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Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Reggie Fils-Aime Gets POLITICAL About GUNS and GAMES!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - I called it!

It hasn't even been a full four months yet since former Nintendo of America President and Chief Operating Officer, Reggie Fils-Aime, retired from the company to enjoy his life. Right as he was retiring, he created a Twitter account. I wrote an article that was received as an out-there, wild take: Reggie would use his account for political posting and trolling President Donald John Trump, very similar to former FBI Director James Comey.

My offbeat take is CORRECT. But some background first:

Over the weekend there were some unfortunate mass-shootings that took place in El Paso, Texas (shout-outs to a KoopaTV fan there that ALMOST went to the fateful Walmart but avoided it) and Dayton, Ohio (no KoopaTV fans there). Those are under investigation and I'm not going to comment on their particulars. I also doubt I'll comment on them after their investigations are complete. It's a gaming site, not a crime blog.

Unfortunately, people look to politicians—not prayers—for answers and comfort in times of disturbance and turbulence. Even more unfortunately, the current president of the United States of America, President Donald John Trump, isn't good at providing coherent answers or comfort. He singled out “the gruesome and grisly video games that are now too commonplace” in his conference about the incident, as something in the culture that glorifies and promotes real violence. This is far from the first time there's been a shooting and President Donald John Trump has identified violent videogames as something that should be examined. He even had a roundtable with industry figures about it—though he didn't pay attention during it because he doesn't truly care about the subject.

It's a good thing that President Donald John Trump doesn't deeply care about violent videogames when he states things like that. However, videogame industry people care greatly about the topic, and that includes former executives like Reggie Fils-Aime. Check out his tweets:

Reggie Fils-Aime Nintendo president gun violence video game revenue tweet facts
Facts are facts, hm?

Gamers—and the population at large—do not need to fall for the false choice of GUNS VS. GAMES. This isn't a Splatfest. But let's look at the substance of Reggie's tweet, which claims,
“When the ill-informed are being critical of the gaming industry and community, this is a very powerful story. The facts are that countries with high per capita gaming revenue have fewer gun-shooting deaths. Except the US, where 4% of the population own 43% of the guns. Facts are facts.”
(Reggie was referring to the United States having 4% of the world's population of humans, and Americans own 43% of the world's supply of guns. He then presented a chart showing no correlation between countries’ videogame revenue and those same countries’ violent gun deaths.)

It is my contention that both of these statements can be simultaneously true:
  1. President Donald John Trump and some other Republicans (such as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy) are using videogames as a distraction technique to shift the conversation away from the Democrats’ preferred topics of gun control and/or racism/hatred
  2. More gun control isn't a valid solution to prevent future tragic incidents, and Republicans are correct on the merits of their core position about gun rights
I suppose Reggie is correct that the people linking games to deaths are ill-informed. The gist of the rest of the message is that America is an aberration in gun deaths, which, if caused by game consumption, should feature countries like South Korea as being slaughterhouses. Reggie then implies that the disproportionate number of guns per capita in the United States is somehow responsible for the violent gun deaths, and then says “Facts are facts.”

That's very misleading of him. Just like it's not a fact that you playing a lot of violent videogames will cause you to exhibit real life deadly behaviour, it's not a fact that you purchasing a gun means you're going to use that gun to murder innocent people. And you purchasing two guns doesn't make you twice as likely to murder innocent people compared to buying one gun.

In fact, in a series of research questions entitled PRIORITIES FOR RESEARCH TO REDUCE THE THREAT OF FIREARM-RELATED VIOLENCE written by the National Academies Press and supported by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (which is not an actual study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as falsely claimed by Erich Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America), it was noted that defensive gun uses by victims are “at least as common as offensive uses by criminals,” with the range from 108,000 defensive uses to more than 3,000,000—which would far surpass offensive uses. That indicates gun presence to be a net positive in America, at least in deterring criminality. More research is needed.

Note that, for the reason that the Second Amendment exists, there really doesn't need to be an observable societal benefit to still justify their continued presence in America.

When Reggie's facts don't support an argument and make no logical sense—and it's hard to present a full argument on Twitter compared to a blog post like this one, which is why one shouldn't try to argue on Twitter to begin with—he appears as “ill-informed” as the people he's being “critical” of. I could throw statistics too that may be as irrelevant or relevant as what Reggie cited, depending on your point of view.

For example, despite being 13.4% of the American population in 2018, black people made up 52.5% of the adults arrested for murder in 2017. Reggie, does that mean we should have black people control like the gun control you undoubtedly advocate? “Facts are facts.”

...I wouldn't advocate for either scenario, since I think it's in America's best interest to value freedom and civil rights above authoritarian measures. Even if it's not a sterile police state.

Speaking of freedom-haters, Crooked Hillary Clinton decided to provide her thoughts on Twitter as well. Unlike the likes of Reggie Fils-Aime, she's expected by the world to disingenuously weigh in. She wrote, “People suffer from mental illness in every other country on earth; people play video games in virtually every other country on earth. The difference is the guns.”

Reminder that Hillary Clinton has gone much, much farther than President Donald John Trump ever has in restricting one's First Amendment rights to enjoy videogames in that she actually drafted legislation that would've permanently stunted the videogame industry if it passed and didn't get immediately struck down by the courts as unconstitutional. But as we've seen from fellow fraudulent Democrats on the presidential debate stage lately, if a Republican says something, a good Democrat must do the exact opposite. Now Hillary Clinton is, for now, trying to portray herself as gaming's staunch ally by defending the First Amendment and trying to eliminate the Second Amendment.

In reality, she wants nothing more than to eliminate both of those amendments. How miraculous that she's not President of the United States!


Ludwig believes that it's completely fair to attack Reggie Fils-Aime based on his political statements. You'll also notice that Ludwig only referred to pretty much everyone name-dropped in his argument, on both the pro- and anti-gun sides, in a negative light. That's because KoopaTV seeks to provide the truth instead of picking partisan sides, and all of the partisans are being disingenuous.

4 comments :

  1. "Gamers—and the population at large—do not need to fall for the false choice of GUNS VS. GAMES. This isn't a Splatfest."

    If it were, we know which character would support it based on one of the official art books: https://images-ext-1.discordapp.net/external/H9J6jcMzxXr1skPlROqQtt__MiD93Dc5D4pKnfb1W2M/https/pbs.twimg.com/media/D8mkeVjV4AEp-vX.jpg%3Alarge?width=903&height=611

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm not a big gun guy, but I've always viewed gun control as being in the same vein as Prohibition. The general idea is good, but it just doesn't work that way in reality. When all the "good" gun owners have their guns taken away, only the bad ones will have them. And then people will sneak guns/bullets in illegally, and soon enough we'll have gangs running bullet monopoly's. If they can do it for alcohol, they can do it for guns.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It'd be worse than Prohibition in practice.

      Alcoholic beverages are superfluous products. They don't satisfy a real need.
      Guns do, though. So one should expect a lot more... effort and resistance.

      Delete

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