Replies to post #239071 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[PegnVA]

If politicians were committed to ending mass shootings and not committed to the NRA, we would control mass shootings.

I'll ask you the same question I asked "Fade", who asks questions but is afraid to answer questions...Will you vote for a pol who does not commit to ending gun violence by passing strong gun laws?

[DesertDrifter]

backgrounds checks for all gun sales, restrictions on high capacity magazines and banning assault weapons.

I think most people support that position, other than republican politicians and the ammosexual clique. Complete elimination of weapons is not anywhere close to politically feasible, and in my opinion not necessary. I don't know what the exact definition of assault weapons is for you, but i think the weapons that can easily be converted to fully auto they should be banned. magazine size is a key as there is no legitimate civilian use for drum clips, and the brief time needed to reload a fresh clip has been the difference in a couple massacre situations, enabling the people to rush the shooter, so i support limiting clip size to some number less than 10 shots.

as to a welfare system that rewards having more children, whether the father is there or not etc.

do you mean the tax exemption for children, too, i assume, as it is a form of wealth redistribution welfare that rewards having more children, even for those not on hard times? Needy people are already in the shit house, and modern laws prevent their long-term use of the system anyway, so picking on them any more is just lame, no one is going to have another kid just for the 40 bucks a month more for a lifetime limit of a few years. The reagan myth of the welfare queen has been debunked a generation or so ago, in case you missed it.

[F6]

conix -- your assertion as to what is "the crux of most liberals' argument" regarding gun control is, not surprisingly, pure bullshit

[fuagf]

conix, btw, one of the reasons why we don't all get along is because people as you continue to foist fictitious frames upon we and other unsuspecting innocents .. haha .. such as you just did there with your

"FadeMeToWin, the crux of most liberals' argument is that they feel that no one should legally own a gun except for the Government, unless they are hunters. Law abiding citizens
should be totally dependent on Government for protection. And the Second Amendment is an out of date Amendment that should either be revoked in toto, or severely restricted."

because that just is not true. (see bottom, too, and also)

And because you continue, until very recently anyway, to perpetuate, .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117441713 .. (which sits in reply to your)

I am sure when a mentally ill, narcissistic malcontent decides to plan his exit from this world, he researches
where he will do the shooting and alters his plan if he find out that the site is a "Gun Free Zone".
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=117417093

discredited NRA pro-gun myths such as gun-free zones attracting unbalanced shooters .. if you have stopped that one now then that's good, and congratulations for getting off that gun-free zone nag .. if you have.

Next step for you might be to question the questionable NRA talking points you continue to preach.

"The same liberals love Hollywood liberal producers and investors that back high violence films, violent video game sellers"

Such as the effect of violent video games and films in encouraging mass shootings.

Please consider this excerpt from a much longer one from Mother Jones

The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence

Do brutal games lead to mass shootings? What do three decades of research really tell us?

—By Erik Kain
| Tue Jun. 11, 2013 6:46 AM EDT

[...]

What research has been done on the link between video games and violence, and what does it really tell us?

Studies on how violent video games affect behavior date to the mid 1980s, with conflicting results. Since then there have been at least two dozen studies .. http://kotaku.com/5976781/25-video-game-violence-studies-summarized .. conducted on the subject.

"Video Games, Television, and Aggression in Teenagers," published by the University of Georgia in 1984, found that playing arcade games was linked to increases in physical aggression. But a study published a year later by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, "Personality, Psychopathology, and Developmental Issues in Male Adolescent Video Game Use," found that arcade games have a "calming effect" and that boys use them to blow off steam. Both studies relied on surveys and interviews asking boys and young men about their media consumption.

--
"I think anybody who tells you that there's any kind of consistency to the aggression research is lying to you," says a Texas A&M researcher.
--

Studies grew more sophisticated over the years, but their findings continued to point in different directions. A 2011 study found that people who had played competitive games, regardless of whether they were violent or not, exhibited increased aggression. In 2012, a different study found that cooperative playing in the graphically violent Halo II made the test subjects more cooperative even outside of video game playing.

Metastudies—comparing the results and the methodologies of prior research on the subject—have also been problematic. One published in 2010 by the American Psychological Association, analyzing data from multiple studies and more than 130,000 subjects, concluded that "violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors and decrease empathic feelings and pro-social behaviors." But results from another metastudy showed that most studies of violent video games over the years suffered from publication biases that tilted the results toward foregone correlative conclusions.

Why is it so hard to get good research on this subject?

"I think that the discussion of media forms—particularly games—as some kind of serious social problem is often an attempt to kind of corral and solve what is a much broader social issue," says Carly Kocurek, a professor of Digital Humanities at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "Games aren't developed in a vacuum, and they reflect the cultural milieu that produces them. So of course we have violent games."

There is also the fundamental problem of measuring violent outcomes ethically and effectively.

"I think anybody who tells you that there's any kind of consistency to the aggression research is lying to you," Christopher J. Ferguson, associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University, told Kotaku .. http://kotaku.com/5976733/do-video-games-make-you-violent-an-in+depth-look-at-everything-we-know-today . "There's no consistency in the aggression literature, and my impression is that at this point it is not strong enough to draw any kind of causal, or even really correlational links between video game violence and aggression, no matter how weakly we may define aggression."

Moreover, determining why somebody carries out a violent act like a school shooting can be very complex; underlying mental-health issues are almost always present. More than half of mass shooters .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness .. over the last 30 years had mental-health problems.


Grand Theft Auto V/Rockstar Games

But America's consumption of violent video games must help explain our inordinate rate of gun violence, right?

Actually, no. A look at global video game spending per capita in relation to gun death statistics reveals that gun deaths in the United States far outpace those in other countries—including countries with higher per capita video game spending.

A 10-country comparison .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2012/12/17/ten-country-comparison-suggests-theres-little-or-no-link-between-video-games-and-gun-murders/ .. from the Washington Post shows the United States as the clear outlier in this regard. Countries with the highest per capita spending on video games, such as the Netherlands and South Korea, are among the safest countries in the world when it comes to guns. In other words, America plays about the same number of violent video games per capita as the rest of the industrialized world, despite that we far outpace every other nation in terms of gun deaths.

Or, consider it this way: With violent video game sales almost always at the top of the charts .. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/apr/30/violence-guns-best-selling-video-games , why do so few gamers turn into homicidal shooters? In fact, the number of violent youth offenders in the United States fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010—while video game sales more than doubled since 1996. A working paper from economists on violence and video game sales published in 2011 found that higher rates of violent video game sales in fact correlated with a decrease in crimes, especially violent crimes.

I'm still not convinced. A bunch of mass shooters were gamers, right?

Some mass shooters over the last couple of decades have had a history with violent video games. The Newtown shooter, Adam Lanza, was reportedly "obsessed" with video games. Norway shooter Anders Behring Breivik was said to have played World of Warcraft for 16 hours a day until he gave up the game in favor of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which he claimed he used to train with a rifle .. http://news.yahoo.com/norway-killer-sharpened-aim-playing-video-game-213107800.html . Aurora theater shooter James Holmes was reportedly a fan of violent video games .. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/07/colorado-shooter-enjoyed-video-games-movies-school-friend-says.html .. and movies such as The Dark Knight. (Holmes reportedly went so far as to mimic the Joker by dying his hair prior to carrying out his attack.)

Jerald Block, a researcher and psychiatrist in Portland, Oregon, stirred controversy when he concluded that Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out their rampage after their parents took away their video games. According to the Denver Post .. http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_6300370 , Block said that the two had relied on the virtual world of computer games to express their rage, and that cutting them off in 1998 had sent them into crisis.

But that's clearly an oversimplification. The age and gender .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map .. of many mass shooters, including Columbine's, places them right in the target demographic for first-person-shooter (and most other) video games. And people between ages 18 and 25 also tend to report the highest rates of mental-health issues .. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/statistics/SMI_AASR.shtml . Harris and Klebold's complex mental-health problems have been well documented .. http://www.davecullen.com/columbine/faq.htm .

To hold up a few sensational examples as causal evidence between violent games and violent acts ignores the millions of other young men and women who play violent video games and never go on a shooting spree in real life. Furthermore, it's very difficult to determine empirically whether violent kids are simply drawn to violent forms of entertainment, or if the entertainment somehow makes them violent. Without solid scientific data to go on, it's easier to draw conclusions that confirm our own biases. .. much more .. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/video-games-violence-guns-explainer

Oh, re your untrue comment re the 2nd Amendment above consider this one

The NRA's Fraud: Fabrication of Second Amendment Rights
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=87067625

See also:

How Fake 2nd Amendment History Kills .. By Robert Parry .. morsel ..

In the late Eighteenth Century, the meaning of “bearing” arms also referred to a citizen being part of a militia or army. It didn’t mean that an individual had the right to possess whatever
number of high-capacity killing machines that he or she might want. Indeed, the most lethal weapon that early Americans owned was a slow-loading, single-fired musket or rifle.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97570840