Blog FeedSmoking Guns and Secret Histories
A ’smoking gun’ is an indisputable piece of evidence, named so because finding a smoking gun on a murder suspect would pretty much wrap up the case. If there’s any argument, it’s not a smoking gun.
That doesn’t invalidate the evidence, or make it inconclusive evidence, it just means that that evidence by itself doesn’t prove absolutely the charges being raised. In the argument between those that say video games cause violent behavior and those that say they don’t, some people have claimed to find the smoking gun proving an absolute link.
Let’s take a look at what things have been cited as smoking guns, and what the ideal smoking gun would be.
Jack Thompson made waves again this week claiming that he knew video games were involved in a recent murder case because the victim was shot in the face and that only gamers and hitmen shoot people in the face. Were this a fact already, then the link between games and violence would already have had to have been proven which it hasn’t.
As an aside, despite game critics claiming that the only studies that show no link are the ones funded by game companies and their allies, a recent British study ordered by the Government found no links between games and real life violence, and even criticized the way the studies that showed a link had been performed. That doesn’t prove anyone right or wrong on the issue of ‘do games cause real life violence’ but it does prove anyone wrong who says it’s already been proven that they do.
For Jack Thompson and his ilk, a smoking gun seems to be finding video games in the houses of juvenile criminals. The reasoning I believe is as follows. I believe video games cause violence. I correctly predicted what games this child would have played, which shows that my belief that the child committed the violence because he played games is correct.
It seems fairly logical, but it’s a case of what we call ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’, or in English ‘it happened after, therefore it happen because of’. A good example would be superstition. I walked under a ladder and later that day I crashed my car, it must be because walking under a ladder is bad luck.
What’s missing in both cases is causality. To say that event B happened because of event A you have to show that the two events are causally linked. A smoking gun infers causality, because it’s smoking, showing that it was fired.
Drawing parallels between events in games and real life crime is much harder, even more so when the events in the game were based on real life crime in the first place.
A good example, would be the Vice City carjacking incident. A bunch of kids decided they were going to steal a car. To do this, they walked out in front of a car holding samurai swords, an approach that works in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The driver swerved around them, called the police, and the kids were still there when the police showed up.
It’s tricky to untangle what we can and can’t draw from this. In this case, if the children turn out to own Vice City, it’s easy to see where they got their methods from, but proving that they decided to try and steal a car because they played the game, is much harder. If their decision to go carjacking was separate to them having played the game, then by putting forwards false methods you could argue that Vice City saved the driver of that car from being a victim.
It’s quite understandable that someone who already believes video games are bad, would see that as a conclusive situation, but that is a unique example.
In all the cases where video games have been cited by the press as likely causes, there has either been clear cut motive, or the traditional warning signs.
Once you get to the ‘video game pushed him over the edge’ argument, you’re on very shaky ground. Do we blame the straw that breaks the camels back? Can we say that something else wouldn’t have had the same effect? A piece of bad luck or a violent film could also be the final straw.
The problem with using real life events as evidence, is that there are a lot of crimes that should be happening but aren’t, if indeed games are causally turning children violent that otherwise wouldn’t harm a fly.
When a police officer gets shot by a youth, then all the games that let you shoot police officers get name checked. Some go as far to say that the youths are acting out a scenario from the game, but these arguments fail to hold water when you think about what else should be happening.
If the kids in the Vice City incident were copying situations from the game, where, for example, are all the hit and runs? The GTA series has long put forwards ‘running someone over’ as one of the most effective ways to kill someone. The vibration that happens when you do this has been called ‘operant conditioning’ by Jack Thompson… so why isn’t anyone doing it?
I’m presuming that if someone had that critics of games would have been all over it, so while I accept that it might have happened I find it hard to believe it has.
A kid getting in a car and driving it down the pavement on a crowded street would be much nearer to a smoking gun than anything we’ve seen so far… but it’s always guns and knives.
The more outlandish game only types of violence are the ones conspicuous by their absence when people talk about the acts being mimicked. Indeed it seems that only the ones that were being done before gaming came along are the ones that are being pinned to video games.
If a person plays a video game and thinks ‘that looks like fun, I’ll go do that’ then it’s not the games fault. That’s why people are always trying to make out that the video game is subconsciously conditioning the child, breaking their inhibitions, because otherwise the argument doesn’t fly. If the child is making a conscious decision about what he’s going to imitate from the game then it’s very difficult to blame anyone but the child again.
If the games were causing violence, wouldn’t we see children going out and shooting neo Nazis as well as burning down churches (something blamed on one of the Call of Duty games). Wouldn’t we see a dramatic increase in people wanting to be counter terrorists? Wouldn’t we see kids walking around urinating on people like in Postal 2?
We want to see our children as innocents. We don’t want to believe that they could be capable of these things without their being external influences, but it’s not a new problem. Nasty children are nasty children. The prevalence of guns in American culture just makes them more effective killers. The history of children being violent is suppressed time and again by it being too upsetting or by pinning other factors to it. We won’t remember Columbine in two hundred years. The shameful past is buried or rewritten and glorified (ala the real Billy the Kid or the fictional Oliver Twist), leaving each generation to try and blame something else for the violence their children commit.
You have to dig to find it. All that’s changed is that the dirty secret is now spread across front pages. Children weren’t considered separately by law until the late 19th Century. Violent Juvenile crime in young males spiked from the late eighties to the early nineties and has been on the decline since. Were those people in 1988 killing because of Mario? Interestingly, arrests in females have been steadily on the climb since the early eighties, yet there hasn’t been one high profile female case tagged to gaming, perhaps because the media believes that only teenage boys play games?
With violent crime on the wane, even if video games tend to make children more violent, there certainly is no smoking gun in the statistics, and many would argue that the time and money spent trying to solve this apparent problem would be better spent trying to sort out things that are on the rise, such as increased drug use, driving under the influence and illegal consumption of alcohol.
9th June | Reply
“The prevalence of guns in American culture just makes them more effective killers. ”
See, I was with you up until this comment. Now, my reading comprehension may be off here, but aren’t you making the same kind of causal links that you are deriding Jack Thompson for?
American children are killing each other with guns, so the prevalence of guns must be at fault?
Sorry, I’m sensitive to the “gun issue.” My brother, sister and I have grown up around guns and all of us play videogames, and none of us have killed or hurt anyone.
In any case, why do we give a shit about Jack Thompson anymore? A) Wasn’t he disbarred, somewhere? B) Why do we give a shit about him?
We should be more concerned about self-serving politicians who are preying on the ineptitude of parents and scaring them into believing that any thing other than baseball and apple pie will have a negative influence on children.
9th June | Reply
I officially don’t care about this subject anymore. Seriously, I really don’t care if violent video games are banned because most of them are a bit rubbish anyway and a good game doesn’t need violence in it to be interesting or fun.
9th June | Reply
Yeah, sorry, but I have to agree I’ve lost interest in the issue. It’s a good article, and well written, but Jack isn’t going to listen, nor anyone else on the “F— videogames” bandwagon. Which really means you’re preaching to the converted.
It’s like convincing the insane that they’re insane. According to them, they’re fine. It’s the rest of the world that’s nuts.
10th June | Reply
In Reply to #3: Sorry, I note that my response actually sounded negative about the article but I’m not. I don’t like the subject anymore (well, I didn’t much like it to begin with) but the article itself is great.
10th June | Reply
Head881, as for why we ‘give a shit about JT anymore’ a bill he drafted just got passed into law on Tuesday in Louisiana.
The line about ‘making children more effective killers’ is not an anti gun stance. Guns are more effective at killing people than other things most people can get their hands on. That’s why the army and the police use them. If the two columbine kids had taken knives with them, they’d have found it a lot harder to kill as many as they did. They’d have been just as guilty of their crimes. The fact that guns are more effective and common NOW compared to a few hundred years ago, means that an equally bad kid is more likely to make the news by racking up a bigger body count. That was my point.
Guns don’t turn people into killers. I don’t think that at all, and while I wish guns would just all disappear overnight, I know that trying to ban them is stupid.
10th June | Reply
I did think twice about writing *another* piece on the subject, but right now with a new bill passed into law here on the back of such ridiculous statements as Grand Theft Auto using operant conditioning because the controller gives a ‘pleasurable vibration’ whenever the player runs someone over, it seems like an appropriate time.
Until the media and politicians are bored of the topic, we need to keep our eyes on the ball I think.
10th June | Reply
Plag: Great piece as usual though I have one suggestion: maybe you could add a preface outlining this new law that was passed illustrating even further that this isn’t just another sermon to the choir? I had no idea they’d recently passed a new law and am in the middle of looking it up now…
Anyway, I like the article quite a bit and if it’s a continuous beating of the proverbial pony then so be it because Plagiarize is absolutely correct in that we should definitely keep our eyes on the ball and if one of us is more vigilant than the rest? Thanks dude! for pointing out something we may have missed.
I’m just as sick of this topic and plenty more, but I’m happy there are still outlets that continue to remind us that even though the initial shouting match has died down to a dull roar, it hasn’t gone away yet and it’s far from resolution.
Why should such supporters of red herrings and scapegoats be the only side with a well maintained stamina for combat? If they can crow til the cows come home then so should we right?
10th June | Reply
In Reply to #5:
I wasn’t taking issue with your stance on guns per se. I would have no problem if you were “anti-gun” (which you apparently are) or not. Like I said in my original post, I am very sensitive to the gun issue and reading it over I was probably being more reactionary than was necessary.
I guess the point I was trying to make was that screwed up kids are screwed up kids. If they didn’t have guns, maybe they would use knives. If they didn’t have someone else to hurt, maybe they would just hurt themselves.
I’m glad no suicidal teen has been caught playing “Killer 7″ or there would be an outcry against a game where one of your characters slashes their wrist…which is an odd concept to defend.
As for not caring about Jack Thompson, I was not aware that someone took him seriously enough to allow him to draft a bill and work to get it passed into legislation. I guess that’s a problem.
Perhaps the real problem is one that’s going to be solved in about five to ten years. That’ll be when my generation, the twenty-somethings who were the first to grow up with videogames (yes I know there were older people playing games, but I’m talking post-crash Nintendo-fed videogame-trained killers) will start to become the leaders of America.
It is easy for our current politicians to decry videogames because it appears to be an easy target that they know very little about. However, time and again the judicial branch has recognized videogames as a form of expression and overturned these laws on the basis of the First Amendment. (speaking solely from the American perspective)
Why don’t we hear about how bad rock n’ roll and hip hop is and how it’s ruining our country? Maybe because at this point our political leaders are primarily from the generation that grew up in the sixties and seventies instead of their parents from World War II and the era of big bands and jazz.
Time is on our side. The guard is changing, and Jack Thompson is trying to walk upstream in the middle of the Mississippi. *Insert Don Quixote reference here*
11th June | Reply
time may be on our side… but how long did it take the comic book industry to recover from the crap it went through in the fifties? at least thirty years, and some think that it’s not near catching up with where the industry would be now had things not gotten so dark. rock and roll, hip hop, horror movies, they all escaped legislation. the comic code was an industry neutering itself because it was the only way to avoid legislation. all hip hop had to do was put a sticker on the cover. the comics code creatively stifled comic books.
lets pretend the age ratings as they are, are written into law. how many times would walmart have to get sued for selling m rated games to kids before they stopped selling m rated games. if that happened, how many publishers would start aiming for a T rating.
it’s about the creative freedom of the industry.
i actually agree with you on the guns and knives thing. i’m just saying that ‘kid stabs two’ is less of a headline than ‘kid shoots twelve’. my point was just that if a kid gets his hands on a gun, when he goes on his rampage, he’s more likely to make the headlines thanks to a sensational body count. and this kind of thing makes it appear that violent crime in kids is increasing when it isn’t.
i come from a society that doesn’t have many guns at all, and it looks like they have a knife problem. so the people are still the same, they just have less effective tools. i’d rather a knife problem than a gun problem though if you get what i’m saying. banning guns in america would be stupid because the end result would be that only the law abiding types didn’t have them.
but as i said, if i could snap my fingers and make every gun in the country disappear i would. i know that can’t happen. does that make me anti gun? i’m not sure. i don’t blame guns for anything, i just wish there weren’t so many, but i admit that guns are too big a part of this culture to try to get rid of them.
11th June | Reply
In Reply to #9:
Like I said, your stance on guns is as far as I’m concerned irrelevant to the conversation. I was/am not attacking your stance on guns.
A couple of things though:
I’d like to read about the “knife problem” in your country (which I assume is not America) just because it sounds interesting, if there is any literature or news items that are current enough for you to easily find. In English if that’s not your native tongue.
As for Wal-Mart, I’ve worked in that shit-hole and being fined by the government is the least of their concerns. Aside from numerous OSHA violations, like having their One-Hour Photo Lab employees work in an area flooded by an over-run cesspool (I wasn’t kidding about it being a shit-hole) to locking their employees in the building while they clean the store until midnight working unpaid overtime, a sales violation is peanuts to them.
On top of that though, they have a really easy way out of that. If you sell an M-rated videogame to a minor, you get fired. Whenever someone tries to buy an M-rated videogame, R-rated movie or something else a minor shouldn’t have, the register locks up and askes you if the purchaser is over 17 years of age. The clerk has to answer yes/no or else the sale will not continue. At that point it is up to the clerk to do the right thing. All receipts are time/date/employee stamped so it wouldn’t be terribly hard to find out who sold what to whom, and take appropriate action.
As far as comics go, I’m not well versed in their history of controversy, which is why I stuck to music and movies. I think the problem with comic books is that they never broke through to “mainstream appeal” sure, people will see movies based on recognizable movie heroes, but that is probably more out of nostalgia than anything else. Or else they didn’t know the movie was based on a comic, like myself and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”
On top of that, videogames are a huge business and I’d be surprised if comic books ever came close to the kinds of sales this industry has/is seeing and the industry is backed by huge multinational corporations.
There is very little chance videogames will go the same route as comic books
12th June | Reply
just start here and keep on going backwards. http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=knife&tab=ns&edition=d&recipe=all&start=1&scope=all
i’m originally from the uk
they banned handguns last decade after a man walked into a school with a bag full of them and killed dozens of kids and teachers. right now, after a rise in knife crime, they’ve got a knife amnesty going and have had tens of thousands of knives handed over to them.
12th June | Reply
In Reply to #11:
“For anybody struggling to keep up, this means he shot his girlfriend.”
The BBC is officially the greatest media outlet ever.
Anyway, I see what you are saying about the knife problem. However, as in the case of the young man from Zaire who was fatally knifed, the street gang also assaulted him with bats, hockey sticks, and at least one hammer.
Banning commonly used weapons just means one of two things: law abiding people are the ones who won’t have them or new, less conventional, weapons will be used instead.
Trying to bring these comments back on topic and more into general agreement here: Obviously banning guns, knives or even videogames will not stop the root cause of violence. Though I’m sure I may be preaching to the choir here, our efforts would be better spent trying to tackle the causes of violence in people and not the methods they use to express that violence.
I’ve always said that if every person in a room was armed with a gun/knife/bat/whatever and no one had a reason to use them, no one would get hurt.
Senator Clinton wants the government to fund a study to determine if videogames cause violence. That’s non-sense even statistically speaking. What she ought to be sponsering is a study into teenage violence in general and analyze the myriad factors that influence or encourage such violence.
Anyway, like I said, I agree with you on this topic whole-heartedly, I’m just a bit over-sensitive to the gun issue.
15th June | Reply
I’m going to slightly step into the gun issue with this: what do you need one for?
I can see the argument for knives, hammers and the like since they have a practical use in society, with the exception of combat knives. But what do you need a gun for? A gun surely has only one purpose and can never be considered to be “a good thing”. Sure, I can take a chef’s knife and stab someone with it, but I also need it to cut meat and chop vegetables. This idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is just completely barking. Get rid of them, they only hurt.
15th June | Reply
kelmon, people over here see a gun as ‘defence’ and it’s long been their right to own one. if there was a vote on whether or not to get rid of guns, i think you’d see a lot of people that didn’t have guns voting not to get rid of them. they might choose not to have one, but they’d vote to keep that choice.
i don’t know how things came to be the way that they are, but the problem NOW is that there’s just too many guns to get rid of them. because so many criminals have guns, people feel they need a gun to feel safe. if there was a ban or an amnesty, you can be pretty sure that most of the criminals wouldn’t give up their fire arms.
the gun thing makes me uncomfortable… and i’ll never own one… but i don’t see trying to ban guns as any sort of a solution right now. as head said, you have to get to the core of the issue, the social factors leading to people wanting to hurt each other.
it was much easier to ban guns in England because the laws were tight anyway, and there were a lot less weapons, but now England has a knife problem.
sure, a knife problem is a lot better than a gun problem, but socially speaking nothing has changed.
it’s become almost a cliche to say this, but Canada has the same violent video games, and same high levels of gun ownership as America does, and yet it has almost one quarter the murders per capita. trying to pin the blame on things such as video games and guns doesn’t work.
16th June | Reply
This is one of those things I’ve never understood about the US. Everyone knows that guns are bad (either that or they need their head seeing to) but since they are everywhere we decide to ignore the problem and suggest that we need them to defend ourselves. Absolute madness. You are more likely to be a victim of your own gun than you are of actually defending yourself with it.
Honestly, I believe that this has a lot to do with business. I’m quite sure the gun manufacturers have their links into government and that they’d lobby hard to prevent any legislation that prevents the sales of firearms to anyone but the military (which, frankly, is the only appropriate place for them). In the meantime, the guns keep getting sold and people keep getting killed by them. Unless you have a real need for one (game keeper, for example) then they shouldn’t be sold to you. Dealing with the problem may well be difficult but nothing is going to change unless the supply is stopped (black market arms, however, will be difficult to stop). I simply can’t believe that no one is prepared to do anything about it.