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Thursday, January 03, 2013

Effort to blame everything but guns for violence begins to turn a bit creepy

Raw Story:

A Connecticut community is to hold an amnesty of violent video games in the wake of last month’s mass shooting in Newtown.

Organisers Southington SOS plan to offer gift certificates in exchange for donated games, which will be burned. The group, a coalition of local organisations, says its actions do not assert that video games were the cause of the killings in nearby Newtown, but argues that violent games and films desensitize children to “acts of violence”.

Except they don’t:

A study by Texas A&M university last year found that exposure to violent games “had neither short-term nor long-term predictive influences on either positive or negative outcomes”. Christopher J Ferguson, one of the report authors, wrote in Time magazine in December that “there is no good evidence that video games or other media contributes, even in a small way, to mass homicides or any other violence among youth”.

Besides, there’s no evidence that Adam Lanza was influenced by video games in any way. Absolutely none. We don’t even know if he was a gamer. This is all a desperate attempt to take the heat off guns by scapegoating First Amendment rights and organizing a 21st century version of book burning. If you want to solve the problem, then the problem is guns. Get cracking.

If you don’t want to solve the problem, then you pull bullshit stunts like this one.

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