Today, an old man went on television and complained about video games. Then someone proved him horribly wrong.
Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and current head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, went on the John Stossel Show on Fox Buisness to tell why he thinks violent games are abhorrent and deserve to be taxed. Stossel, confused, struggled to understand the logic behind Graham’s argument.
This is what that frustration looks like:
Here is a comprehensive breakdown of their arguments, as I understand them:
Graham:
- God gets violent games because of that whole crucifixion business.
- We tax cigarettes, therefore we should also tax video games because they’re the same.
- I miss my old cowboy TV shows. Gunsmoke was awesome, I’ll tell ya what.
- We’re addicted to violent media “like the Romans”.
- I’m old and this brave new world frightens and confuses me.
Stossel:
- Crime in America is down on the whole.
- Japan has higher game usage, immensely lower violence.
- There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that games make you violent.
- This is the exact same hysteria as comics in the 1950s, dressed up for a new generation.
- You have no argument.
Look, I don’t agree with Stossel about 99 per cent of the time, but that’s completely irrelevant right now. The man has done his homework on this one, and a shocking display of basic competency like this is something you simply don’t see a lot of on television.
So Stossel? Today you’ve earned your facial hair.
To contact the author of this post, write to chrisperson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @papapishu
Comments
56 responses to “Watch A Fox Reporter Demolish A Hackneyed Anti-Game Argument”
And a Fox reporter too? Impressive 😛
Don’t get too used to it.
I guess he’s gonna get a demotion soon =P
A diamond in the rough, as it were.
John Stossel is by far one of the best reporters on any news station.
I like him for two other reasons besides this story:
1) He doesn’t look anywhere near his age (66)
2) His Ron Burgundy moustache is great.
The fact he seems to be a (more than) competent journalist/reporter is a brilliant bonus. 😛
Look him up on youtube, he’s brilliant.
Yeah, get people out of their homes watching movies or playing video games and onto the streets with their real guns for some entertainment instead. Nice idea.
Clear, unstandable, fact checked argument in favour of video games? The man is a legend. Good for him for not jumping on the bandwagon but inspecting it and finding it full of the leper nimrods condemning our entertainment & avoiding it like the plague that it is.
Love that “like the Romans” comment – so left field.
It was the Jews, the Romans just wanted to whip him a few times.My spoiler only makes sense if you read the above first.
The Jewish death sentence was stoning, the Roman Death Sentence of Crucifixion was reserved for people who really really pissed off Rome. The Jewish people invited him into the city against the wishes of the Roman Government. Factually proven from documents other than the bible. If the Jews had killed him he would have been stoned to death. It was the Romans. Logic and facts prove that.Edit: needed to fix weird formatting.
There you go.
Brilliant. Just brilliant. The first real investigative reporter on FOX.
Stossel did a great job of putting forward an argument that was based on facts and evidence. Unfortunately, facts and evidence just aren’t enough for some people.
Great point about Superman. It does seem like people always need some sort of boogeyman to blame for society’s ills, be it Superman, video games, movies, heavy metal, rap music or even Elvis Presley.
Whoa whoa WHOA! They did ACTUAL RESEARCH? They were ACTUALLY being Fair and Unbiased?? What kind of sick, twisted alternate dimension have I woken up in!?
I know right? He’ll must’ve frozen over. Didn’t help that it was fekking freezing when I got up today, too. This story’s gotta be legit.
In my humble opinion it’s laughable every time a pro-gun spokesperson gets up there at the lecturn to proclaim why there’s so much violence in American culture. What’s the main difference between US and other western countries (hint, it’s not the amount of videogames they play)? I mean, are these people complete idiots?
Going on that point comedian John Oliver did a great 3 part series on gun control comparing America to Australia and our gun control laws. Only about 15 mins total for all 3 videos but I feel it’s well worth the watch. You’ll laugh, and then you’ll cry at the crazy gun control people. Here they are.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pOiOhxujsE
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbY45rHj8w
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuspKSjfgA
I’m anti-guns but there are plenty of differences between the USA and other nations, the fairly substantial drug and gang culture for instance. Almost all the top gun-related homicide ratios come from countries with fairly embedded drug production or transportation problems (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate. Only Swaziland, South Africa and the US out of the top 15 are not located in northern South/Central America) and America has documented issues with drugs and gangs (See Scarface).
Making firearms illegal would probably help a lot but it’s not the only issue
There has been no evidence to suggest that making firearms illegal has ever made crime go down, on the contrary all of the mass shootings in recent times have happened in ‘gun-free’ zones.
I’m off to play Rome: Total War now. If you see a legionnaire on the news tomorrow killing Asterix, I guess you can blame that on me
Mind if I continue that line?
I’m off the play Bioshock Infinite. If you hear something on the news about some guy riding monorail tracks with a meat hook, it would be me.
Seriously now, the guy said Murder Simulator. Clearly this clown’s only source is loose cannon Jack Thompson.
Speaking of which, I wonder where he is now. He disappeared off the planet since he got disbarred. Not that it is a bad thing…
Joining in too with a long term goal, if in about 15 years from now there is a report of
A 14 year old girl shiving people in the neck and butchering people with machetes; that may or may not be my faultI have a spoiler with a spoiler tag, dare you click it with only a vague reference regarding what it might be about?
The last of us is awesome
The newest forms of media (typically embraced by younger people first) are always the scapegoat. Today it just happens to be video games.
Tax violence?
Start praising god? omfg.
If we were to tax violence… can we retroactively tax christianity?
I wouldn’t start that argument. It’s pretty hard to find any long-existing cultural group or ethnicity that hasn’t had members perform violent acts in it’s group’s name at one time or another. Unfortunate facts of life
The Blue man group.
That’s a biased comment… just tax religions and belief systems in general. Religious schism, conflict and stereotyping has been the cause of more deaths over the last five millenia than any other three causes combined (well, except possibly viral/bacterial contagions). Jihad – Holy war. The Crusades – Holy war. Marxism – Persecuted the Jews for failing to conform to the abandonment of religious belief. Gaza strip – massive conflict resulting from conflicting religious views. Ireland/England – Catholics vs Protestants. Video games? Well, MAYBE a couple of high school massacres and a few hundred deaths, based of biased and unfounded reporting that failed to conduct proper research into the actual circumstances. If this guy wants to compare religion and video games as causes of violence, his side is gonna come out battered and bruised. There is just no contest.
tl;dr. Someone always has to get up on a pedestal *sigh*
Maybe you should take the time to listen to the opinions of others. You might learn something. In any case, I’m agreeing with your point and making a case for it.
I always listen to the opinions of others, my apologies 🙂 I was having a shit of a day yesterday, entirely my fault and I do apologise whole heartedly.
In other news, Jim Carreys an asshole. :\
all it is really is old, miserable baby boomers with power seeing young people and teens having fun and they just can not stand it.
John Stossel is a boss – the guy defends individual freedom wherever it is found, be it video games, guns or drug use.
Wow, you don’t see logic on fox news very often. Or for such a length of time. I wonder what Glenn Beck thinks. He loves his country.
I can’t wait for the next big thing to be labelled the problem so that our videogames are left alone.
For those wondering about the “Romans” comment, he’s probably referring to how the gladiator games were used to keep the populace entertained. I imagine he’d then go on to point out how that civilization collapsed. Rome is a popular example for doom-sayers.
The catch is in the USA, the media and politicians are scared of the NRA, plain and simple. Their Vice President tried to put in gun control laws and failed, now hes babbling about video game laws and taxes. NRA loobyists push the media and parent groups into making video games the scape goat, to difuse any gun control topic.
Come on, there was a statistic recently that said more children die to gun shots in the USA than to CANCER. The big C. Seriously thats messed up.
Hey Mr. Graham, you know what should actually be taxed? Your churches
Firstly, I like hiding my live explosives behind my team mate just as much as the rest of you.
But I do think that in the future these opinions that we laugh at may start gaining weight. With our gaming improvements coming by one after the other, like the Oculus for example, we are making our games look more & more real. In the end the argument will be “If the game looks real, and real life looks real, what’s the difference? Why can’t we shoot people in both?”.
Not trying to start a fight, just wondering what other people think about where we are going in the future for this.
because real life is real, and video games are fake. do you have trouble understanding the difference?
Maybe it would benefit all those maniacs with homicidal tendencies, they can kill people in simulations and not in real life.
Ban video games because they glorify guns! But not rifle associations, they don’t glorify guns at all.
i feel sorry for the .07 of a person shot to death in japan 🙁
.07 deaths per 10,000 people.
7 dead from guns for every 1,000,000 people for Japan, 1,000 dead from guns for every 1,000,000 Americans.
hah, i read it as 10, though im pretty sure the way its going 10 out of every 10 people in america will be killed by guns
Graham lost all credibility the moment he uttered the word “God”.
This, you know you are going to hear some belief based bullshit as soon as you hear the word god.
And to further that he is trying to push his beliefs onto other people instead of using critical thinking and logic.
I didn’t understand why he kept calling for evidence. He clearly hasn’t needed it in the past to justify his beliefs.
The guy could have destroyed his entire argument in one second.
The churchy guy said something like: “I grew up with guns, I had one since I was 9 years old and I didn’t go around shooting people”
The reporter could have said: “The current generation of children have grown up with video games their entire lives, and they haven’t all gone around shooting people either”
I can’t believe that a country which allows the ownership of high-powered fire arms and one of the highest death tolls in the world dictate whether or not video games are the cause for violence.
How about, stop putting guns in the hands of civilians and children, and you might stop seeing mass shootings, stop acting like barbarians, you know, most of the civilised countries in the world have done it, and succeeded. I would say that having readily accessible weaponry to nearly every single person in the country could be having a huge impact on your crime levels. I know a lot days I would like to shoot some stuff.
I kinda was more interested in the next topic. See what Mr Grahams thoughts are & if Rosies been to his place
Heh, and the reporter even failed to notice this egregious logic flaw in Graham’s logic: He was basically saying “Look, we grew up with /actual guns/ in our homes… and we came out alright! But these kids today, with their /pretend pixel guns/? We’re doomed.”
Classic pro-gun nut trying to place the issue in absolutely everything else but the guns.
I keep my kids away from violent video games so they don’t become too agressive. I prefer they read wholesome children’s books like Cat in the Hat. Unfortunately the other day I caught them putting beetles in a bottle with paddles to see if they would have a beetle bottle paddle battle.
Thank you Franklin G. the agenda pushing spinster, the propaganda the right wing pushed with reefer madness taking away a perfectly natural material, hemp, and pushing harder for people to buy tobacco that was more addictive and likely to make a profit for big business. cue his argument that this industry needs to be further taxed and controlled so people like him can make more money. This all the while takes us from the real reason kids are resorting to murdering people in their communities, society is stressed in this modern age due to pricks like him taking all the money.
John Stossel is the man, he’s a libertarian with consistent views, check him out on youtube he’s got a lot of informative pieces.