True that brother!!! Training should be a mandatory requirement for all to own firearms. I obtained my licence at 15 after a week of training and passing both a practical and written exam. It, if nothing else, instills a sense of responsibility for ownership. We are still not allowed to own a firearm till 18 but may use a guardians for hunting, the guardian assumes responsibility.
that statement of video games cause issues has consistently been proven false stop spreading nonsense.
Has it been proven false though? And yes your right about the hurtful vocabulary
. 
yup plenty of studies show its not the problem, people have violent video games in canada and other countries with no issues.Has it been proven false though? And yes your right about the hurtful vocabulary
Do Violent Video Games Trigger Aggression?
A study tries to find whether slaughtering zombies with a virtual assault weapon translates into misbehavior when a teenager returns to realitywww.scientificamerican.com
I agree that what the parents did was stupid and irresponsible. But so is a society that waits for this to happen and holds people accountable after the fact.
www.kgw.com
www.kgw.com
I do think that there is some new impacts on this that needs to be rethinking when it comes to the availability of kids on the voice/social media platforms with respect to radicalization.
(bit from the middle of the story)
The house that Jack built
By the time Discord was shuttering its attempt to engage with the moderators who police its own rules and content, Jack Teixeira was already sharing classified government secrets with friends.
Beginning in 2020, Teixeira and his friends had littered several private servers, including Thug Shaker Central, with racist and antisemitic posts, gore and imagery from terrorist attacks — all in apparent violation of Discord’s community guidelines. The server name itself was a reference to a racist meme taken from gay porn. Though his intentions weren’t always clear, in chats Teixeira discussed committing acts of violence, fantasizing about blowing up his school and rigging a vehicle from which to shoot people.
Members of Thug Shaker Central also shared memes riffing on the live stream footage of the Christchurch mass killing, which Tarrant had littered with far-right online references aimed at gaming communities.
A user on the server who went by the handle “Memenicer” said he would discuss “accelerationist rhetoric” and “racial ideology” with Teixeira, pushing to see how far the conversation would go. On the wall of Teixeira’s room hung the flag of Rhodesia, a racist minority-ruled former state in southern Africa that has become a totem among white nationalists.
After Teixeira’s arrest, FBI agents visited Memenicer, who spoke on the condition that he be identified by his online handle, carrying transcripts of chats the two had exchanged, he said.
“One was about a school shooting and then one was … about a mass shooting,” he said. More often the server was a stream of slurs: “the n-word over and over again.”
In Thug Shaker Central, Teixeira cultivated a cadre of younger users, who he wanted to be “prepared” for action against a government he worked for but claimed to distrust. Over time, the community became “more extreme,” according to Pucki, a user who created the initial server used by the group during pandemic lockdowns in 2020 and spoke on the condition that he be identified by his online handle.
Once he became administrator of the server, Teixeira expelled those he didn’t like, narrowing the pool of who could report him. Many of those who remained had spent time on 4chan’s firearms board and its notorious racism and sexism-filled /pol/ forum, Pucki said, bringing the toxic language and memes from those communities.
Teixeira’s political and social views increasingly infected the server, said members of Thug Shaker Central. “It became less about playing games and chatting and having fun, and it became about screaming racial slurs,” said Pucki.
There was at least one self described neo-Nazi on Thug Shaker Central: a teenager who went by the handle “Crow” and who said she dated Teixeira until early 2022. Crow said that at the time she was involved with more hardcore accelerationist white supremacist groups that sought to inspire racial revolution, movements she says she has since left behind and disavows.
"Crow" met Teixeira online and the two spent hours together on Discord. (Frontline (PBS)/The Washington Post)
Crow spent time on Telegram, but she also pushed her views on Discord, including in Thug Shaker Central, where several members recalled her sharing links to other communities and posting racist material, including swastikas.
“I was trying to radicalize people at the time,” said Crow. “I was trying to get them to join … get them more violent.”
Crow claimed that a young man she attempted to radicalize later live-streamed the beating of a Black man in a Discord private message as she and another person watched. The Post was unable to confirm the existence of this video.
“The man was sitting against a wall and he was kicking him,” Crow said. She had little fear the video broadcast in a group chat would be picked up by the company. “They, as far as I know, can’t really look into those.”
Teixeira posted videos taken behind his mother and stepfather’s house, firing guns into the woods. Filmed from Teixeira’s perspective, the clips mimicked the aesthetic of first-person-shooter video games — the look of Tarrant’s live stream in Christchurch.
“That’s what I think of instantly,” said Mariana Olaizola, a policy adviser on technology and law at the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights who wrote a May report on extremism in gaming communities. “I’m not sure about other people, but the resemblance is very obvious, I would say.”
Another video Teixeira posted on the server showed him standing in camouflage fatigues at a gun range near his home. “Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump,” he says to the camera before firing the full magazine downrange.
Discord’s Redgrave confirmed that the video violated the company’s community guidelines. But like everything else that happened on Thug Shaker Central, no one at Discord saw it.
A member of the server where Jack Teixeira allegedly leaked hundreds of documents tells Post reporter Sam Oakford they bonded over sharing offensive videos. (Video: Frontline (PBS)/The Washington Post)
Hundreds of documents, fragments of metadata
The intelligence horde linked to Teixeira turned out to be larger than it first appeared, extending to hundreds of documents posted online, either as text or images, for more than a year.
Redgrave said there was little the company could do about the platform being used to share government secrets.
“Without knowing what is and is not classified and without having some way to essentially detect that proactively, we can’t say definitively where classified documents go,” said Redgrave. “That’s true of every single tech company, not just us.”
That is one way to take it and spin it towards videos i guess. imho
More correlation and not causation for sure. The video games just are the direct route (in those specific cases, marks can be found anywhere and everywhere people are) to finding and then developing the bond for the later con that is set up on the social media surrounding the game.
I also was thinking along the lines of:
After reading that article, it seems that video games were a common interest among young people, some of whom were attracted to the white power thug culture. Discord is where they met. Interest in video games doesn't seem to be correlated.
Wow!!!
Sorry you have to read that crap. Thanks for helping keep this place a worthwhile destination!
i too am a big FPS player now a days however i play mostly overwatch 2 cause its weasy to hop n and out of when youre busy
that right there removes all doubt about the stupidity of online trolls. The only thing that could show it to be less intelligent is if it posted that without hiding behind an anonymizer.
That sucks you have to get trolled like that, its sad that accounts have to spread that kind of hate to make themselves feel better/becasue it is their job. You do a good job, thank you.
A a lot of games are enhanced by using discord. You pretty much have to have that app to progress in the harder content.
jonathanhaidt.com
But the US isn't the only country with people, not just kids spending way too much time alone and online. Yet we are seven or eight times the rate of homicide by gun. I agree that mental health issues are probably on the rise in connection with the rise of people spending more time isolated from their community. But the US isn't exceptional in that area. What we exceed at more than any other similar nation is gun violence. Sure, do lets work on improving mental health in our populations but gun violence in the US is also connected with our insanely easy access to killing machines in ways that no other nation like ours have..Easy accessibility to what are basically weapons of war is the prime reason for most of the shootings. Decades of fear mongering by the NRA making everyone believe that simple and sensible gun control like training, storage and mental health screening means they're coming for your guns is also a big contributor.
A huge contributor in not only my opinion is the rise of internet culture and it's impact on youth especially tho not exclusively. Before online gaming gamers would have to gather together to battle each other in group settings so there was still a lot of social interaction. Since smart phones came came along and most games are now almost exclusively online platforms even that aspect of sociability has disappeared. Young people are more isolated than any generation before them and have lost a lot of the ability to interact with their peers IRL. Young men in particular have been affected what with the 'femininization' of masculinity added to the already present anxiety about interacting with females in their peer group. Just look at the rise of incel groups all over social media. I checked out a couple of them on Reddit and it boggles my mind how these poor outcasts feel about the opposite sex. Add to that the free availability of porn and the radicalization these guys get exposed to and it's no wonder to me that there is so much mental illness in the young these days.
Personally I believe it all began with good old TV once media went from just the news ala guys like Walter Cronkite to the kind of sensational broadcasts that pass as news today. Parents became more fearful of letting their kids roam freely like my generation and used the TV to babysit their kids beginning the isolation cycle that has spiralled out of control these days with so many giving their smart phones to their kids to fill that role.
I saw an interview on Amanpour and Company on PBS the other day with the author of 'The Anxious Generation', by Johnathan Haidt that really makes sense of it all. My book budget is limited to thrift store books or the local library so won't likely get to read it any time soon but looks like a good read.
The Anxious Generation | Jonathan Haidt
