Guns, games, and real life; what gives?

Everyone who lives in the United States knows about the Sandy Hook, Columbine, Aurora, and various other shootings that have happened in schools and public places over the last few decades and beyond. With each shooting, there is always speculation as to why it was done. In each one, at least recent ones since the inception of shooters and violent games, those speculations have fallen on a few topics. Mental health, drugs, abuse, and games always come up somehow. To most news outlets, parents, and people in general, violent video games seem to be an actual reason. Which to me is preposterous, can video games really have an effect on young adults and people who are older going on these rampages?

[vork77]

finally common sense

[Jek_Porkins]

It's fear mongering, and lets face it, America has become more and more socialist over the years. The same thing happened after 9/11. People always want something to blame, and kids really hit home.

Fear of kids dying from guns will have a lot of people agreeing to outlaw guns altogether. It furthers an agenda by a liberal president, who today bypassed our whole system put into place by this countries forefathers.

People have been killing other people long before video games, movies, music ect..

With all the mentally ill people in the world, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. Bottom line is that by making something illegal, doesn't mean it will stop happening. Last I checked murder was illegal.

[Allsystemgamer]

I'm Canadian and own 13 guns. Ranging from 9mm handguns to m1 garands and ar15s.

Our gun crime is low even though statistically we have more guns than the states. Problem is they are more readily available in America. Here we need background checks etc where as many states do not.

[Jek_Porkins]

We have background checks here as well, every single state, and most states have assault rifle bans and clip size limits. In our Constitution we are granted the right to bear arms and I don't like people trying to change that.

[360ICE]

Yeah, we have the right by the 2nd ammendment to a WELL REGULATED millitia and the right to keep and bear arms, not the right for any person of any background to obtain how much he or she wants of anything anywhere. Only the fringe of liberal inteligencia would suggest that you take away all guns. What's being discussed are expanding pre-existing federal restrictions, as well as adding some new ones. Not breaking into your house and stealing your handgun.

A couple of decades ago we had huge problems with deaths from drunk driving. What did we do? We didn't ban cars, we enacted stricter alcohol limits, raised the drinking age, raised penalties and ran massive awareness campaigns. What happened? We brought drunk driving rates down by two thirds over two decades.

What really matters is what works, and smart regulations are not completely unlikely to mitigate the issue of gun violence in America.

[Jek_Porkins]

Banning rifles wont stop school shootings from happening, just like making tougher laws to stop drunk drivers haven't done much to curb DUI's, which are up across the board.

This is a scare tactic, plain and simple. People (parents) mostly are afraid. The fact that the US President used kids as a backdrop to sign executive orders, bypassing the whole idea of a House Of Representative and Congress, is something that should never happen.

When people start getting apathetic about losing small liberties, we end up losing big ones next. Hitler said the first part to taking over is disarming the people. Why do you think there are record numbers of gun sales since the school shooting ? People are worried that we will lose our 2nd Amendment.

If those executive orders aren't enough, the President and his Vice Idiot are targeting video games, tossing around the "ban" and "tax" word for them. Even though video games clearly fall in the freedom of speech category. We already live in a country where you cant use your finger as a play gun in school without getting suspended, cant drink a soda larger than 12 ounces in New York, wont be able to buy rifles and will either have to pay a tax on video games or face them getting banned altogether....Not good.

[360ICE]

Matter of sheer fact:

"In 2010, the rate of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities per 100,000 population was 3.3, representing a 64% decrease since 1982"

From Century Council's websites

In despite of people having more cars! (arguably cars are safer though, but in comparison there have been no such signifant change for traffic fatalities not related to drunk driving.

And who says school shooting is what should be prioritized. The number of people dying from school massacres each year is dwarfed by the number of gun homicides.

USA is not turning into Nazi-Germany, because a democratically elected (and re-elected) leader tries to impose some regulations on what guns you can have. In fact, even with the new regulations Americans will have access to more dangerous weapons than they ever had at the time of the founding fathers. Again, hardly anyone, and certainly not the President is talking about taking away rifles and handguns, it's about limiting access for specific people to specific weapons, and where you can use these.

And I don't know if you've payed attention to the news this week, but the VP did have a conversation with ESA, and went on to make a statement that videogames are not where we should turn our heads to reduce gun violence, but that the problem is much more complex than that.

[Mutant-Spud]

Gaming is one of the biggest competitors to news and traditional entertainment media, on average people are watching about 25% less TV than they were 15 years ago. There's your explanation as to why the MSM always bring up gaming in connection with gun violence and why they're constantly criticising social media,online based pastimes are eating into the profits of traditional media.

[Rob Hornecker]

Thank you to the author of this story. It is VERY well written and researched!The part of this story that sets it apart from others that have been posted on this subject on N4G is that it looks at the REAL issue,mental Illness.

Yes Adam Lanza had mental health issues,and they did find a xbox 360 in his house,as well as a laptop PC ( which was found to be FUBAR'ed by his own hands. I wonder if the FBI was able to get anything off of it...we may never know! )and was told that he didn't play his xbox often. Well I'm sure that they have looked into to his internet and Xbox live account to see what he was doing! Once again we may NEVER know!

The one person that knew what made this kid tic was his mother and shes DEAD thanks to HIM!Was this kid under the care of a shrink? I'm to the point that I think his mother was just as much mentally unstable as he was. She had to know this kid wasn't a brick short of a full load and to keep a bunch of weapons in the same house as a unstable kid!?!

What it boils down to is alot of the blame game is the medias fault! As I work with ESE kids with all forms of mental illness every day for the past 10 years and I can honestly say that there is not enough research being done to find the how,whats and whys of it. I guess our goverment would rather spend billions of dollars on a useless war!

In my 30 plus years of gaming,theres one thing I know forsure: Video games do NOT kill people,people play video games to keep from killing people!

Parents need to be responsable for what there kids play and the media they watch. They know there kids better than anyone, As so they should be aware of there kids mental state and be able to get them help and away from what is causing the issue.

None of what the VP or president have proposed will work! What happened in these incidents ,sadly can and will happen again. Weather its with a gun,or a baseball bat,or a butcher knife.

[Dcadjust]

You guys are lucky. Here in South Africa it is very difficult to get a firearm license if you are a law abiding citizen. And that is only for handguns. Some people of course have rifles, for hunting, but that’s about it.
On the other hand our criminals are armed to the teeth with automatic weapons etc. so the law abiding citizens in this country is getting gunned down on a daily basis with no way to defend ourselves.
And on the rare occasion that someone can defend themselves they do so, but what happens then? We get locked up for 15 or 20 years because we shot the person trying to murder us and our families.
Go figure that.