Navy Yard Washington DC

[Marti Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Marti]

Sept 16, 2013

Shooting at Navy Yard in DC

[Carolinian Super Moderator Find all posts View Profile Close Carolinian]

It looks like this is another gunman addicted to violent video games:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...deo-games.html

[Pstreet1 Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Pstreet1]

And he's another crazy.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

It looks like this is another gunman addicted to violent video games:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...deo-games.html

Call of Duty isn't just a "violent video game". Over 100 million copies of the various titles have been sold around the world and there are regularly 40 million monthly active players. Black Ops II is popular in my household. Haven't had any gunmen take to the streets looking for zombies here.

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

Call of Duty isn't just a "violent video game".

Yep, I think it's one of the WW II games my hubby plays. 'Course, he does have a bit of a temper -- but he usually vents it by yelling and/or stomping off until he cools down.

The problem with blaming "violent video games" (or guns, or any number of things) for someone's violence is that the connection doesn't work cross-culturally. Japan has one of the lowest violent crime rates out there, and they're big consumers and producers of video games (Resident Evil, the other game referenced in that picture tag, comes from Japan). What does seem to encourage violence is cultures that support the whole "men should physically defend their honor" idea. For example, studies comparing white guys raised in the rural south to guys raised in the north discovered that the northerners were not simply claiming they were cool after someone rudely bumped into them or otherwise disrespecting them -- their body chemistry was different. Guys raised to defend their honor have a harder time "walking away from a fight," first because they were taught not to, but second, because their "instincts" are against it. They have been conditioned to respond violently to a non-violent threat.

Cultural attitudes explain violence a lot better than video games, guns, TV, or any other popular target I've looked into. When the local society or subgroup encourages violence, it gets it, and often more of it than it really expected.

[CarolF Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close CarolF]

Yep, I think it's one of the WW II games my hubby plays. 'Course, he does have a bit of a temper -- but he usually vents it by yelling and/or stomping off until he cools down.

The problem with blaming "violent video games" (or guns, or any number of things) for someone's violence is that the connection doesn't work cross-culturally. Japan has one of the lowest violent crime rates out there, and they're big consumers and producers of video games (Resident Evil, the other game referenced in that picture tag, comes from Japan). What does seem to encourage violence is cultures that support the whole "men should physically defend their honor" idea. For example, studies comparing white guys raised in the rural south to guys raised in the north discovered that the northerners were not simply claiming they were cool after someone rudely bumped into them or otherwise disrespecting them -- their body chemistry was different. Guys raised to defend their honor have a harder time "walking away from a fight," first because they were taught not to, but second, because their "instincts" are against it. They have been conditioned to respond violently to a non-violent threat.

Cultural attitudes explain violence a lot better than video games, guns, TV, or any other popular target I've looked into. When the local society or subgroup encourages violence, it gets it, and often more of it than it really expected.

How interesting, I had no idea that there is a culture of 'physically defending honour' there.

Personally I don't enjoy video games and I think the violent ones are a bit strange but there are certainly a lot of people that love them.

[Hobbitess Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Hobbitess]

How interesting, I had no idea that there is a culture of 'physically defending honour' there.

Yah, it goes back a ways. Dueling was practiced in the south much longer than it was in the north, for instance, even when it was technically outlawed both places. But there's still a difference today; in smaller cities and rural areas with similar populations, the murder rate is higher in the south than in most of the rest of the country. Bigger cities the difference is not so pronounced, either because the populationd there is more mixed or because people in the bigger cities in the south are less tied to local tradition (or at least that aspect of it).

So guys who say they killed someone "because he dissed me" may be using a modern vernacular, but the underlying principle of defending one's honor to the death can be traced back through southern U.S. locales to specific places in the UK that much of the southern white population came from. The term "redneck" has been traced to one of those groups, on the Scottish border, although I don't know how supported that theory is (or if there are other etymologies with more support). And most people I've known who identify themselves as rednecks are not embracing the culture that Thomas Sowell sometimes characterizes as "redneck", which is why most researchers use the term "Culture of Honor" instead, even though they're talking about the same thing.