Well, it's come to this. The second highest political official in the country will sit down with video game industry representatives to discuss the correlation between violent games and real world gun violence.
Vice President Joe Biden is meeting with members of the gaming industry as part of his new role as head of the anti-gun violence task force. The meeting, held today in Washington, comes on the heels of a less than productive series of meetings with the NRA. The NRA's president, Wayne LaPierre, has been leading the charge asserting that violent video games, and films, are the real reason behind tragedies like Sandy Hook.
While the rest of the planet collectively roll their eyes, and does a set of 100 rage push ups, at those shockingly irresponsible sentiments. LaPierre claims that limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and bans on assault weapons would go against the Second Amendment. If anyone needs the grown ups, they'll be trying to come up with a real solution to this mess.
According to Polygon, "The Entertainment Software Association's Michael Gallagher will be joined by a cadre of researchers, game publishers and retail executives in Friday's meeting with Vice President Joe Biden to discuss violence in video games."
Other industry entities, such as the International Game Developers Association and the Electronic Consumer Association, issued open letters to the vice president ahead of today's meeting. Urging well researched and balanced data to be considered in the correlation between gaming and real world violence.
Hopefully we can avoid any more knee-jerk reaction like this one or this one and get down to actually putting this non-issue to rest, and avert anymore needless tragedies in the future. Let us know what you think about all of this.
[via Polygon]
