Tuesday, December 7, 1999

Grossman Interview -- 9:48 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Stomped has an interview with David Grossman, a big anti-violence "expert" who has borne the brunt of many flames in the gaming community. He makes some valid points (I don't think six-year-olds should be playing first-person-shooters either!), but his final comments are very disturbing to me:

Is it worth ONE life for all the kids in America to be able to play violent video games? Every major medical and scientific body says the price is MUCH more than just ONE life. REAL lives, with real families, dead. No reset button. Dead. No extra lives. DEAD. Even if all these medical and scientific experts MIGHT BE WRONG, is THAT a risk with taking?

This is the real danger in Grossman and people like him. This comment is fascist, pure and simple. We need to remove anything from the people that could possibly endanger them because they are too stupid to know the difference. Shall we eliminate the freedom of the press or freedom of speech because someone could conceivably be libelous or slanderous? Shall we eliminate the freedom of religion because some religious "extremists" may get carried away? While I may agree with him on points, his overall argument is very dangerous.

This is the same arguement that neo-prohibitionists bring up all the time. Think how many drunk-drivers, drunk-driving-related deaths, and problems with alcoholism we could eliminate if only alcohol were illegal! Instead of dealing with the people who are the sources of the problems, we make every adult who has a beer on Friday night a criminal.

I'd also like to know why when a white kid shoots up a school, it's an unbelievable, unexplainable tragedy. When a black kid shoots another, it barely gets mentioned. Why is that?

The Master comments: Personally, I think it's because society for some seriously SCREWED UP reason has decided that black people shooting each other is normal. And white people shooting anyone isn't. That's such exquisite BS, but that's the image most people carry around. And TV/Media/Movies don't exactly try to rectify that situation either. Update: I do need to qualify all of this with "American people" since this typically ISN'T the attitude outside the U.S.

News for 12/07/1999

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