German Police Union Chief Wants Violent Game Ban After Shooting 518
A recent shooting in Germany has raised the ire of many politicians and officials, and they're turning to video games as a scapegoat after it was revealed that the shooter was a fan of Counterstrike and played Far Cry 2 the night before the rampage. First, a major retailer decided to drop mature-rated games altogether, and then the Minister for Social Affairs suggested restricting "addictive games," such as World of Warcraft, to adults only. Despite an unfavorable reaction from gamers and game developers alike, the chief of Germany's national police union has now spoken out against violent games as well, saying, "The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames."
Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is in the same vein as people who blame pornography for rape.
That makes sense (Score:2, Insightful)
GOOD IDEA. (Score:5, Insightful)
Correlation? (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll find that the vast majority of school-shooters play first-person shooters.
The vast majority of young males also player first-person shooters.
You'll even find that the vast majority of young males eat bread.
What exactly does this tell us?
Re:Right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Relax. He's not actually personally blaming violent games. He's just taking a queue from Obama's Chief of Staff and not letting a serious crises go to waste [youtube.com].
Re:Correlation? (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly does this tell us?
The vast majority of all statistics are made up on the spot?
Maybe bullets first? (Score:5, Insightful)
This wouldn't have happened
1) if the guy hadn't had access to inordinate amounts of bullets (you can't kill 15 people with less than 15 bullets)
2) if the guy hadn't had access to a gun that was stored outside the legally required locked safe
3) if the guy hadn't been given weapons training even though his diagnosed mental condition (again, this was against the law)
Once you've addressed these issues, we may want to talk about banning violent games.
Stop isolating games for their interactivity... (Score:4, Insightful)
Movies like Last House on the Left would have a hard time getting made even in the 1980s. Yes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre existed, but Last House on the Left depicts a violent rape, and the Saw movies are torture porn.
Responses to web boards (every major newspaper now takes comments to about every single story) depicts a violent world. I took a look at the Entertainment Weekly website, looked at an article about Natasha Richardson's death from head injury. Unfortunately, the sysadmins at EW don't screen comments. It was horrific, with comments that are hard to repeat, many talking about what they would do to her corpse and many being glad that she "got what she deserved".
Videogames are simply reflecting this culture shift. A game like Bully simply reflects what goes on. It's a deep, and very unfortunate, confusion of the chicken and the egg. Somehow, legislators look at Resident Evil 5 and see something that they don't see in the remake of Dawn of the Dead. They look at Far Cry 2 and they take a pass on Sorority Row, a trailer I saw last night that looked as violent and horrific as anything I've seen from Wes Craven.
Somehow the interactive nature of video games makes people feel that it "thresholds" behavior. If you fantasize about harming animals, you need therapy. If you actually bind, torture and kill animals - you are quite a step closer to being a human killer. Somehow, this logic is being applied to shooters. That makes playing shooters itself a deviant behavior. I think it signals something deeply wrong with our culture, but it's interactivity alone does not single it out as threshold behavior.
Cue correlation != causation... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems that most responses to this sort of article are of the form "violent video games have nothing to do with what he did!" And then when something about a black shooter in a ghetto comes up, most people say "It's his society and location, if we could just get rid of the ghettos/black gangs/whatever, we'd have less violence/shooting/murders."
So it seems that in general, people do think that the environment one lives in affects one's decisions. Well, video games are part of my environment.
So instead of simply dismissing video games as having anything to do with decisions (which, IMO, is a ridiculous proposition, the idea you could spend 20+ hours a week playing video games and not have it affect you, whether that's morally, ethically, intellectually, ... grammatically ... what about, oh, say, myspace? no affect?)... I'd propose that we start posting how video games (especially violent ones, since that's this article's topic) DO affect you. How does virtual violence affect someone.
And preferably more than the curt "Duh, it lets you cool off virtually making you less likely to kill someone in real life." I'm not sure that is any more or less proven than video games causing real life shootings. If it does... then [citation needed]
Not the chief of the *German* police union (Score:5, Insightful)
Crappy journalistic research.
It's "just" the chief of the Hessian section of the DPolG, not the Chief on the federal level.
And there's several police unions as well, with the DPolG only being second largest (about half as big as the GdP with a few micro unions not worth mentioning).
Apart from that, it was pretty clear that everyone's gonna scream BANZOR KILLARGAMES after the little fuckwit ganked his old school, so no big surprise there.
What is imo most surprising is how careful and diplomatic Christian Pfeiffer is with his statements. He usually was pretty rabid anti-"Killergame" the last couple years and I expected him to gloat and go "TOLD YA" to his critics, but he actually says stuff like games are not the deciding factor, not the original cause for stuff like that, just a small piece of a big puzzle with social issues being the real problem, etc.
I'm confused. It's like if Jack Thompson would go ahead and offer to become BFF with John Carmack.
Guns... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. Let people buy guns. When they use them to kill people, ban video games. Hey, some crazies have killed people because God told them to! Let's ban religion!
Tragic == False Blame (Score:5, Insightful)
When ever you see a tragedy such as a school or public shooting or anything for that matter the first thing you do is say why, the second thing you do is find the easiest answer. The truth is that if someone does something that people don't understand they tend to blame the thing that person did that they didn't understand. I would agree that violence can breed more violence but it's pretty hard to blame video games when you see it played out in movies, TV, on the streets, and anywhere. The question is, is that when every one I know plays violent video games and not one of them has been convicted of a violent crime what does that prove? Counter-strike has 4.2 million users(just the original not source as there would be some cross over between the users number comes from Wikipedia) world wide. If this game(which is 10 years old give or take a few months) truly breed the kind of violence that made this kid kill people that's 0.0000238% of all people that play are made violent enough to commit a crime, I'm pretty sure that's an anomaly.
I would hope that things would settle down people would look at it a little more logically and decide that this kind of thing is silly. I would hope parents would be aware of the mental state of their children and be trying to get help if they can, and be aware of what content they can handle. I have heard of kids calming down once fighting games were removed but as a parent you should be watching them instead of letting them socialize on video games alone. If you let them play video games watch or play with them, of course as they get older it's harder to do that besides not giving them money to buy games, and then if they are still violent it's tragic but at least you shouldn't be blaming video games at that point.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
The effect of censorship on people is a thousand times worse than the effect of romantic comedies, which is ten times worse than the effect of pr0n, which is one half as good as the effect of video games. This is basic psychology, empirically proven.
Clearly, games are the root of the problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure it would. (Score:3, Insightful)
The world would be no poorer if there were no more killergames.
Nor would it be any poorer if there were no movies in which people died, or books containing stories involving violent conflict.
I also think the world would get along just fine without football, golf, chess, horse races, and many other things.
But that doesn't in any way justify me taking those things away from people who want them....let alone those who turn a decent profit from facilitating them.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
To say that viewing pornography everyday, where women are treated like beautiful objects at best, and dogshit at worst, wouldn't have an effect on one's outlook is rubbish. You can't even watch a romantic comedy everyday without it affecting your views - that is basic psychology, empirically proven.
And, of course, you naturally have the studies which prove this "basic psychology" of yours, right?
I mean, you wouldn't be advocating censorship based solely on your baseless assumptions and anecdotal evidence, would you? Because *that* would be a really *really* bad idea.
Re:Cue correlation != causation... (Score:4, Insightful)
That being said, I don't recommend playing a racing game that rewards smashing into other cars for 8 hours, then immediately getting out and driving down the freeway. To a certain extent your automatic reactions are trained by video games. But not your conscious decision-making processes.
I don't think .. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe bullets first? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that's the reasoning the UK used to ban guns. If no one has a gun, then there isn't going to be any more killing right? except that now people are killing with knives. some people are even calling for certain knives to be banned to stop the killing. The thing is that they are completely missing the point. If a human being really wants to kill another human being, it is going to happen regardless of what weapons or anything else is banned. The real problem here is that there are murderous individuals not the tools that they could potentially use nor what media they watched.
Re:Cue correlation != causation... (Score:1, Insightful)
LOL... comparing the psychological toll that living in an extremely under-privileged community where your ability to eat may come down to begging or stealing with the ability to play games in HD.
Re:Stop isolating games for their interactivity... (Score:5, Insightful)
You might want to look further back than the `80's. Last House on the Left [imdb.com] is a remake of Last House on the Left [imdb.com] from 1972. Hell, the original was directed by Wes "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Scream" Craven. Don't forget that Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th had their heydays in the `80's as well.
You mention that playing shooters signals something "deeply wrong." Could it be that such forms of entertainment appeal to our baser instincts and have for millennia? The Romans sure seemed to enjoy watching gladiators fighting to the death. Violence and violent entertainment are nothing new. Also, as has been said before, perhaps those with violent tendencies are more drawn to violent entertainment because they are already predisposed to enjoy that type of imagery. Does that mean that everyone who enjoys such forms of entertainment is drawn to violence in the real world? I highly doubt it, and for every study that one can find to say there is a correlation between violent entertainment and actual violence, there are several others that say there is no causal link, not even on an "if there's smoke, there's fire," level. Violence is more often borne from desperation of one form or another, I'd be willing to bet.
Re:Sure it would. (Score:5, Insightful)
Football: a violent contact sport, frequently resulting in personal injury. Chess: A game in which you are encouraged to send blindly loyal soldiers of varying specialties to their untimely deaths all in the name of protecting a single political figure. Horse races: Involves brutally pitting horses against one another, some choose to include whipping. The horses get nothing but a fresh feed bag, while the trainers get millions in prize money, and book keepers rake in billions from the gambling. I'm sure there's something bad about golf, but all I could think of is "known to cause heart attacks in managers who should be behind their desks", but that's no loss for the world.
Anything can be portrayed in a bad light by phrasing it correctly.
Re:That makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
And what are you doing by making a general statement about 60 million people based on what some of their grandparents did hmmm?
Re:Maybe bullets first? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but unlike a knife - unless the guy had some mad ninja skills or something - you don't really get a whole lot of time to rush toward the assailant and e.g. tackle them to the floor.
If you have a knife, you barge into a classroom and.. then what? You go for the person closest to you... STAB, in the jugular.. NEXT! STAB! in the chest if you're lucky.. NE..whoops.. in the half a minute it took you to do that, the rest of the class had a chance to rush toward you, pushed you to the ground, and only if you're lucky left you alive.
If you have a gun, however, you barge into the classroom and.. you don't move. You just aim *BANG*, aim again, half a second later, *BANG*. The classroom is already scared shitless at this point but some dude's being a hero and makes a move *BANG!* not anymore.
So for you to kinda shove part of the responsibility to the 'bystanders' - who were victims just as much, I'd say, except that they lived - is woefully negligent of how these things happen.
Note that I don't really mean to single out 'the gun'; anytime the assailing party has the upper hand -by far-, bystanders are unlikely to try anything. Just see the whole biker thing in that Australian airport; there the upper hand was caused by the fact that it was a group of rather muscular burly men that probably wouldn't have any qualms bating the living daylights out of some little old lady that would 'tut tut' them.
You can call that cowardice, I can call that 'shock' or something... whatever it is.. it simply is.. and it's never an active party to killings.
Of course.. you probably meant "but if ALL of them had guns, they could've shot him!".. sure.. if they're fast enough to grab their gun before he offs vics 2 and 3, probably more. On the other hand.. more of these troubled teens would suddenly have guns readily at their disposal.
4 words: (Score:5, Insightful)
External locus of control. The shooter had it. Why do you think 14 out of 15 victims were female? He was gunning for females, because he was blaming all females for his condition. He blamed them for so much that he thought they collectively deserved to die.
Now the interesting part: pretty much everybody who wants to ban videogames because of events like these believes just as much in an external locus of control as the shooter. Except instead of believing that a group of people is directly harming them, they believe that a group of people is influencing "their" people through violent games. And instead of wanting to shoot the people they accuse, they want to ban their product.
Granted, it's better to ban a product than to shoot someone. But the fundamental drive is the same. It's also the drive that's behind book burnings and conspiracy theories like the protocols of the elders of zion. It's bullshit that makes people feel better and in control - it's not them that's the problem, and there's an easy solution at hand.
I despise both the shooter and the idiots who clamor for video gaming bannings equally. One's more harmful than the other, but that's just because the other is a bigger pansy. I'm convinced that under the right circumstances, the head of the state's police union would be just as willing a shooter as the 17 year old kid.
Let's ban chess (Score:4, Insightful)
Why stop there? (Score:5, Insightful)
While we're at it, lets also ban drugs, that way, we'll never see them on our streets again! ... Oh wait, we do. The only thing this will accomplish is an advocacy of piracy. Do you really think passionate gamers aren't going to turn to the torrents to get their fix? Keep dreaming you simple-minded jackasses.
Re:Oh common... (Score:2, Insightful)
The real problem with that guy in Germany was that a) he had a depression and was not treated for that, b) his father trained him shooting with real weapons which is forbidden for depressive people and c) his father had not his weapons locked away which was also against the law.
His depression was caused by feeling underrated by other people. He felt bullied by his former classmates and teachers. These two aspects were the cause of the shooting not any ego-shooter.
Re:Stop isolating games for their interactivity... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I'll be unpopular around Slashdot and say you are wrong. First, you fail to quantify the type of desperation. Economic? Social? Political?
Secondly, there are direct studies that show alteration to blood pressure and sleep habits with violent video games:
http://www.zampbioworld.org/bionews/index.php/2008/11/15/10883 [zampbioworld.org]
The relevant question is: We know playing these games stimulates brain pathways, but is it THRESHOLD behavior? Does it lower the inhibition to perform violence in real life?
My answer is that it may, but the jury is still out. A leading study tried to correlate racing and aggressive driving games with road rage, and came up empty.
My second point is that many forms of mass media are moving in the same direction, so we must be saying something quite specific about the interactive nature of video games to single them out for repression.
As to your, "maybe some people just like video violence" or "is everyone who plays these games destined for violence in real life?" - these are straw men, and not really on topic.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Police are supposed to investigate and solve crimes. (among other things).
How can you investigate and solve crimes if you don't understand the difference between correlation and causation?
Is anyone else worried that the Chief of Police makes conclusions like this?
It basically shows that the guy running the police force isn't smart enough to reason properly about simple casual relationships.
For example, if you turn up bound and gagged at a murder scene, is this chief of police going to conclude you are the murderer?
Rather than that some third factor (the actual murderer) is responsible for both you and the victim being there?
It's not good.
Re:I would say something... (Score:3, Insightful)
the german school system has degraded seriously since i 'enjoyed' it. the kids are under more and more pressure, but if you fail, it's only your fault. because you're lazy. it's never the systems fault. if you're treated unfairly, your fault. you're an outsider and laughed at by the others? your fault.
this whole systems is becoming more and more a radical filter to push out good portions of our society. the worst thing that can happen to you in god ol' germany is that you fail school at some point, are undereducated, don't get a job, no further education. that's the real german stigma. unemployed and even worse: lazy. then you 'failed' society. this is pushing a hell of pressure on you in our educational system.
and that's what happened to this guy. he failed school at a point where it's really hard to get a job. especially now. but, his parents are supposedly pretty well established (porsche etc.). maybe pressure from his parents? you bet.
oh well i forgot. it was just 2h playing counterstrike.
Re:Maybe bullets first? (Score:2, Insightful)
Du beschreibst hier äußerst akkurat den typischen Ablauf einer Bundestagssitzung...
Re:Maybe bullets first? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree mostly with you, but I think you're doing your argument a disservice by intentionally missing the point of these sorts of bans. The intent isn't to make it impossible for people to kill other people. The intent of gun legislation is to introduce hidrances which tend to result in less crime. There must be plenty of incidents which are mostly impulsive, not a case of "a human being really wants to kill another human being", wherein maybe the guy wouldn't have killed if it hadn't been so quick and easy. Obviously gun bans don't eliminated crime - but surely you can't claim they don't help at all. The question is how much they help, weighed against the loss of liberty imposed by the ban.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing people that enjoy porn on occasion versus people that have addictive personalities and over-indulge.
The occasional viewer is not harmed in any way shape or form nor are their views towards the world any different.
Anyone that takes anything too far, even drinking too much water can be deadly invariably leads to problems.
Naturally the same is true of violent video games or video games in general. When their use is destructive in your life then you need to stop. Just because you can't handle something doesn't mean I can't and so there is no cause for censorship in any form.
What about the Bible? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mentioned *fiction* works. What about a Book that a significant percentage of people not only claim is NOT fiction, but a work full of moral and ethical teachings? What if that Book has scenes of drunkenness, incest, genocide, murder, prostitution, debauchery? How much worse would be the effect of that?
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Interviewer: "If you could say anything to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, what would you tell them?"
Manson: "I wouldn't have said anything, I would have listened to what they had to say."
Re:Oh common... (Score:5, Insightful)
And you're wrong, too. The kid felt the need to kill people, and so he did. His father teaching him how to use real weapons did not cause him to feel the need to kill people. His father not locking the weapons away did not cause him to feel the need to kill people.
It is easier to kill with guns than a knife or baseball bat. It is easier to take an unlocked weapon from your dad's closet than steal one from the gun store. But making it harder to kill isn't going to stop people from feeling the need to kill others. Maybe we should find out what it is that causes people to want to kill other people. Find that out and make it harder to do that. Then you will solve problems.
Poorer world (Score:3, Insightful)
The world would be no poorer if there were no idiot politicians looking to gain fame and control the masses, and leveraging the bodies of the recently deceased to do it.
And those video games Hitler played were.....??? (Score:1, Insightful)
This makes me think of comedian David Cross's joke about Hitler and what violent video games he played. I'll preface my main post with this: I'm not German but my wife is, and I've spent quite a bit of time in Germany over the past few years. That doesn't make me an expert, but I have observed a lot about their culture through talking with people, being there, and just simply paying attention to what goes on there.
What amazes me is that for a country that has contributed some of the important art and intellectual works across all spectrum, they are so willing to sacrifice certain rights for a perceived sense of freedom. I get into arguments with my wife all the time about censorship, and like most people (even here in the US), as long as it doesn't directly affect them, they don't care. I've often said that it's easy to sacrifice another man's freedom. Sacrifice gun rights, freedom of speech and press, expression, religion, just as long as the right being given up doesn't affect me. I guess I expected more out of Germany.
I'm so sick of the whole violent video game debate. I'm having flashbacks to the 80s when I was a young metalhead, and watching Tipper Gore and the PMRC blame metal music for society's ills! You can make statistics prove anything. The fact is that the problem is not epidemic. Millions of people all over the world play violent video games. If there really was some direct correlation to playing games and real violence, we would have mass chaos and destruction due to the sheer number of people playing games. It's a lame, knee-jerk reaction to explain complex problems. I guess it's easier to blame serious problems on video games than on the real problems that cause violence on a mass scale: ethnic disputes, religion, etc. People have taken the old "Devil made me do it" argument and put a new spin on it: TV and movies made me do it, DnD made me do it, metal music made me do it, and now video games made me do it. What is the percentage of people that commit real acts of violence and play video games? Is violence something new? Did man just become violent in the last 30 years or so?
I don't want to put all of the blame on Germany. There are other countries that do the same - Australia, for one (I lived there!). As an American (and as an artist), the idea of censorship is repulsive to me. I've grown up cherishing and respecting my constitutional rights, and when I see people in foreign countries (modern and democratic countries) so willing to give up their rights, I'm shocked.
Violent people do violent things... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why stop there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets also ban paintball, and movies and books with violence and/or guns. Lets also ban guns in general. Lets ban bad words. Lets ban Islam. Lets ban anything that isn't Christian. Lets ban homosexuals and Jews.
Oh wait... I've seen this before....
Re:Why stop there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there any restriction for Godwin's Law if it's actually insightful?
Re:4 words: (Score:2, Insightful)
As a side issue, there is also the point that "police raided his parents' home later and found they had a collection of 14 guns". There is a real trend between families who collect lethal weapons and the children of those families using them in an appalling fashion. Perhaps more care needs to be taken with monitoring families with a tendencies to collect lethal weapons than monitoring children who play with digital weapons.
That whole firearm as a substitute for male impotency or self perceived inadequacies seems to have a very high correlation for male against female violence. So crank up the per gun warning rate, one gun some danger, two guns greater danger etc. and of course once your into double digits watch out.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
But, in particular, I appreciated the irony that the most intelligent comment about the killings out of all the interviews came from the very man who was the scapegoat.
using the police chieif's logic (Score:1, Insightful)
Well how about we just go and ban killing altogether then? ban the movies, ban tv, ban the internet, can we ban history? Sure lets ban history! Lots of death and killing in that vile thing called history! I mean someone went mad last week and killed 3 people and you know what? I heard he had a history exam yesterday! By this dumb-ass logic we can then assume that history classes cause you to go on a killing spree with their terrible content.
Re:Oh common... (Score:3, Insightful)
And you're wrong, too. The kid felt the need to kill people, and so he did. His father teaching him how to use real weapons did not cause him to feel the need to kill people.
But if he didn't know how to use "real" weapons he probably wouldn't have killed as many people.
His father not locking the weapons away did not cause him to feel the need to kill people.
But it made the guns easy to access, and familiar.
It is easier to kill with guns than a knife or baseball bat. It is easier to take an unlocked weapon from your dad's closet than steal one from the gun store.
I've never been in a gun store (not sure they exist in this country?) but I'm guessing they have pretty good security.
But making it harder to kill isn't going to stop people from feeling the need to kill others.
But it might reduce the casualties. If the man hadn't had a gun available, he might have calmed down before he managed to get one. Or he might have been caught trying to steal one.
Maybe we should find out what it is that causes people to want to kill other people. Find that out and make it harder to do that. Then you will solve problems.
It's already been mentioned that the man was depressed. I don't know if he was being given treatment.
We don't have to choose between stopping people from wanting to kill people and eradicating tools used to kill people. We can do both, which seems to be the case in Germany.
Re:4 words: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a real trend between families who collect lethal weapons and the children of those families using them in an appalling fashion.
Really? I'd like to see the data. What exactly is the correlation between collecting weapons and school shootings? How many data points do you have, and how good is the fit? If I have 10 weapons instead of 1, what is the increased risk of my (hypothetical) child shooting up a school? If you claim there's a correlation, then there's a trend line, and this type of information should be available.
the cause is mobbing (Score:2, Insightful)
the kid was mobbed by his class and his teachers.
That's why he went to his former school to kill his harassers.
In total he played 10 minutes of FPS as shows his online counter.
Re:Oh common... (Score:3, Insightful)
Or I could try and buy one on the black market, but I don't associate with the right kind of people, so that wouldn't be easy.
It's easier than you'd think. If you can find illegal drugs you can find illegal weapons.
Most guns are banned here in the UK. Some can be owned with a license
I'm a gun-toting American, so I doubt you and I would see eye to eye. I'm a believer in having the ability to defend oneself from the criminal element and do not think that taking away tools is a good way to reduce crime. A better solution in my mind would be to address the socio-economic factors that push most people into committing crimes while locking up the true psychopaths who can't be redeemed.
Did you know that 80% to 90% of people who commit murder already have violent criminal records? Instead of trying to disarm the people who aren't violent criminals perhaps we should be asking ourselves why the violent criminals are being released back into society so quickly?
People can't admit the problem is society. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I know: we're all tired of idiots saying "I blame society."
However, for smart children, this society is a mess. It has no goals. It suffocates us in platitudes (equality, generosity, compassion) while forcing us into a life of conformity to very basic aims, like money and popularity. While all this public bloviation goes on, commerce destroys everything good by turning it into a lowest common denominator product. The smart kids see this; everyone else is oblivious.
From my reading of the documents that school shooters like Jeff Weise, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen leave behind, this more than anything else is their motivation: our society is a monstrous hypocrite that has lost direction, and because it cannot face that, we all serve in boredom and frustration.
About Hitler ... (Score:2, Insightful)
What video game shall we blame for Adolf Hitler's actions?
(Oh, that's right. VIDEO GAMES weren't invented yet!!!)
The human mind is the greatest weapon ever created, plain and simple. Because the German police have lost touch with reality and decided to be patrol officers instead of being active in their society, what that teenager did was ALLOWED to happen.
Comedy Comment (Score:3, Insightful)
There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
-- Dick Cavett, mocking the TV-violence debate