Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers

Today licensed weapons are commonplace in video games, but the deals between game makers and gun-manufacturer are shrouded. Not one of the publishers contacted for this article was willing to discuss the practice. (EA: "I'm afraid we can't progress this." Activision: "Not something we can assist with at present... My hands are tied." Codemasters: "We're focused on our racing titles these days." Crytek: "We can't help you with that request." Sega: "[This] doesn't sit comfortably." Sony: "I can't help with this I'm afraid.")

[Marquis_de_Sade]

Actual journalism from a gaming website? You wouldn't see an article like this on any other gaming website, this is why I rate Eurogamer so highly, fantastically interesting read.

[miyamoto]

Three Words....Federal Gun Control.

[deno]

A gaming website from Europe. And they have the nerve to write about weapons. The same continent responsible for the Catholic crusades, world war 1 and world war 2. You guy's are the last one's to know about peace. If it wasn't for Britain and America everyone would be exterminated by Hitler.

[Marquis_de_Sade]

Why are you relating public gun ownership to historical military events? European nations realised long ago that Joe Public doesn't require a full auto machine gun/killing machine in order to get by.

[Hicken]

@deno: You have a point, but it's misplaced. Europe, like the US, is home to a LOT of cultures; conflict is inevitable.

@blacmanone: If you had said "recent history," you'd have been right. Even then, though, you'd have to concede that virtually every war we've waged in the past century was one where we picked up someone else's slack.

As for the article, it seems totally off-base. It starts off by saying- in its title, no less- that video games fund gun makers, but he offers no proof. He gives an example of a child from Illinois, but fails to mention the role his family played both in getting him the BB guns and giving him experience firing a real gun.

I could be wrong, but I get the feeling he'd STILL grow up to want guns if he had never played Call of Duty.

Oh, and who allowed him to play the games? The article says that, as well. His family gave in because he frequently played the games at friends' houses. Instead of disallowing him from playing or visiting those friends at home, they gave him the games, the guns, and then experience with real guns.

No shit, he's gonna want to own them when he can.

As the one developer he speaks to says, it's far deeper than actual guns being "glorified" in games. But despite this being the end message of the article, he seems intent on painting the picture that the games, themselves are an influence.

What did young Aidin Smith's parents have to say about all this?

Oh. Well, that's interesting. They said nothing.

[ChrisW]

The reason why people hang them over their fireplace as an inverse trophy is because they are impractical for anything other than shooting something 1 mile away and decimating the target. As for hunting, unless you use super expensive full-metal jackets, you could easily decapitate a deer at the shoulder joint. Over powered beyond belief and makes it a military style weapon, through and through. And military style weapons should be for military purposes only!

[Th3 Chr0nic]

and no car should be able to go over the posted speed limit cause thats only for the racetrack

[ChrisW]

Oh! Let me guess! You're trying to say that more people die each year by cars than from guns?!? Uh... yeah... okay... but how many deaths are classified as vehicular homicide? Ooh! And here's another good rebuttal, cars are manufactured for transportation and guns are manufactured for... well, I think you know.

[Th3 Chr0nic]

no i wasn't trying to say that.. i was making a point how ludicrous and single minded and ignorant your statement is. guns are made for more than killing, like sport shooting and hunting and recreation shooting. your too close minded to think of any of that though.
Just cause some people choose to do bad things with something doesn't mean that object is made for it entirely.
removing guns will not remove the ill intent or evilness of people. it will just make them choose another avenue for it. I guess its expected for people to choose the easy way out and take away peoples rights and freedoms rather than tackle the real problem of why they do things and what is wrong with our society that makes people lose their minds and go insane enough to want to use objects of any kind to cause harm or to cause harm in general.
of all the people that have done these acts none of them should have had access to guns, parents give their kids access to violent movies and games and the games and movies are not to blame but the bad parents that make the bad choices to begin with. ignorance is bliss until it blows up in their faces and there is nothing left to do.

and thanks for that other rebuttal....yes cars are made for transportation..BUT what happens when the next disturbed young man gets in his giant SUV with huge tires (that are perfect for rolling over bodies without stopping) gets upset over some BS and decides he will run thru a crowd of children and keep going till he kills several off them or he runs thru a parade crushing numerous people. are we going to go on a war against big trucks with large tires and more horse power than is necessary for the everyday commute to the store or work......no cause that would be asinine wouldn't it. wait maybe we should just remove his freedom to leave his house so he cant make the choice to do anything that may harm someone.

OR we could wake up and do something about mental illness not just in America, but the world in general. Lets expect parents to do their job and not allow children access to things that only mature adults should have or see so they wont be skewed by immoral choice and acts of violence. Should we remove these things from the world altogether no cause that would be asinine

[palaeomerus]

Chris, 'decimate' is a rather stupid and dramatic word to use. Just say injure or kill. A common .22LR can "decimate" someone if it hits them in the right place. Any bullet from ANY firearm can. If you are trying to imply that a .223/5.56 round is more damaging to tissue than a round from a 'hunting rifle' that is laughably false. You will not 'blow up' a deer with a round from an AR-15 nor will you be able to fire it any faster than any other semi-auto rifle.

Civilians are not allowed to purchase automatic weapons in the US without getting a license to do so and it requires very stiff background checks and personal recommendations from local law officer, equivalent to those required to become a gun dealer, an expensive tax, and paperwork on where the weapon is located with an understanding that you are not to move it without informing the authorities where it is going. Sadly, some people try to exploit confusion between semi-automatic weapons and automatic ones to imply that semi-automatics are just like machine guns only they don't fire quite as fast. This is false and silly. In most cases it is illegal to modify a semi-automatic weapon to be able to fire automatically or simulate it with a bump-fire stock (it makes the gun recoil-jog forwards when you fire causing you to rapidly pull the trigger again by moving the trigger faster than you can move your finger.)

Most hunting rifles for medium game and up hit harder than a 5.56mm Nato round does (.243 Winchester, .270 Winchester, 7mm-08 Winchester Magnum, .30-30, .30-06, .308 Winchester (a civilian equivalent to 7.62mm NATO, etc.) and a 5.56 NATO hits harder than the same caliber .223 that it is the military equivalent of. The .223 was originally considered a varmint gun (for coyotes, foxes, skunks). A Ruger Ranch Mini-14 rifles chambered for 5.56 NATO is pretty much ballistically and in terms of fire power the same thing as an AR-15. (Maybe less accurate though). A Ruger Ranch Mini-30 looks about the same and yet is ballistically and in terms of fire power a semi-automatic equivalent of an M-14 or Garand chambered for .308/7.62

Despite hitting considerably harder than the AR-15 and other .223/5.56 Nato rifles, some of those hunting rifles are semi-automatic JUST LIKE the AR-15 and clones, though a few are lever, pump, or bolt action. Some are even single-round breakaways. Some black powder hunters use modernized light weight muzzle-loaders. FMJ's are not really intended for hunting. They work but an expanding round like a notched soft end or a hollow point tends to get a faster kill. That doesn't mean that FMJ's are not deadly, just that they are not usually the preferred hunting round. The military is REQUIRED by The Hague Convention to use full metal jacket rounds in their infantry small arms. Hollow points actually cost more to make and shoot dirtier than FMJ's and are not as good at shooting through light cover.

A guy with a semi-auto .308/7.62 hunting rifle slightly outguns a guy with a AR-15 style .223/5.56 rifle that looks like an M-4 or M-16 or whatever. He can fire as fast as he pulls the trigger, unless he has a jam or a gas tube failure, and his bullets will hit harder. Assuming the same size magazine the .308/7.62 rifle will have a heavier loaded magazine than a .223/5.56 rifle. The AK-47 and it's many semi-auto civilian variants used a russian round similar to .308/7.62 called 7.62mmx39mm. The AK-74 looks a lot like an AK-47 but uses a round similar to the .223/5.56 round called 5.45mmx39mm. The moral of the story is that scary black AR-15's really don't hit as hard as some common semi-auto hunting rifles do OR fire any faster.

[Th3 Chr0nic]

but but but they are military styled.....so they must better at killing a man than the next thingy that puts holes in things....right

i learndeded this from walking dead, it teaches how to kill effifiently but dont tell congress that

[deno]

Says the guy with a Lenin avatar. By the way I'm from Belarus, minsk and I know enough about communism. That's why my family moved to America.