Earlier this morning, I read an article on Forbes that talked about how Pennsylvania Rep. Christopher Quinn wants to create a violent video game tax law which would be used to buff up school security in a variety of different ways. If anyone is interested in the article itself I’ll include a link at the bottom of this page. The article itself is a good read, but I wanted to talk about the potential tax law and the situation as well.
As someone who is currently a college student, the thought of someone coming in and shooting up my campus is something that’s been in my mind, maybe, once or twice. I don’t think that the thought process for something like this can be realistic. According to an article on politifact.com, there was a total of 3 mass shootings in the United States in 2018. When you think about the amount of schools and colleges in the United States this is a very low number. This isn’t something that happens frequently. On a personal level, I live in New York State. The gun laws here are some of the most strict in America. Even then, my campus has security guards who are routinely patrolling. Going back even further, I remember right after September 11th happened my middle school went all out on hiring security guards like something was going to happen there too. Is this excessive? I think when you logically think about, it is.
You don’t want to think about getting killed when you are trying to better yourself in life. It’s understandable and at the same time it’s weird to think about putting any form of extra taxes on any video game. There have been debates on how video games influence violence for years. Hell, I remember the original Doom being pointed at for the Columbine shooting. Yes, Doom and all of it’s pixelated violence was blamed. It’s so ridiculous to blame video games for the actions of incredibly unstable people who just so happened to have a gun laying around the house. Movies have been portraying violence even longer than video games, why aren’t those being heavily taxed too? We’ve seen time and time again these kind of things come up and then they are always debunked. There’s always going to be violence in society, overreacting to things isn’t the answer.
Sources:
Politifact article: https://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2018/feb/15/jeff-greenfield/mostly-false-18-us-school-shootings-so-far-2018-an/
CNBC article on States with strict gun laws statistics: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/27/states-with-strict-gun-laws-have-fewer-firearms-deaths-heres-how-your-state-stacks-up.html
New York Times article debunking the claim that video games leading to mass shootings: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/trump-video-games-shootings.html
Of Course I Game 