South Wales, Australia, police commissioner Andrew Scipione believes that kids are out of hand these days. His police force are picking up 13 and 14 year olds who are drunk and disorderly, they carry around knives and they stab people. The parents refuse to pick the kids up and violence is on the rise. You know what caused all this? Video games.
In a world operated by common sense one might assume that any kid who can get drunk at the age of 14 comes from a domestically dysfunctional home. However, common sense is a rarity and ignorance seems to be sold in spades these days, hence Australian police commissioner Andrew Scipione believes that pop-culture has more to do with delinquency than bad parenting.
According to Australian news site, very easily and conveniently named News.com, Scipione stated that...
"How can it not affect you if you're a young adolescent growing up in an era where to be violent is almost praiseworthy, where you engage in virtual crime on a daily basis and many of these young people (do) for hours and hours on end,""You get rewarded for killing people, raping women, stealing money from prostitutes, driving cars crashing and killing people.”
I'm going to interject for a second here and ask, what mainstream AAA video game promotes raping women? I know his comment obviously takes digs at Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row, but apparently I've been living under a tarp of marketing jargon for far too long and missed a press release or two that explicitly states that you can run around, steal cars, beat-up prostitutes and rape a few women just for kicks. When did raping women become a pastime activity in video games? Even attempting to address that kind of subject matter in Tomb Raider created a public furor. You have to get low and dirty on the interwebs to find games that allow you to do that sort of stuff...or live in Japan.
Regardless, Scipione goes on to say that...
"[Video games are] not going to affect the vast majority but it's only got to affect one or two and what have you got? You've got some potentially really disturbed young person out there who's got access to weapons like knives or is good with the fist, can go out there and almost live that life now in the streets of modern Australia. That's concerning."
Eh, so what he's saying is that because some already mentally disturbed individual might go off the deep-end, we should be wary of content that could push them over the edge? Well, that could apply to anything. Let's say we remove “mature” content from games (even though most times the “offensive” content is usually juvenile) and we censor out violent movies and music; what about sporting activites that get these disturbed young persons riled up? What about school or work that help raise tension? What about social gatherings that spawn anarchistic behavior, which was the case with the Dark Knight Rising shootings? How do you censor real-life?
Poor-minded people like Scipione seems to be overlooking a much bigger problem, a problem he addresses himself, saying...
“We grab them off the streets, children 14-13, who are drunk that we come across in the city in the Cross and in Oxford St."We ring parents and say 'little Johnny's down here, you better come in and get him'. And parents don't even care. They say 'he got there and can get his way back'."
Ugh, there's the problem right there.
How about instead of attacking video games we take away parental licenses instead? There's a ton of people who don't deserve to have kids or should be restricted from making them. Bringing another human being into the world for the sole purpose of making them share in a miserable suffering spawned from unresolved baggage from a lifetime of failures is not something anyone should be allowed to do. And if you're a parent and you allow a 13 or 14 year old to carry around a knife and get drunk, I'm sorry but you failed at life. Actually, no I'm not sorry...you simply failed at life, period.
This Scipione needs to start arresting the parents and get a wake-up call going for all the deadbeats out there bringing miniature flesh-suits into the world: If you screw up as a parent you get put in jail. Problem solved.
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