US Mass Shootings

New jersey State Assemblyman Sean Kean has introduced two bills that stem from reports that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old shooter behind the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Conn, owned some violent video games, including games that carried a '17' rating, mature.

Kean's legislation would restrict the sale of video games rated mature or adults only to minors.

Officials in several states have attempted to pass laws that would prohibit the sale of certain video games to minors, but none have succeeded. Citing First Amendment protections.

The first bill proposed by Kean would prohibit retailers from selling video games that are rated mature or adults only to anyone under 18. The second would require the presence of a parent for a minor to purchase a violent video game.

Any retailer found to be in violation of either bill would be subject to a $10,000 fine for the first offense and up to $20,000 for each subsequent instance; be forced to cover any punitive damages to the minor who purchased the game; and could be on the receiving end of a cease-and-desist order from the state Attorney General's Office.

Though both of Kean's pending bills are currently backed by a small cadre of Republicans. Assembly members from the other side of the aisle have also taken on the violent video game debate. Democratic Assemblywoman Linda Stender (Union) is preparing a bill that would ban violent video games from public places such as arcades.

A state lawmaker in New Jersey, Linda Stender, is planning to introduce legislation that would prohibit public spaces such as amusement parks, movie theaters, bowling allies, or restaurants from making video games rated mature [17 rated] or adults only available to play.

Under the proposed legislation, business owners could face fines of up to $10,000 for the first offense and $20,000 for repeated offenses.

In a statement introducing the proposed legislation, state Assembly Stender claimed that while violent video games don't necessarily cause violent behavior, they can play a role:

Children today are exposed to violent images more than ever. Violent video games can desensitize children to violence and give them a warped version of reality where violence and death have no consequences outside their TV screens.

However her proposed legislation could face legal problems not only because video games are considered a form of speech protected under the first amendment, but also because the mature ratings she is appealing to have not historically been applied to the arcade games she is specifically targeting anyway

A former FBI-profiler and risk assessor has spoken out about perceived causal links between gaming and outbursts of violence, warning US viewers that trying to establish that connection is to ignore the true causes of tragedies like December's shootings at the Sandy Hook school in Connecticut.

Having reported that perpetrator Adam Lanza had several games at his house when it was searched by investigators, TV company ABC broadcast a panel discussion about the issue.

Whilst various conservative and pro-gun lobbyists had laid the blame for Lanza's actions at the door of videogaming, former FBI analyst Mary Ellen O'Toole offered a different perspective:

It's my experience that video games do not cause violence. However, she continued, it is one of the risk variables when we do a threat assessment for the risk to act out violently.

It's important that I point out that as a threat assessment and as a former FBI profiler, we don't see these as the cause of violence, we see them as sources of fuelling ideation that's already there.

During the same discussion, Christopher Ferguson, a psychology professor at Texas A&M University, pointed out that rather than increasing as games have become more violent, youth violence has actually receded - although he claimed no causal connection there, either.

Reports say MPAA chairman Chris Dodd has warned against efforts to regulate violence in films and instead suggested that the film industry will work with the White House on voluntary steps to help parents decide what movies and TV shows are appropriate for children.

Campaigners and state lawmakers have been suggesting that the marketing of violent movies and videogames should be restricted.

Asked whether Hollywood there is too much violence in videogames and movies, Dodd said the industries give people enough choices across the spectrum, but warns that if you start to get into the business of trying to regulate content, that is a very slippery slope. Dodd said that the focus should be on giving people the information they need to make their choice of what to watch, adding that we are working to provide whatever support and assistance we can to the White House.

Dodd said more attention should be paid to mental health, noting that is the space where we really need attention.

US House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had a good debate against the Fox News argument that violent video games are responsible for mass shootings in the United States.

On Fox News Sunday , host Chris Wallace challenged Pelosi on this plan, saying she should instead simply go to her friends in Hollywood and shame them into action:

As part of your plan, you call for more scientific research on the connection between popular culture and violence. We don't need another study, respectfully. I mean, we know that these video games, where people have their heads splattered, these movies, these TV shows -- why don't you go to your friends in Hollywood and challenge them? Shame them, and say, 'Knock it off?'

Pelosi responded that Democrats wanted concrete scientific evidence in order to write the best legislation possible, and countered that Wallace's assumption about violence in the media could be incorrect:

I understand what you are saying, Pelosi said. I'm a mother, I'm a grandmother. But, they -- not Hollywood, but the evidence -- says that, in Japan, for example, they have the most violent games and the lowest death -- mortality -- from guns. I don't know what the explanation is for that except they may have good gun laws.

When looking at the other largest video game markets around the world, there appears to be no statistical correlation between video game consumption and gun-related killings. Max Fisher at the Washington Post recently examined some of this data and found that:

countries where video games are popular also tend to be some of the world's safest (probably because these countries are stable and developed, not because they have video games).

After a particularly vitriolic attack on the media industry for violent games and films, the US National Rifle Association has launched its own shooting game for the iPhone and iPad.

The game, which simulates a shooting practice, has been approved for children from 4 years old.

NRA: Practice Range , billed as the NRA's new mobile nerve center, says it strikes the right balance of gaming and education and delivers a one-touch access to the NRA network of news, laws, facts, knowledge, safety tips, educational materials and online resources .

The player can practise shooting at targets, including some in the shape of coffins, and has a choice of nine firearms. Some of the guns can be upgraded for $0.99 each. The game is available in the UK.

There have been calls for gun law reform after 26 children and teachers died at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. US Vice-President Joe Biden is expected to make recommendations on gun control to the White House on Tuesday. Last week Biden met with video game makers to discuss gun violence in popular media.

President Barack Obama has also announced that he will lay out his plans for tackling gun violence later this week.

Update: Shooting up the Ratings

17th January 2013. See  article from  gamepolitics.com

When the NRA-branded iOS app NRA: Practice Range launched earlier this week it carried a rating of ages 4+.

Well it looks like Apple has reviewed the rating (no doubt after the game gained national attention by the mainstream media and some harsh criticism from several high profile politicians) and deemed that it was just too low.

The game now carries a rating of ages 12+, meaning that your young children are no longer able to play the app for free. Apple's ratings descriptor for the game says that it contains Frequent/Intense Realistic Violence. That descriptor is debatable given that the realistic simulation only contains target shooting.

For the past month, the US focus on gun control laws has been unprecedented.

Vice President Joe Biden was assigned the task of meeting with various powers that be to discuss what can be done to reform our gun laws. One of those entities was a conglomerate of representatives from the video game industry. What Mr. Biden took away from those meetings, however, may or may not surprise you.

After reviewing the Vice President's findings, United States President Barack Obama signed a twenty-three point executive order for Congress to act upon and address the issue. Nowhere in the order does it propose any changes which need to be made to video games in this country. Just sensible measures like banning assault weaponry.

Study

However the games industry has not got off entirely unscathed. President Barack Obama called on the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to conduct a study on whether there is a correlation between gun violence and violent video games and other forms of media.

Video Game Labelling Bill

GamePolitics has also learned that a new video game labeling bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Representative Jim Matheson has introduced bill HR 287, which would require ratings label on video games and prohibit the sales and rentals of adult-rated video games to minors.

A bill introduced in Congress last year calling for a study into the effects of violent video games and other content on children, died when the 112th session ended on January 2.

But the bill's author, senator Jay Rockefeller, plans to reintroduce that bill during this session, likely by the end of the month, a staffer at the senator's office tells Polygon.

The will call for the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission to jointly undertake the study with the help of the National Academy of Sciences and will investigate:

• Whether there is a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children.
• Whether there is a connection between exposure to violent video programming and harmful effects on children.

The results of the study would be due to Congress, the FTC and the FCC within 18 months.

If passed, this would mark the eighth such study conducted by the FTC since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. None of those found any link between violent video games and violence in children.

On the eve of the entertainment industry's White House meeting to discuss gun violence in films and video games, Motion Picture Association of America president Chris Dodd told The Hollywood Reporter that his industry will consider voluntary guidelines but will vehemently oppose any government restrictions on content.

Dodd and spokesmen from various sectors of the entertainment industry will meet with Vice President Joe Biden, who has been charged by President Barack Obama with recommending legislation to curb gun violence.

Dodd said:

We want to explore what we can do to provide parents and others with the information for them to make choices on what they want to see and what they want their children to see. That's a legitimate space for us to be in. It's all voluntary. What we don't want to get involved with is content regulation. We're vehemently opposed to that. We have a free and open society that celebrates the First Amendment.

Public relations experts who have experience working with the gun industry expressed horror at the National Rifle Association's response to the Newtown shootings.

The group's executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, struck a ranting tone, blaming the video game industry and media for exposing youth to a culture of violence, and calling for armed police or security guards in schools: The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, LaPierre claimed.

He spoke of video games and movies:

There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and stows violence against its own people, through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat , and Splatterhouse .

Then there's the blood-soaked slasher films like American Psycho and Natural Born Killers that are aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life. And then they have the nerve to call it entertainment.

But is that what it really is? Isn't fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?

In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes every minute of every day of every month of every year.

Public relations professionals reached by The Huffington Post said the timing of his message, which broke a week of silence in the wake of the tragic murder of 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School, could be an irredeemable mistake for the group.

Amid the shock and grief that followed the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, there have been unsurprising calls for stricter regulation of guns and rifles.

Now the National Rifle Association has decided that its strategy in the blame game will be to deflect the blame onto violent media.

An industry source relayed this strategy to Fox News:

If we're going to have a conversation, then let's have a comprehensive conversation If we're going to talk about the Second Amendment, then let's also talk about the First Amendment, and Hollywood, and the video games that teach young kids how to shoot heads.

If you really want to stop incidents like this. Passing one more law is not going to do a damn thing. Columbine happened when? In 1999. Smack in the middle of the original assault-weapons ban.

However the lobbying group did addthat it is willing to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.

Meanwhile the Sun fingers Call of Duty

See  article from  thesun.mobi

School massacre maniac Adam Lanza fuelled his violent fantasies while hidden away in a windowless bunker plastered with posters of guns and tanks.

Lanza, 20, spent hours playing bloodthirsty computer games such as Call Of Duty and obsessively studying weapons in the basement at mum Nancy's home.

The news media, quick to find a cause for why a lone gunman would kill his mother, drive to a local elementary school, and kill 26 people (20 children) before killing himself, has turned to the usual scapegoat: video games.

Fox News wastes no time in trying to connect TV, Facebook, and computer games to the horrific actions of Lanza. As transcribed by Kotaku, a Fox News segment hosted by Megyn Kelly with guest analyst Dr. Keith Ablow waste no time pointing the finger at the consumption of various types of media:

Kelly: The real question to you is why have there not been more things like this in the past and what is making them seem to come out now?

Ablow: You know you and I have both spoken about this on and off the air, and I fear that our level empathy just as a culture, as a society, is being diminished by things like reality TV and like Facebook that seem to take people to a kind of fictional realm. I guess you could add gaming to that, computer games.

Later in the segment Ablow says that:

 ...such that now people feel less for one another, they can think of them almost as third parties, or entertainment figures or animated creatures, and for the people among us who are vulnerable to acts of violence who are violently ill, if you will, that means they consider others even less than ever before.

On another tack, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee told Fox News viewers that the separation of church and state was to blame for violence in schools. Huckabee said of this latest US atrocity:

We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?

Maybe we ought to let [God] in on the front end and we wouldn't have to call him to show up when it's all said and done at the back end.

While Fox News is blaming media and godlessness, other networks are using the tragedy as an opportunity to call for stricter gun control laws and for more funding for mental health services.

Warner Bros have pulled their Gangster Squad trailer after the Colorado cinema massacre and in addition, are cutting gun scenes out from Dark Knight Rises trailers.

It's a small, symbolic concession to show that the violence has shocked the studio to the core. It's something that we expected, but could more restrictions be placed on trailers? Is this also going to have an impact on gun laws in the future?

Next time you watch a trailer for an action movie, check out the gun references to see just how visible they are.

Update: Gangster Squad will be the Fall Guys

24th July 2012. See  article from  odt.co.nz . thanks to Nick

Warner Bros is now rethinking its plans for the film Gangster Squad in light of a scene featuring a movie-theatre shooting, but beyond that Hollywood executives expect little fall-out from the mass killing at a Batman screening on Friday in Aurora, Colorado.

Officials at Time Warner Inc-owned Warner Bros are expected to discuss whether to remove or edit the Gangster Squad shooting scene, or to change the September 7 release date for the film. Warner Brothers have already pulled the trailer that included the scene in which men open fire with machineguns on an audience in a movie theatre.

Industry experts said moviegoers were likely to move on quickly from the shooting and studios would proceed mostly as planned. Theatres tightened security over the weekend to reassure customers and one chain imposed new rules on costumes.

The immediate reaction is to go to some dark place when something like this happens. By Monday that's forgotten and the business of releasing a movie takes over, said one person familiar with the studios' thinking. Especially for big-budget films, studios like to stick with planned openings as they spend tens of millions of dollars to raise awareness in advance. Filmgoers don't dwell on isolated incidents for long, said Peter Sealey, a former Columbia marketing chief who now heads the Sausalito Group consulting firm.

Ronn Torossian, chief executive of New York-based 5W Public Relations, agreed that the public has a very short-term memory of news events and said the Aurora shooting would not leave a long-term impact on film promotion.

Update: Warners Donate

25th July 2012. From variety.com . Thanks to Nick

Warner Bros. is making a substantial donation to victims of Friday's shooting rampage in Aurora, Colorado., during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises.

A spokeswoman for the studio said that execs have arranged for the donation following conversations with Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper.

Update: Reshoot Ordered

26th July 2012. See article from hollywoodreporter.com

Warner Bros. is moving the release of Gangster Squad to Jan. 11, postponing it from its scheduled Sept. 7 release date in order to accomodate reshoots because of a scene of a movie theater shoot-out in the completed film that became problematic in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado. massacre.

The film included a climactic gun that was filmed at Grauman's Chinese Theater. The scene could be glimpsed in a trailer for the movie that the studio pulled from circulation on July 20 after the shooting that claimed 12 lives.

It is all so perfectly fitting that in the wake of a murderous rampage in which 70 people are shot ---12 fatally, including a 6-year-old girl --- and countless families are sacked with unspeakable grief, you would take the time to share with us your feelings.

Because, really, at this moment, all that matters to most of us is what a bunch of smutty purveyors of violent fantasy, half-rate actors and an industry of sick narcissism is feeling at this moment.

Director Christopher Nolan, speaking on behalf of the cast and crew of The Dark Knight Rises, you told us how much you love going to the movies and how they are one of the great American art forms.

You are devastated that such an innocent and hopeful place --- here you are talking about the movie theaters that play your twisted movies --- would be violated in such an unbearably savage way. I mean, really, who could think up such monstrous hatred and nihilistic violence? Umm, have you watched any of your own movies lately?

And, in the selfless modesty that is the hallmark of an Academy Awards ceremony, you tell us that your feelings about the massacre are so deeply profound that the mere words of the English language built up over hundreds of years are simply not up to the task of describing them. Wow. You do have a gift for fantasy.

But the real clue that you remain shrouded in guilt-free delusion is when you mention the senseless tragedy that has befallen the entire Aurora community.

Senseless? Really? If by senseless you mean carried out almost precisely from the scripts of your own movies, then, sure, it was senseless.

As for you, Sean Penn, you paragon of endless moralizing, we would like to thank you, too, for underwriting last week's ultra-violence and real-life carnage at the movie theater. One of the last scenes that 6-year-old saw in her precious life was a trailer for your movie.

In the final clip of a trailer filled with orgiastic bloodshed, you have some classy actors with machine guns unload from behind a movie screen into a crowd seated in a theater, watching a film. Ring a bell, Sean? Sound familiar?

I realize how busy you are, so loudly and obnoxiously jet-setting around to save the world, but do you have time to think about what you have done here? What your life amounts to at this moment?

No, you did not pull the trigger in this case. You did not don the gas mask. But you were the inspiration, and you are the architects.

Your celebrations of diabolical mayhem and pornographic violence prey on the fantasies of sick, fragile minds. You insulated them from the painful reality of bloodshed. You have inspired mass murder. You are the Osama bin Laden of this travesty.

This, of course, is all legal and has made you a fabulous fortune. But, never forget, this is who you are. It is what you do. This is your legacy.

When you die, your gravestones should read: Here lie men who created such horrific, meaningless violence in such realistic scenes that a sicko carried it out for real and shot 70 people, killing 12, including a 6-year-old girl.

To be fair, you haven't only inspired murderous rampages. It is true that you have also entertained. But is the fleetingness of that entertainment nearly so profound as the terror you inspired here? Will it outlast the irreversible permanency of 12 deaths, including that of a 6-year-old girl?

Which brings us to Warner Brothers, those titans of decency. You bankrolled The Dark Knight Rises and so many other pointlessly violent movies that infect feeble minds and bring hatred upon America. You, it is reported, are feeling really sad about those poor saps who paid to see your wicked movies --- only to have the very scenes come alive and kill them in the dark, sticky rows between seats of a movie theater.

Out of your respect for these people, you declared you would not announce box-office receipts from this weekend's snuff film. Instead, you will count your $150 million in bloody money --- privately.

One day, you will meet the original Joker, the inventor of all evil who is diabolical and depraved so far beyond your furthest, sickest imaginations and there, in his lair, you will spend the rest of eternity wishing you had had a little decency back when you had the chance.

A Colorado police officer has suggested that a troubled 22-year old man who went on a random shooting spree last October may have been influenced by violent video games.

The Denver Post reports that the police investigator made the comment in regard to Stefan Martin-Urban, who killed two people and wounded two others before turning his gun on himself:

He was said to be an obsessive player of video games. Those games, authorities said are the closest police and FBI investigators can come to an explanation for Martin-Urban's actions that killed two and injured two.

Sergeant Clayton said: In the last year, he had no friends. No boyfriend. No girlfriend. No pets. He was consumed with the video games. He spent an enormous amount of time playing them, .

Martin-Urban lived mostly in isolation... after enrolling in a state college... He stopped going to classes within two weeks. His father had committed suicide in Alaska four days before the previous Christmas. His favorite videos included a prophecy that a 2,000- mile-long spaceship containing cosmic beings was going to appear in the Earth's atmosphere three days after the shooting.