The future generation is scaring me...

The best of this generation are waxing scumbags in southwest asia. I'll cut them a little slack if they don't shoot as straight as I think they should.

B
 
TheCamel said:
Upon shooting my rifle, they started complaining how loud it was.
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Too bad you didn't have a 91/44 to demonstrate. ;-)

YouTube and the video games have given us a lot of folks with no sense of consequence. "This here is my double-glock..."
 
Geez, if they think an AR15 is loud, wait until they try one of the larger rifles someday!!




TheCamel said:
So while at the range that I frequent, there were two younger kids there giggling and fooling around with a ruger 10/22. They were also all 'tacticooled' out, wearing cheap assault vests, empty thigh-rigs, 3-day assault packs. I had my AR15 and Glock 19, which they seemed to be interested in. They approached me after a while and asked if they could try it. I asked if they had ever shot one before, which one responded, "oh, I unlocked all the accessories for the M4 and in my 7th prestige in Modern Warfare 2. I know how to use it." Needless to say, I quickly took my rifle back and had to painfully explain to them how to use it correctly. Upon shooting my rifle, they started complaining how loud it was.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've noticed an increasing amount of younger kids who think that, by playing video games, they're somehow firearm experts. Granted, I myself am only 22. But it's still a scary thought, knowing that these kids will someday undoubtedly be buying firearms soon.
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TBalls said:
Yes, but I'm guessing your son does not presume to be an expert with a particular firearm simply because he used it in a video game. Sounds like he has some healthy curiosity, whereas the boys in question have some unhealthy stupidity.

By their logic I'm quite proficient with a whole arsenal of weapons: Assault rifles, RPGs, tanks, fighter jets, lasers, phasers, ray guns, rail guns, tactical nukes.............you get the point.
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If it gets them out to the range to try the "real" thing, let them assume they can shoot. Reality will strike back upon the 1st shot. Hopefully someone like thecamel, or you, or I will be there to help them with the truth.
 
Son of Sasquatch said:
It does desensitize you to pulling the trigger on someone. That's why the military does it and spends millions of dollars supporting the industry.
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that's anti BS. reminds me of the media spouting the same crap saying the military used DOOM to train desensitize soldiers and that it was turning children into emotionless killing machines after the columbine shooting.

let me just leave this here:

[bs2]
 
atilla said:
that's anti BS. reminds me of the media spouting the same crap saying the military used DOOM to train desensitize soldiers and that it was turning children into emotionless killing machines after the columbine shooting.

let me just leave this here:

[bs2]
Click to expand...

Did I say the proliferation of violent video games is the cause of violence? No. We've been doing that for quite some time.

Did I say that's cause of gun problems? No. People are the cause of gun problems.

The mind of the average child cannot differentiate between violence in reality and violence on the screen. This has been proven again and again. Pulling the virtual trigger on a life like and semi intelligent human caricature thousands of time has a psychological impact, period. Some kids can filter it out, some can't. All are affected to some degree. It's our job to educate our children and make sure they know the difference.

How many kids have jumped through a glass door or open window with a cape on because they saw Superman do it? There is a large dichotomy between banning guns and making sure people are aware of the effects of violent media.

But, to say video games have absolutely no impact on our youth besides "they don't know how to properly handle a gun' or 'they are all fat' is ignorant. The military has a hard on for drones for a reason....
 
Son of Sasquatch said:
But, to say video games have absolutely no impact on our youth besides "they don't know how to properly handle a gun' or 'they are all fat' is ignorant. The military has a hard on for drones for a reason....
Click to expand...

......and drone pilots have far more psychological problems than their flight suit wearing counterparts for a reason.

And not the type of psychological problems that fat kids playing COD have.
 
The kids are on the video games shooting because they have no access to the "real thing" - both from (local) political realities, and from the lack of local facilities.

Don't mock them - educate them. They're wearing tacticool stuff because the only "range wear" they've seen is computer-generated. I'm guessing that the avatars on the games ( I don't play) don't bother with ear protection, trigger discipline or muzzle control. Hell, I have to correct non-tacticool shooters at the Trap range!

The days of high-school rifle teams around here has passed. Kids with an interest in shooting will get the CoD game, not a real gun, as they have no choice, unless we as the "older generation" actively work to change things.

If your club has a Junior Rifle program, do you help to make it work? If there is no program, start one.

We're collectively screwed unless we get real people shooting real guns on a real range. If the Next Generation gets their gun knowledge from shoot-em-up games, when it's time to vote on an issue that affects our real world passtimes (and rights) they'll know that an AK is too dangerous for real people to have, 'cause it is so good at wiping out zombies, mutants, or whatever.

Video games ARE instructive...but not in breath/sight/trigger control, safety or real-world shooting etiquette.
 
Son of Sasquatch said:
The mind of the average child cannot differentiate between violence in reality and violence on the screen. This has been proven again and again.
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Total crap... Do you have kids? Have you ever seen someone take game or slaughter an animal for the first time?

Watch the Penn & Teller episode on video game violence. Watch the 9yo FPS video game champ melt into tears after firing a real gun the first time...

Now, frankly, I don't know why he cried, but it wasn't because he was desensitized to violence...

I've experienced in my life and watched my kids and others perfectly capable of differentiating between video game, nerf gun, paintball, shooting paper and hunting. The human brain is a very powerful thing and it cannot be easily fooled - particularly when it comes to this topic.

What has been disproved "time and time again" is what you just said. Even typically moon-bat Harvard researchers agree that the early studies claiming a link between video games/tv and violent behavior are complete BS.

It is possible that once the "uncanny divide" is crossed and if you did not tell people they were playing a game that you might see some of this, but the mere fact that it is a game being known to the player completely changes how their brain understands what they are doing...

Harvard researchers: Violent video games OK for kids
 
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Timber said:
there was an entire series of FBI reports and government findings in the mid and late 90's that said exactly what Son of Sasquatch is saying. especially regarding point and shoot marksmanship of school shooters who'd previously never fired a handgun, but were getting 14 hits for 15 shots fired. true or not, they've since filtered down into the cultural parlance, and are excepted as gospel by the media now.
Click to expand...
Sadly yes, it isn't just the media peddling this crap... Heck, even some gun owners are parroting it... [wink]

Two Harvard researchers have concluded that there's no data to support the notion that violent video games cause the kids who play them to act out violence in real life, contrary to the vast majority of media outlets that would have the public thinking otherwise.
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See my prior post for a link to the story...
 
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Video games do instill an extra level of hand-eye coordination that a lot of people wouldn't have otherwise, but you're not gonna be Grendel the super sniper just 'cuz you can rock no-scope head shots with the FAL on Favela all day long. I'm living proof.
 
something else that was interesting...

The armed forces use video games to train soldiers to kill by making shooting at humans seem routine. According to Lt. Colonel David Grossman (On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society): "One of the most effective and widely used simulators developed by the United States Army in recent years, MACS (Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator) is nothing more than a modified Super Nintendo game."

http://social.jrank.org/pages/1302/Kids-Blame-Violence-on-Video-Games.html
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yes the MACS system was a SNES game but you were shooting at silhouette targets but to compare that to shooting at a human being? no way. can anyone verify the above quote actually came from him? hell the weaponeer systems had recoil! danger! danger!

some of this stuff just makes you go... wtf?

also:

Timber said:
interesting reading here:
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/school/school2.pdf
Click to expand...

beat me to it.
 
Timber said:
interesting reading here:
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/school/school2.pdf
Click to expand...

I can't see that right now, but if that's the one that profiles school killers and suggests a link to games, it was specifically mentioned in more recent studies as having failed to "control" for the proliferation of game-play by the generation(s) in question.

Classic correlation vs causality research failure.
 
atilla said:
can anyone verify the above quote actually came from him?
.
Click to expand...

Absolutely Verified.
Grossman is a huge supporter of the hypothesis that video games encourage violence and teach children how to shoot people. In 'On Combat' he gives an example of how, in his view, Quake taught a young child to be an expert handgun marksman, who then shot a bunch of people (all with 'expert', head-shot-only shooting). If this is true, I want to know why my IDPA performance is so poor.

Every generation is concerned about the future generation. Those nasty kids are always too fickle, uneducated, careless and entertainment driven. See for example:

Many children today are greatly to be pitied because too much is done for them and dictated to them and they are deprived of the learning processes. We seem to have dropped into an age of entertaining, a breathless going from one sensation to another.... It not only destroys their power to think, but also makes happiness, contentment, and resourcefulness impossible. At seventeen, life is spoken of as “so dull” if there is not “something doing” every waking hour.
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- Prof. Gail Harrison, 1915.

Even better:

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
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-Hesiod, 8th Century BC

There's a Plato or Aristotle quote that's similar, but its real authorship is in question.
 
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I don't buy the videogame training argument, at least not the one put forth by the media and scaredy-cat parents, ie. violent games turn kids into sociopathic killers. That definitely is a load.
 
Son of Sasquatch said:
"The America's Army series of free-to-play PC first-person shooters that double as recruitment tools has cost the US government $32.8 million over 10 years, according to data obtained through a GameSpot Freedom of Information Act request. "

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6242635.html
Click to expand...

I'm well aware of America's Army, as well as the Doom .wad files that were created specifically for the military before AA was developed. I'm not arguing that the military hasn't invested money into video gaming, I'm arguing that they don't desensitize you to pulling the trigger with a person in your sights. As I said in my second post, you can definitely learn some hand-eye coordination from gaming, but I'm fully against the notion that they somehow lessen the effect of real world violence on a person.
 
Being a 23 year old myself, I have grown up with these so called murder simulators. At a very young age I was introduced to the likes of Duke Nukem, Wolfenstein 3D, Mortal Kombat etc… Honestly I can’t say they have honed my skills any more than anything else. I can play the game Silent Scope in an arcade and get perfect head shots every time (for those not in the know, Silent Scope is a sniper game. In the Arcade the controller is rifle mock up complete with a scope that has a screen in it to simulate a real scope.) The first time I picked up a rife, I’m sure it was a fantastic miss. I have never had an urge to go and run down someone with my car, even after playing Grand Theft Auto 4 for a few weeks nonstop after launch.

Honestly, this argument is this generations “Metal is going to make you worship Satan and drink Blood” argument. Are there people that video games have effected? Maybe, but I bet you I can show you parents who don’t do a good job at the same time. My little brother has been playing video games his entire life as well. He is really, really good at First Person Shooter games, and he has no desire to shoot a gun in real life.

Parents will always be scared that their kids are going to all messed up because of some new stimuli, it’s just nature. Kids become a product of their environment. Show them that it’s just a game and they are not going to go get your gun and shoot someone.
 
william_munny said:
I'm well aware of America's Army, as well as the Doom .wad files that were created specifically for the military before AA was developed. I'm not arguing that the military hasn't invested money into video gaming, I'm arguing that they don't desensitize you to pulling the trigger with a person in your sights. As I said in my second post, you can definitely learn some hand-eye coordination from gaming, but I'm fully against the notion that they somehow lessen the effect of real world violence on a person.
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AFAIK this has not been refuted by a new study.

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~nscentral/news/2006/jul/desensitized.shtml

We are creatures of habit. I stand by my point that 'virtually' shooting at a simulated human target which acts and moves like a human, thousands upon thousands of times, and over hundreds of hours, will affect the mental health of an individual. We're empirical creatures.
 
Son of Sasquatch said:
\
The mind of the average child cannot differentiate between violence in reality and violence on the screen. This has been proven again and again. Pulling the virtual trigger on a life like and semi intelligent human caricature thousands of time has a psychological impact, period.

Some kids can filter it out, some can't. All are affected to some degree. It's our job to educate our children and make sure they know the difference.
Click to expand...
By all of that I should be a mass murderer by now, or something like that. A killing machine. [rolleyes] I guarantee you that I've killed more "virtual people" in the Hitman series than everyone else on this board combined. (Lee Hong Assasination = win) Yet, somehow, by some miracle, I can easily distill the difference between a game and reality. In reality, you can't shoot a bunch of bad guys in the restaurant and have the bartender with the double barreled shotgun notice there are piles of corpses all over the place, and then offer you an invitation to a brothel, and then resume wiping down the bar counter as though nothing has happened. (Well, maybe Chuck Norris could pull that off, somehow... ) (tongue firmly implanted in cheek)

My parents never educated me specifically about those kinds of things. They didn't need to... it's something you start to learn the first time you fall off a bike, get stabbed with pricker bushes, or have a "friend" throw a rock at you. It's called mortality. The human existence. The basic understanding of right and wrong. A video game doesn't overcome the emotional/sensory impact of things like that.

Filter? There is no "filter"- it's the result of having a properly oriented moral compass from experiences you learn when you grow up.

Maybe you have a point, if all these kids are growing up in bubbles these days. That still isn't the fault of a "game" though..

How many kids have jumped through a glass door or open window with a cape on because they saw Superman do it?
Click to expand...

How often does that happen? I'm sure it has, but I don't see the papers filled with accounts of kids trying to fly off of balconies, etc. Most of them are infants falling out of windows because their dumb parents left them unattended. No delusions of superman grandeur required.

There is a large dichotomy between banning guns and making sure people are aware of the effects of violent media.
Click to expand...

Videogames/media is bad guns are bad, no difference- same authoritarian/statist bulls**t.

Maybe people should concentrate on the real problems, which is parenting and societal failures. We have school systems where policy is to destroy individual accomplishment and 'prevent" kids from experiencing failure in a safe environmnet, and people are worried about a f**king videogame? Is that really the biggest problem?


But, to say video games have absolutely no impact on our youth besides "they don't know how to properly handle a gun' or 'they are all fat' is ignorant.
Click to expand...

I'd say that bad upbringing has a bad impact on our youth. "Videogames", media, pop culture, etc, are just scapegoats for the real problems kids face. Not much different than the concept of scapegoating private gun ownership for crime.

The military has a hard on for drones for a reason....
Click to expand...

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that nobody wants to tell the parents that their son or daughter died in combat, when a drone could have done that job instead?

-Mike
 
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Son of Sasquatch said:
AFAIK this has not been refuted by a new study.

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~nscentral/news/2006/jul/desensitized.shtml
Click to expand...

Iowa State is an engineering school: mechanical and aerospace are their forte. Psychology is not one of them.

They offer only the basic graduate program for their psych department. If you have any knowledge of psych degrees and what merit they carry in the "real world," programs that offer doctorates in this "profession" are typically the only ones where masters of this art are successful in working for real world institutions. Undergrad degrees in this art make you a qualified baby sitter. Masters degrees from good schools (as I defined earlier, Iow State is not one of these) get you into social working positions.

Nice try though.
 
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william_munny said:
I don't think the methods of that study can produce accurate results. Test subjects played violent and non-violent video games, and then had to watch violence on TV. The only way you're going to get accurate results is if you have them act out violence and record the results.
Click to expand...

The point of the study was not if its easier to act out violent acts against others. It was to prove that there is a observable physiological change in the body while watching real acts of violence after playing violent interactive media.

The argument we are having is 'Does violent media desensitize people to real violence?' it's not 'do violent video games make you go on a shooting rampage?'.

If a person can be observed to be desensitized by violent media, the mental blocks for them committing real acts of violence have been modified to a point. Does that mean a person will or may act out? That's up to individual cases.

Does violent media (especially interactive) affect us?...the answer is yes.
 
TheCamel said:
So while at the range that I frequent, there were two younger kids there giggling and fooling around with a ruger 10/22. They were also all 'tacticooled' out, wearing cheap assault vests, empty thigh-rigs, 3-day assault packs. I had my AR15 and Glock 19, which they seemed to be interested in. They approached me after a while and asked if they could try it. I asked if they had ever shot one before, which one responded, "oh, I unlocked all the accessories for the M4 and in my 7th prestige in Modern Warfare 2. I know how to use it." Needless to say, I quickly took my rifle back and had to painfully explain to them how to use it correctly. Upon shooting my rifle, they started complaining how loud it was.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've noticed an increasing amount of younger kids who think that, by playing video games, they're somehow firearm experts. Granted, I myself am only 22. But it's still a scary thought, knowing that these kids will someday undoubtedly be buying firearms soon.
Click to expand...

Myself? I was never a kid thinking I knew everything because I read something in a magazine somewhere. I knew to ask all the right questions and made no assumptions about anything.

We were all young and dumb at one point or another. Along the way to here someone was nice enough to teach me what I know now and hopefully I’ll meet more folks who can help me out the next time I’m acting stupid.
 
drgrant said:
By all of that I should be a mass murderer by now, or something like that. A killing machine. [rolleyes] I guarantee you that I've killed more "virtual people" in the Hitman series than everyone else on this board combined. (Lee Hong Assasination = win) Yet, somehow, by some miracle, I can easily distill the difference between a game and reality. In reality, you can't shoot a bunch of bad guys in the restaurant and have the bartender with the double barreled shotgun notice there are piles of corpses all over the place, and then offer you an invitation to a brothel. (Well, maybe Chuck Norris could pull that off, somehow... ) (tongue firmly
implanted in cheek)

My parents never educated me specifically about those kinds of things. They didn't need to... it's something you start to learn the first time you fall off a bike, get stabbed with pricker bushes, or have a "friend" throw a rock at you. It's called mortality. The human existence. The basic understanding of right and wrong. A video game doesn't overcome the emotional/sensory impact of things like that.

Filter? There is no "filter"- it's the result of having a properly oriented moral compass from experiences you learn when you grow up.

Maybe you have a point, if all these kids are growing up in bubbles these days. That still isn't the fault of a "game" though..



How often does that happen? I'm sure it has, but I don't see the papers filled with accounts of kids trying to fly off of balconies, etc. Most of them are infants falling out of windows because their dumb parents left them unattended. No delusions of superman grandeur required.



Videogames/media is bad guns are bad, no difference- same authoritarian/statist bulls**t.

Maybe people should concentrate on the real problems, which is parenting and societal failures. We have school systems where policy is to destroy individual accomplishment and 'prevent" kids from experiencing failure in a safe environmnet, and people are worried about a f**king videogame? Is that really the biggest problem?




I'd say that bad upbringing has a bad impact on our youth. "Videogames", media, pop culture, etc, are just scapegoats for the real problems kids face. Not much different than the concept of scapegoating private gun ownership for crime.



Maybe it has something to do with the fact that nobody wants to tell the parents that their son or daughter died in combat, when a drone could have done that job instead?

-Mike
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I'm not advocating banning violent media. I'm saying that it affects your psychological state. To say it doesn't have a measurable effect is ignorant.

I've spent hundreds of hours playing video games. I haven't killed anyone and don't plan on it either. People can buy whatever they want and play whatever they want. I'm not saying you can't.

I totally agree it's up to the parent to raise their child. It's also the parents choice if they want their children to be exposed to numerous acts of real or pretend violence via the media.

Also, some people do not have properly aligned moral compasses. That's the whole reason we have police and a justice system.

Some of you guys are so paranoid that when someone says "you know that may not be good for you" you think the person wants the government to regulate and prohibit such acts.

214668321_3Kqua-L-2.jpg
 
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