Kotaku misconstrued an anti gun control argument into something it’s not
Practically everyone and their mother is talking about gun control right now, some of course talking about the arguable correlation between gun violence and video game violence.
The other day Kotaku, the video games-focused blog and part of Gawker Media‘s “Gawker” network of sites, reported on a video from Fox News about gun control. The writer of the article entitled “Fox News Host’s Guns Vs. Video Games Argument Doesn’t Make Sense” which you can read here, makes some valid points. The fishy part here is that what was discussed was totally taken out of context.
Here is word-for-word what was said in the clip provided at the beginning of the article at 4:27 :
“So, if we ban assault rifles, then should we ban the images of assault rifles in movies and video games? What’s that, you say? The First Amendment protects free speech? Of course it does! And the Second Amendment protects my right to bear arms. Neither trumps the other.”
In-of-itself the excerpted quote is pretty surprising (though not so much by Fox News standards) but its just an opinion. Upon watching the excerpt video I defiantly immediately thought “wow this lady is a moron” rolled my eyes and went on to read the article. But having just that small segment of the argument does not give you the full picture by any means of what Judge Jeanine Pirro was trying to say. If you watch the whole video it isn’t even a video games vs. real world violence argument, it’s fully just a pro gun rights argument in fact the title of the video on youtube is ‘Banning weapons to prevent crime doesn’t work’ On top of that in the pulled quote Judge Pirro was not comparing real world violence to violence in video games at all, except maybe to say that we as Americans have both the right to free speech and expression (video games movies etc.) and the right to bare arms. Both of those rights are equally important therefore neither should take precedence over the other.
The only other time Judge Pirro mentions video games in the 7 minute long video at 3:59 is when she says:
“And now the president wants to have a dialogue on mental illness. We know the Virginia Tech shooter, the Colorado movie theater shooter and the Gabby Gifford shooter each had serious mental problems or were declared to be dangerous. Even the Newtown shooter who would play violent video games for days on end had mental problems”
To me this quote simply states that the Newtown shooter played video games, which is arguably a cause of violence. Or possibly it was more so a statement on the idea that video games may effect mentally unstable people but not necessarily mentally stable people. Either way her argument wasn’t whether or not his gaming habits were the cause of mental illness or the desire to cause harm to other people or anything along those lines. I truly wish that rather than analyzing the effects that violent video games have on people the government would concentrate on helping mentally ill people.
All I have to say is it’s this type of gossip-seeking mis-reporting that makes the gaming community look bad, like we are just fishing for reasons to be angry. Please do your research guys.
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