well at least we can say finally we can vote them out of office this coming nov. :)

Hears how we fix this. Young people... VOTE!!!!!!!!! In the '04 presidential election the voter turnout for 18 to 20somthings was ABYSMAL and it's even WORSE for local elections!!! Start getting active and MAKE YOU'RE VOICE HEARD!!! This goes for all elections from school board to police chef to mayor to governor to congress to president!!! OH MY GOD IT'S THAT EASY SO F#!*$^# DO IT!!!!!!!!

P.S. If any of you are not going to vote in the '08 Presidential elections PLEASE just vote for Obama or Nader so you can do SOME good with you apathetic life.

Oh come on! My faith in the future of humanity is crippled as is. This just about kills it.

Video Game Link to Philadelphia’s Murder Rate? Politicians Grasping at straws to try and find something besides criminals to blame for crime.

"The system is broken? These asshats were VOTED into their positions for the most part. The system is fine, the people voting for said asshats in support of their own “special” interests and the generally uninformed masses (thanks to the media’s unwillingness to care about truth in favor of the almighty dollar) are the problem."


It really doesn't matter how educated or informed you are. When both your choices suck, which most elections come down to, then who do you vote for?

Children learn the difference between reality and fiction at quite a young age. They're not killing each other until they're really quite old.

The only way to become less sensitive to realworld violence, is to commit lots of real world violence. To say otherwise would be like saying playing cops & robbers is training/desensitization for the real thing. It just doesn't check out...

maybe game companies are just refusing to fund politicians?

Face the facts, fucking censorcrats. No matter how many games you ban, crimes are likely to stay in our world. So why don't you leave the fuck us alone? Sheesh.

I don't live in Pennsylvania, but seriously, who elected these people?

It is really sad to see something like this happen in an area that I grew up. I guess the local government needs to latch on to something to distract the people from the horrible conditions of the schools, their (in some cases) non-existent student attendance, Drug use among bored adolescents, a police force that almost has a worse reputation than the L.A. cops, I would list more but I'm lazy.

This is just a diversionary tactic, much like what magicians use, only it costs you more than the price of admission and your distended believe wore off in the first few seconds of watching this lame side show.

"Children can’t always understand the difference between the video game world and the real world, and there’s no telling what impact this exposure to violence will have on them later in life."

I'd settle for one example of when a child couldn't understand the difference between a video game and real life, provided that child was able to clearly distinguish those dividing lines in other forms of media.

I'd also love to see this printed some day, "Parents can't always understand the difference between an M rating and content appropriate for their children..."

How do they plan to quantify violent videogames in a way that can be directly correlated with a murder rate?

Pfft. Everyone know that the real cause of crime is the jealousy, greed, and lust for the amazing power and taste of cheese. What we need to do is take away the cheese from the people.

Seriously: Scapegoating is nothing new. But the fact that most of the articles posted on this site have to do with scapegoating video games makes me sick to my stomach.

@Pirra, E. Zachary Knight, et al

Umm, nobody made it any "easier" to get guns in 2006. A State delegate from Philly proposed a to law repeal State preemption so that Philly could try to pass local laws banning all firearms, as well as trying to pass a State-wide gun ban and/or one-gun-a-month rationing. Needless to say, the rest of the State told them to STFU. In short, absolutely nothing changed.

"Children can’t always understand the difference between the video game world and the real world, and there’s no telling what impact this exposure to violence will have on them later in life."

yes cause kids are retarded. wow thats a big insult. i thought kids were the future? what happened to being smart and knowing the diffrence between right and wrong being natural

group cry time

Wow this is frankly just unbelievable

Lets assume what they say is true that violent games are a contributing factor. Why hasn't this been happening in other cities? I live in Chicago which 6 years ago used to be the most violent city in the whole country. We had over 600 homicides at one time. We got a new Police Chief who finally started doing something and our homicide rate went down. And this is when GTA3 was being accused of corrupting my generation's morals and turning us all into mobsters in training. This is just an attempt to distract everyone from the real problems which actually *GASP* take some time and thought to fix. I honestly can't believe we are gonna waste more money this crap, espicially when another study came out that showed that violent games may actually be GOOD for you.

oh.

because, pie charts are easy to understand for politicians.

One can point at the different colors, and explain that the color represents a number of dollars...
wait that's maybe already to much

A little off topic here --

anyone interested in trying to change partisan politics in the upcoming '08 presidential election should check out

www.Unity08.com

I know it won't do anything on the state level, but it is possible that having an executive branch that can overcome partisanship might be able to direct the government to focus more strongly on important issues; i.e. war in iraq, health care, education, social security etc.

@Killadelphia Residents
I'm really sorry to hear that your all living in a city of living shit. Hopefully you can get something together to completely restructure your local area. If you must, incite some rather large mob to take over the city government. Or even better, ask your local National Guard to help with these problems.

here we go again

After it was on a downward trend for 15 years.

As someone who lived in Philly for three years, I find it appalling that the idiots in the legislature would even dare to suggest video games are a contributing factor to violence in the city. I'm sure rampant drug use and turf/block wars have nothing to do with the city being dubbed "Killadelphia". 25 To Life definitely has more of an impact.

i couldn't even read the entire thing - stupidity such as this hurts my head. Talk about avoiding the problem...

@Tempo, I hope so too, but I simply have a feeling they will come up with some reason to legislate anyway, like most of these reports regarding Video Games, they are approached with the 'Fred Phelps' school of thinking, in other words, there are something like a Million words in the Bible, Fred Phelps only cares about 7 of them 'Thou Shall Not lay with another man.', the other 900K odd are irrelevent. Politicians read studies in much the same way, they look for the paragraph that serves their purpose and ignore the rest of the study.

the real 800-pound gorilla is why our elected officials are so retarded and out of touch.

Funny thing is, if the results of this testing comes out as 'Video Games are nothing to worry about', do you honestly think they will simply say 'Okay' and move onto other things?

I wish someone would ask these politicians (in front of reporters)...

"Do you believe that this legislation will end violent crime?"

"What percentage do you expected violent crime will decrease with passage of this bill?"

"What do you intend to do about the other leading factors of crime, namely: unemployment, poverty, gangs, and drugs?"

It's because this way Politicians can 'do something' about the problem without actually 'doing something' about it, thus ensuring that there is still something for them to 'do' when re-election comes around.

@ Dexee

Politicians are paper dolls - they have no real substance other then what's imbued into them by their electorate or, as is the case in recent years, the lobbyists. Even if you take all of them down and elect the entire government over from scratch they will still reflect the biases of the voters. Change comes from the few politicians with balls, but we see less and less of those in recent years.

You solve the problems by educating the people so they elect politicians who enact legislation that actually targets the root causes of these issues.

Hi. I live in Philly and I can tell you that the problem with the murder rate in this city could be fixed by doing the following:

Combat drug trafficking in the city.
Reduce poverty in the area.
Improve public schools in poorer neighborhoods.
Reducing the number of gangs in the area.
Increasing the number of community centers in impoverished areas.
Increasing police presence in the city, and especially in impoverished areas.
Get Mayor Street out of office.
Fix the Septa crisis.

And last but not least, GET GUNS OFF THE STREETS.

In 2006, residents of this city thought that having more guns on the streets would reduce the occurrences of crimes, and of violence. They made their voices heard in local city papers. What has been happening for the past few years is that guns HAVE been solving disputes in the city, but many of these disputes usually end in gun fire and death.

The problem is that while honest, law abiding citizens have been using guns to legitimately protect themselves, so do every other nefarious citizen, gang banger, drug dealer, etc.

Fact: 80 percent of the homicides in Philadelphia are committed with guns, and 10 percent of the victims of gun violence are juveniles.
Source: http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:7IMitd3W1OYJ:ework.phila.gov/philag...

In Philadelphia, if you give a person on the street the wrong kind of look, then you're likely to have a gun jammed in your face. People DO shoot each other over petty disputes, whether it be that you said something offensive to someone's friend or the person wants your shoes (yes there are documented cases of murders occurring for BOTH of the listed reasons).

This legislation is truly a waste of tax payer dollars, time, and does not make me feel any safer in this blasted city. There are more viable alternatives which can be applied right now to help combat crime in Philadelphia.

Wow, drugs, gangs, and guns don't even get a passing mention here. Never mind that the FBI has listed those (and not games) factors as the most likely causes of the upsurge in crime in some cities. Funny how the Philadelphia government and NIMF act like they know more about crime than the top law enforcement agency in the country.

To everyone in Philly, PLEASE vote these clowns out of office. They obviously aren't interested in solving your city's high crime rates.

@Tom

I think that one way of taking the challenge is to get rid of all the politicians that don't know jackshit about whats REALLY going on in their country rather than what the PTC, Liberal Media, NIMF and the Church of England tell them...

"Children can’t always understand the difference between the video game world and the real world, and there’s no telling what impact this exposure to violence will have on them later in life."

Later in life? You mean when children become young adults and understand the difference between right and wrong, real and make-believe? Hang on, that doesn't just happen, there's something in the background that makes this come about. What is it again? Oh yeah, having been raised properly by their parents or guardians!

I'm sure there are some people with mental problems that could be adversely effected by violent media, but it is up to their parents/guardians to ensure they do not consume any media not suitable for them. There are children who are severely and dangerously allergic to peanuts. Should companies who make peanut related products be blamed and be asked to stop? No, it's up to the parents of these children to ensure that their child is not exposed to these things that could be harmful to them. Why can't people understand this?

They should commission a study into the effects of a lack of proper upbringing, or anti-social tendencies, drug use or gangs instead. You know, some of the things that are actually involved in criminal activities?

Maybe it's the goddamn $5 tolls Philadelphia has. Good to see where THAT goes to.

The most violent periods in modern American history had nothing to do with games and all to do with drugs and gangs. Why are things any different today? Because people - and therefore politicians - want to believe that we're moving forward and therefore they will believe that it's not the same problem that we've already "conquered" rearing its ugly head again because it actually stems from deep seated cultural and social issues that would require real work to change, rather it's [insert latest thing here]. It sucks for us that the latest thing is our preferred pastime.

OK, i think we need to force all politicians to have one month (a year) of STFU, so we can get some peace and quiet every once in a while.

I am pretty damn sure drug and gang wars make up 90% of this.

Man wtf @ politicians

Um, how many of those homicides were actually committed by children? I bet

You ate my post!

Um, how many of those homicides were actually committed by children? I bet fewer than 10. Relevance of study? None.

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