S&M fling with a prominent businessman. But such an assertion would never be tolerated. It's only acceptable to portray boys/men as visceral cretins incapable of self-restraint, which is exactly what Trump and those who share his disposition (whether they realize it or not) are inherently suggesting.
Is it the fault of video games or parents if "kids don’t understand the permanency of death?" Since when is it a video game's job to inculcate that understanding in children or people at large? And even were video games responsible for this dearth of understanding, how could that be the case save for abject parental dereliction? How does a child without an innate and/or incurable psychological disorder, mature to have no value for human life whatsoever, without egregious parental apathy in regard to inculcating values? But we live in a post-personal responsibility society. So the solution to parents using video games as babysitters for the women above, is not for parents to become better parents, but to empower government to compensate for and allow them to continue being negligent parents. Parents don't need to teach their children right from wrong, and inculcate critical thinking skills, the state just needs to purge society of all references and allusions to violence, so they may remain lazy parents who refuse to provide the proper edification or police their childrens' entertainment.
Now, I would agree you could indeed probably warp a child mentally, by assiduously exposing them to graphic violence sans any ethical instruction that places such in its proper context for a protracted period of time. But as illustrated earlier, if such a moral vacuum exists, it's leftists that created it and leftists that sustain it. They're not trying to fix that with what they're proposing, they're trying to validate and protect it. They don't just want to eliminate the right to bears arms (leaving us helpless against the monsters they create), they want to eliminate the psychological disposition innate to males, that induces them to resist authority altogether (that we strain not against the yoke of a totalitarian state). Boys who enjoy using guns, without the supervision of the state, may one day use them against the state. And to prevent that they need to not only eliminate access to firearms, but to eliminate the natural aggression innate to boys and men, being the contingent of society most likely to take up arms against a tyrannical state. That is the real agenda behind this.
The argument that gun crime is grounds for this is farcical. In 2015 (according to the CDC) there were 2,712,630 deaths in the United States. In that same year there were 12,979 gun homicides. So gun homicide comprised a paltry 0.4784655481949252% of all deaths in the U.S. in 2015. Now, let's say 100 of those deaths (which I'd surmise is well more than what actually occurred) were caused by "mass" shooters using an AR-15. That would mean 0.7704753833115032% of that 0.4784655481949252% were the result of shootings with an AR-15. By contrast 37,757 people died in automobiles (190% more than killed by gun homicide). But no one cares because that's just 1.3918964252404493% of America's total deaths in 2015. The freedom to travel, everyone will readily concede, is worth the cost in lives. There are over 3,000 abortions in the U.S. every day. That's over 1,095,000 deaths a year; a sum that amounts to over 40% of all deaths that occurred in 2015. Abortion killed 8336% more people than gun homicide in 2015, and (based upon the figure I provided) 1094900% more people that AR-15s. But according to Trump, the Democrats, and the complicit media we have a gun problem in America. And thus guns (especially AR-15s), and video games which induce people to use them in acts of random violence, need more regulation. You know, for the safety of the people and whatnot, but especially the children; that leftists would throw into trash cans, or dismember and sell for parts, if they were simply unwanted by their mothers.
Based upon these figures, if video games are causing gun violence, they're doing a terrible job of it. The "link" that exists according to Trump, if it exists at all, when viewed in the broader context of causes of death in the U.S., is statistically insignificant by comparison and a non-issue. This is just another example of stupid or disingenuous bureaucrats, augmenting the size of government and scope of its authority to "fix" imaginary problems, which remaining deliberately unfixed provide a pretext for more of the same in perpetuity. These measures won't solve anything, because they're not meant to solve anything, as solving the problem would eliminate the necessity of future/further government intervention. And this perverse anti-logic validated regulatory boondoggling, which has long been the epitome of leftist/Democrat thought and conduct, is now coming from Republicans; the head of the Republican party at that.
So again I ask. What is the non-rhetorical difference between a Republican and Democrat? Hell, as this (and previous installments) plainly evince, even the rhetoric is becoming indistinguishable. Again I ask. With Republicans like this, who the hell needs Democrats?
I'm done with the GoP in any serious capacity. Done. My days of voting straight along party lines are well and good over.
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