re: #73 Gus

The experts who’ve studied the issue for much of their lives tend to come to a different conclusion. It’s a fact that past generations of soldiers were much less willing to pull the trigger on the battlefield with another human being in their sights. The idea that video games, first person shooters especially, either simply can’t or don’t act as operant conditioning is kind of ridiculous.

In 1992, the national body of the American Psychological Association said, “The scientific debate is over.” In 1999, the American Psychological Association said, to argue [that media violence does not cause real violence], is like arguing against gravity. So, for the man to stand up, in front of this—the New Jersey Psychological Association—and claim it, is like standing up at B’nai B’rith and claiming that you can’t prove that the Holocaust happened, and it never happened.

Lt. Col. David Grossman

The next point he makes is hard to dismiss, except it seems by those with a vested political or commercial interest in maintaining denial.

“This concept of these things being fantasy is interesting,” Grossman said, “because the Holy Grail of this industry is realism, seeking ever greater levels of realism. And, when the child spends more waking hours playing the game than he does anything else, what becomes fantasy and what becomes reality?

“People tell me, ‘you can’t tell me that a 6-year-old in Flint, Mich., couldn’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality.’” Grossman said, recalling the Feb. 29 shooting in which a 6-year-old boy shot and killed a classmate. “And I say, ‘Well, you know, how many adults do you know who think professional wrestling is real?”

Anyway, the Supreme Court has determined that video games are protected speech, even though the founders who wrote the constitution couldn’t have possibly conceived of them at the time the it was written. This pretty much destroys the argument that semi automatic rifles can’t be protected because the contemporary state of the art arms were muzzle loaders. Either the Constitution is a living document or it isn’t.