Posted on 12/17/2012 9:12:43 AM PST by pabianice
Like most of you, I have been thinking of the massacre in CT last week. When we were kids we also played violent games -- cowboys and Indians, Germans and Americans, etc. We "killed" each other all afternoon, went home, then came out the next day after school and battled on. Many hammer-dumb commentators have been braying that a cause of the CT shooting is the violence of video games. I think that's only half-correct. What these talking heads fail to take into account is that video games are free of feedback. When we oldies played cowboys and Indians, we got hurt. We fell. We got hit with sticks, rocks, dirt, thrown toy weapons. We got stuck-up with thorns and nettles and burrs. We got cold. We got thirsty. Our noses ran. Our hands got cut and raw. All this is missing from video games. There is no feedback from the most horrendous violence on your TV.
Could hurt-free video games be contributing to violence in public?
Yes, and recalling my own past, we sometimes lost it and started beating each other up. But then at the end of the day we apologized and made up.
As far as I was concerned, I only had so many good friends, and I didn’t want to lose them.
One part of controlling your temper is to lose it every so often, and then pay the penalty—and learn to control it better.
Doubtful.
I like violent video games. Doom, Quake, Halo...
I have lots of guns and I’m pretty much a nut.
Got no interest whatsoever in blasting a bunch of innocent folks.
It’s something effed up in the PERSON who does such things.
Maybe a father figure who whips your ass once in a while
imparts something undefinable but infinitely important.
In the end, what Solzhenitsyn said about the destruction brought by Soviet Communism can be said of American relativism: “We have forgotten God. That is why all these things have happened.”
Video games, availability of guns, whatever. All these are not what caused the problem. What caused the problem is we have raised our children to believe there is no such thing as right or wrong and no God who demands righteousness from His creatures. We have accordingly created government policy that attempts to alleviate all consequences of sinful action, and that is the “feedback mechanism” that has been removed from our society: The consequences of sinful behavior.
We learned life by living life, even if it was an imaginary portayal of life, it was real to us by our hands-on participation ... not an insulated game.
Interesting post!
Yes, of course that must be part of it. I remember getting hit with an iceball (in the face) as a kid and thinking: maybe this game isn’t for me. These real games may very well have been teaching me to be leery of violence.
The thought of installing electrodes in the video game controllers makes me LOL!
What the CT, AZ, CO and VA killers all had in common were that they were young males with emergent paranoid schizophrenia.
That is the commonality that most observers are ignoring.
In 1965, all four would likely have been institutionalized.
Nonsense. It’s what we are putting into our kids blood streams, not their eyeballs.
The only answer is that there is evil in this world, there has always been evil in this world, and will always be evil in this world....and there is nothing you can do about it.......and anyone who thinks they can do something about it, is most likely to make the “cure” even worse than the disease.
I don’t buy the video game argument. I’m a “gamer” and play such PC games as Battlefield 3, Medal of Honor, Borderlands, Duke Nukem, Assassin’s Creed, etc. I also play strategy games such as StarCraft, Tropico, Red Alert, etc. And finally, I play MMOs such as World of Warcraft, EVE Online, etc.
I’ve been a gamer for decades. I played Atari and Nintendo when they came out in the 80s. I’ve played D&D. I played cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, Americans and Russians when I was growing up. I’ve played with cap guns, water guns, slingshots, and paintball guns.
I also grew up in a single-parent home, but I was raised in the church. I was raised by a morally upright mother who regularly punished me and expected As and Bs in school. I wasn’t given anything for good grades, they were expected. Going to church on Saturday night/Sunday morning wasn’t debatable. Going to catechism class wasn’t debatable. Going to school wasn’t debatable.
These days, kids are left unsupervised in front of trash televisions with hundreds of channels, most of them peddling dreck. Kids are left unsupervised with wide-open wireless network connections and laptops or tablets to use as they see fit. Kids are left without parents, without God, without a moral or ethical compass. They are left to socialist public schools preaching reliance on government and not once given the opportunity to excel on their own. If they do so, they are smacked down and told that it’s not “fair” to the rest of the students.
When I was in 3rd grade, my mother was told that I was reading at a 6th grade level. My teachers asked if it was okay for me to be taught after school for advanced reading and composition. By the time I was in high school, I’d read Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Twain, Emerson, etc. It wasn’t considered “unfair.” As a matter of fact, my teachers were overjoyed by my interest in learning. They’d say they wished other students took education so seriously. Now, teachers are forced to teach to a federal curriculum that bores many students, because they teach to a lowest common denominator. They don’t challenge the dumb, they dumb down the intelligent.
That’s where I see this all went wrong. This “hyper-intelligent” kid wasn’t challenged. His idle mind was able to run free with delusions of grandeur. Instead of being challenged intellectually, he decided to challenge authority with force and died in the process.
In the case of Newtown, I blame the kids teachers. I blame the system. I blame a lack of morality. I blame a lack of God in the public square. Everything the liberals and progressives have pushed for the last 100 years has destroyed the moral, ethical, intellectual, and emotional fiber of this nation. Unfortunately, it would likely take twice as long to rebuild it.
These are random acts. I don’t know if such acts are indeed becoming more common vs. the past - perhaps only the media coverage is increasing.
Trying to “prevent” such random, and rare, occurrence, is like trying to prevent lightening.
Look at where we start with kids. Everything they see from the earliest age is a liberal manipulation of reality. They see it on Sesame Street. Then when they go to school, they’re told that the parents are ruthlessly destroying the planet and don’t care about the kids or their future. They’re told that thoughts of homosexuality are normal and not having those thoughts are abnormal. Society is creating a shield of fantasy around them and as they get older reality begins to intrude and they can’t cope.
I saw this with my liberal sister. When her son was 6 or 7 years old he told me that all the animals had to move to build a house for people. I pointed out that his house was no different than any others and my sister went ballistic because I told him the truth.
My point is that kids can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy because they don’t have a reality based frame of reference any more.
BTW my nephew is now 18 years old and my sister is having a tough time coping with the fact that he isn’t different from other 18 year old boys. She built the fantasy and she began to believe her fantasy and she can’t figure out what went wrong. Fortunately her son is coping a lot better than she is.
What age are you, roughly? I was late teens when the gory video games came out, and we all thought they were hilarious because they were so over the top. But I remember the strange fascination some very young children had with them (preteens) bothering me even then. I really don’t think there’s a need for kids under 18 to be playing first person shooter games. Maybe I’m an old fart, but it just seems there’s a vulnerability to influence at those ages. I mean, there’s a reason silhouette targets were created for training soldiers.
Great post. You’ve described the problem better than I could. Bottom line it’s about parenting, or the lack of it, and relinquishing control of your kids to leftists’ agenda via entertainment media and public education.
I’m 48.
Started off with Doom 1 about 20 years ago.
We seldom, if ever, had enough kids to play nine on a team. So the catcher was almost always furnished by the batting team and he doubled as the umpire to call balls and strikes.
It worked pretty well because if he wasn't fair about it, we'd get our revenge the next inning.
I usually got to play the coveted position of pitcher. Not because I was necessarily better than the other kids, but because I had the sense to buy two or three baseballs when the local hardware store was marking prices down in November. If you owned the ball, you were the pitcher. However, if you were having a bad day, you'd cede the position to another boy and take your spot in the field.
I'm certain we got more at bats in an average day than a kid in modern adult supervised youth baseball gets in a whole season, including practices.
A christian church burned down in some shit hole in Africa by muslims where dozens of people are killed? Not really a big deal by today's media standards. Sure they don't usually have a TV or electricity but it's probably video games or antidepressants. How many Mexicans were murdered in the last week by drug gangs that this administration helped arm? Again it doesn't fit with the anti-America meme, but if push came to shove I bet it could be blamed on desensitization to violence by popular (American) culture. How many have been killed in Chicago in the last week with illegally obtained guns? We don't want to talk about that but again if forced we could use all of the above as excuses.
Oh come on humblegunner we know you want to blast the blog pimps!/s
I often think about my childhood, in relation to that of my own children and wish that things could be different. I regret that they can’t know the innocence of childhood like I did. It disappoints me, that to keep them safe, I have to keep them sheltered to some degree. Sure I let them go outside and play, but it’s much more limited than what I wish they could have. And I also keep my eye on the electronics they use and the games they play, that’s why LeapFrog is a huge product in my house, so they are learning as they play.
When I was growing up (70’s/80’s), we didn’t have many electronic toys to occupy our time, unless you want to include Pong... We didn’t have computers, or Ipods, or Ipads. We had to use our imagination and create our own play environment (if you will). We had to interact with each other, which is something I think is HUGH when it comes to what is happening in society with our kids today. I mean, what ever happened to Pac-Man, Frogger, DigDug, Tron?....I can’t even think of a truly “violent” game back then. But now, everything is so life like and real...even in 3D. And every where you go, you see kids with their noses, stuck in their little electronic gadget....tuning the world out, or texting when they are standing right next to each other, instead of talking.
I lived in a small town, up in the woods, so my playground was a forest. And we only got 2 channels on the TV, so going outside to play was the best thing ever. And I remember not ever being made to wear helmets, knee pads or protective gear when playing. If we got hurt, we got hurt. We put on a bandaid, scratched ourselves off, and went back to playing.
Even still, when I went to the city to play with my friends, we didn’t want to hang out inside, and when we went out outside (in the front yards) we played without fear of being picked up and/or taken by some psycho. Neighbors watched out for neighbors, and the parents watched out for other kids (not just their own).
But now, I refuse to let my kids out the front door, unless I am with them. And it really disturbs me when I see little children (obviously under 10, and especially under 5) riding their bikes or playing ALL ALONE, with no parent in sight. Because I know there are sick people out there....who could very easily come and take that kid and hurt that kid. I know people don’t look out for other people anymore. Parents aren’t willing to keep their eye out on the neighborhood kids anymore.
I think this has caused a lot of kids to resort to their electronic gadgets too. They get bored SO easily. Even when my kids go out and play in our backyard, they eventually would rather come in and get lost in their video games. And I think too many parents don’t bother with that. They let their kids just close themselves off and isolate themselves in their electronic world and don’t try to MAKE them interact like we used to. I can’t imagine getting my teen his own cell phone, let alone give one to a younger child, but I know people who have given smart phones to 6 and 10 year olds....WTF for? I just can’t imagine why a child needs a smart phone....let alone a cell phone.
But I digress, I just think if more kids were made to use their imagination and to interact with more people outside of electronics, than less isolation and less kids would need to get lost in their video games and virtual realities.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.