Senator Feinstein: We Need Video Game Control

ducomputergeek writes "Since the assault weapons ban seems to have died in Congress, it looks like Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) now turning her attention to video games...again. '"If Sandy Hook doesn't [make game publishers change] then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the future," said Feinstein. She went on to claim that video games play "a very negative role for young people, and the industry ought to take note of that."' Yet, as the article points out, since the introduction of games like DOOM, the crime rate in the U.S. has gone down. Dramatically. Correlation != causation, and all that jazz, but there are a lot of violent video games these days and yet crime has continued to go down."

What do you expect?

[macbeth66]

It is the usual democratic knee-jerk reaction.

As opposed to the alternate republican knee-jerk reaction.

I don't even think that these people believe the verbal diarrhea they spew, but it plays well to their constituents.

Overall, across the country, crime is down. Way down, and that includes murder and murder by gun. That doesn't seem to get considered in their posturing.

Re: Obscene

[fredprado]

Bullshit. Obscene is defined by whatever the person that holds political power and is willing to define it want it to be. That is the problem with creating loopholes in constitutional principles that should be absolute.

Constitutional failure

[onyxruby]

Feinstein has always had problems with Constitutional protections for anything she doesn't like. She likes to pretend that the Constitution only protects the things that she favors. If a Senator will blatantly attack the 2nd amendment, why would it surprise someone that she would go after the 1st?

You have to give her credit in her consistent disregard for peoples rights, her track record is as bad as other Senator currently serving in Congress. She's a hardcore extremist and thinks nothing of using the law to trample anyone that doesn't think like she does. Left wing and right wing extremists are both just as bad at having trouble understanding rights are rights and that they should not mess with them.

Moderate in the middle that supports all rights.

Re:I'm surprised...

[dgatwood]

In at least one case the jury ruled a gun defective because you could not remove a round from the chamber while the safety was on. This is a common feature because one of the ways to make the gun safer while the safety is on is to lock the slide. It makes the safety stronger, more effective. Of course, you can't move a locked slide to remove a round from the chamber, so it's a bit of a trade off. The popular 1911, some of which cost several thousand dollars, features this kind of safety, as does most other high quality semiautomatics. Glocks, the most popular police handgun, don't even have a manual safety switch.

How was the injury caused? From testimony the victim's babysitter found the gun on top of a book shelf and decided he needed to unload it. The safety was on. He couldn't move the slide. So, in the process of messing with an unfamiliar weapon, he gripped the trigger along with the rest of the grip, holding it tight, while pointing it at his charge, the ultimate victim, when he eventually took off the safety, still pulling the trigger, at which point the gun fired. Is that the manufacturer's fault?

In part, yes. By definition, a safety is supposed to make a firearm safer. The best way to make a firearm completely safe is to ensure that it contains no bullets. If the safety is preventing that from happening, then that safety is effectively operating in a manner that is directly counter to its intended purpose. The manufacturer should have lost that case.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that an awful lot of handguns use a design that works the way you describe, but that doesn't make the design any less brain damaged. A safety should prevent the hammer from striking the bullet. Any other behavior is suboptimal.

Re:I'm surprised...

[bdwebb]

Your analogy is a straw man and does not apply. Airbags were not tested thoroughly with child seats and therefore when they killed children, of course they were liable. In this case, the guy was holding the trigger of the gun down, pointing it at someone, and flipped the safety off thereby intentionally disabling the safety feature intended to protect from accidental discharge. The gun did not misfire, the safety did not fail, the guy disabled it while doing the only thing you're not supposed to do when the gun is off safe.

The only way your argument is comparable to this scenario is if you were to say that someone was driving with their child in their safety seat with the airbag disabled for safety purposes and then re-enabled the airbag just before an impact which then caused the airbag to deploy, killing the child. In this ridiculous scenario, the manufacturer would also not be held liable because the vehicle operator disabled the safety mechanism that was specifically designed to keep the airbag from killing their child.

Re:I'm surprised...

[shutdown -p now]

The purpose of safety is to prevent the gun from firing while loaded (so that you can carry it loaded and not worry about accidental discharge). It serves no point whatsoever on a gun that is unloaded, so I don't see the point of even looking at that scenario.