There comes a time in American politics where the Politicians take certain movements too far. Such as the banning of Gays in the military. Or the attempts to ban Firearms, and Violent Video Games (in California, no less.) What they try to make a point in, is that by taking away violence in video games, or removing firearms from the public vendors, you suddenly remove any possible means for anyone to get their hands soaking in blood. But this is wrong, you see. The Criminals who attain these weapons when otherwise being unable to purchase them publicly, will be even more dangerous. They will have access to all sorts of underground arms that common folk have no idea where to even begin to look. And asking around is suspicious… And then about video games? Jeez, kids at such a young age will just go outside and play “war” with each other. Beat each other up, use play-guns to “shoot” each other, and imagine maiming and bleeding out. So, what’s the point? I will say that Politicians like those who try and pass these movements are either a) trying to make a name for themselves(McCarthy vs. Communism), or b) just plain idiotic, or c) both.
Just Plain Idiotic
In the last 10 years, during of which the 8 that President Bush took office, the Senate believed it had more power than the congress originally allowed them, and took great advantage of it. The Evidence? Passing several business related laws to send jobs from various established companies, such as Boeing, overseas to countries – mainly China. Or let’s say, the Patriot Act, which is only two or three steps away from Martial Law, and the lawful invasion of privacy. (Quick Point: The Patriot Act, under a different name in the 60′s and 70′s, allowed police officers to mine data from civilian activity to weed out Communists, Hippies, and Gays.)
In short, the banning of Video Games and Firearms break the first two Constitutional Amendments: 1, and 2. These are the most common of debated Amendments, the Right to Free Expression, and the Right to Bear Arms.
The Right to Free Expression: Video Game makers aren’t elves who live in a tree who make diabolical games in order to enslave people and rack up money using obscene prices (unless you’re EA.) They are a group of Artists and Programmers who are dedicated to a common goal, of expressing their creations. This is especially true when they make games that often look controversial, or appeal to very small groups of cult-style fans. There are of course other supposed “repercussions,” such as:
- violent games cause addiction
- violent games cause crimes
- violent games cause social deviancy
We should remember that Parents, Lawmakers, and Idiots, will always target things they don’t like FIRST. The sad incident of Columbine was first blamed utterly on Doom, one of the original First Person Shooters of that time. Yet, the game “Doom” didn’t show up in the diaries of the two assailants of this massacre. What was pointed out by them was bullying, teasing, and the inability to act or think in classrooms. One was a great manipulator, and the other was a great follower. Neither really had social lives. Therefore, it must be blamed on Video Games. (See Above, “Causes Social Deviancy,” “Causes Crime.”)
Allow me to explain a little bit about addictions. Normally, they happen on their own. Whether or not someone has an addiction, is mostly based on their “Addictive Nature.” Sexual Addicts, Drug Addicts, and Alcohol Addicts (or Game Addicts) aren’t really there for the thrill, excitement, or pleasure… rather for the power, need, and habitual nature. Game addicts aren’t any different from the other Addicts. They seek out something, anything to defeat boredom, and the normal every-day beat of life. Often this happens without realizing that this escape becomes their every-day life.
Let me point something out about the Grand Theft Auto games. On news broadcasts, in the Senate discussions, and in talk shows, GTA has been demonized for allowing the player to kill Police Officers, beat Hookers with baseball bats, and run various people over without any cause of belief that you’ve done anything wrong. Well, it’s true! One, it’s a video game! The moment you walk in front of a Police Officer and point a gun at him, think of two things. 1. You probably don’t know how to handle a real firearm, as opposed to your high-rank in the video game. 2. The Police Officer knows how to not only use their sidearm, but WILL fire on you if he/she is threatened. Next, people need to think about what they’re saying. Many Politicians sleep with Hookers, but then deny them their rights on the Senate Floor, but then give them the same “humane leniency” in video games. This is kinda screwed up, honestly. While there isn’t any reason for beating up anyone, the game simply “allows” this to happen. Meaning, there are no missions where you actually are forced to beat up hookers. The same style of Postal 2, is that you are “allowed” to do as you wish. I once went through a GTA game WITHOUT beating up a hooker. Let’s look at it another way. Hookers in Television: Bad, nasty women who hear all the good talk, and sell that information. They’re dirty, full of diseases, and you should probably stay away from them. Hookers in Movies: Bad nasty women who like being dominated by their Pimp, and do so voluntarily. In the case they don’t like it, the movie becomes based around them in a freedom-seeking hour fest that somehow introduces a Manly Man to do a lot of fighting. Yet, in GTA, Hookers just act like Hookers IRL: they want you to get “in the mood” so you buy their services. So, you can either buy their services, deny their services, or in GTA, run them over with a Semi-Truck at full speed. For more on this topic, you can watch this video.
Who’s The Tool Now?
Much like adolescent Emos, guns are highly misunderstood. They are often confused as being “violent” and “dangerous.” Yes, they are. However, like many tools of trade, anything able to craft or destroy is considered dangerous. Take for example, how many workers lose fingers or entire limbs due to the Industrial Machine, in comparison to actual gun related injuries or death. It’s actually rather small! Next, take Automobile deaths per year, and compare them to gun deaths! Another gap! Yet Automobiles, for their sincere advantages over (gasp!) walking, they will never be banned. Since guns don’t necessarily have a practical use in modern society — not here, here, here or even here! — (sigh) nevermind. The above videos are a reminder that it isn’t always the criminal who has the firearms. But let me tell you that these videos would be far more gruesome and tragic if those same firearms were banned. Across the United States, the most common gun-related robberies are related to Pizza-Deliverers, who are lured to the robbers home… or taxi drivers. California has been very hard-pressed to ban firearms to the public, but considering how many well-armed gangs there are in California, I would say that it would be very stupid to disarm the innocent half
Another point that I have, is that many news casters and journalists very rarely look at Police Reports given to the public for common knowledge, which will show the actual numbers recorded with Firearm Involvement with Crimes, as opposed to “trusting” private research institutes. The number of true gun-related assaults are very small, even in urban cities. Well, this is because of how expensive Firearms are in a Gun-Shop, and surprisingly (or not so) more expensive in the underground trades. Not to mention, a knife is more deadly than a gun in many aspects. For one, a bullet when penetrating a soft target may only cause a small entrance wound, and an exit wound of only an inch or so more wide (With the exception of Hollow-Points, and some larger rounds/cartridges.) Most deaths related to gunfire are mostly due to shock and bleed-outs, but they can actually be treated easily. Knives on the other hand are much more mortal. Do your own research, I don’t really need to explain the idea of metal slowly rubbing against skin, as opposed to a bullet that shoots faster than the blink of an eye.
Rather than outright banning the Private Trade and Selling of Firearms, why not just require a permit that requires schooling and training? If a Police Officer must pass a training exam to earn his 9mm, why shouldn’t common folk like us? And I don’t strictly mean being able to hit the bulls’ eye at least 3 of 50 shots, I mean proper handling and knowledge. You know, the most important aspects of knowing when, where, how, and why to use a firearm for personal protection. If someone doesn’t know how to properly store their weapons away from children, or even the robbers themselves, they shouldn’t own a weapon of any kind. In fact, either your child should never know you have a firearm, or you should at least have the common sense to teach them about how dangerous the weapon is. No, wait, always educate everyone about dangerous tools that you have around your home. Or, just don’t own one.
My main point is, that the Gov’t should have the option to regulate weapon trade as far as difficulty goes, but remember that there will always be someone with a much more easy way to sell a gun – even if it were illegal. Just look at how well banning Marijuana has improved in keeping it away from people. Heh, not very well. The Gov’t also needs to constantly remember just why Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wanted the public to own firearms. Personal Defense, yes, but more importantly so the public can rise up and have a fighting chance against any possible dictatorship. It is so that a Militia can defend their country in time of dire need, should it arise, instead of running away. If many of our own revolutionaries ran away from conflict, then Britain may still be in control of America, Canada, India, and Africa with their colonies. Perhaps even China would be a part of their growing colonization? Oh wait, guns were only a small portion of the American Revolution. Barely anyone remembers all the talk, paperwork, and community aid that actually won-over the war for America, and all that jazz.
Dislocating Discourses; Rewriting Boundaries
This weekend my parents’ friends are visiting some obscure little village in some Dusty Part of India, because they apparently have a house there — and they didn’t even know it! — and the lovely Government wants to run it down and make a road connecting two villages, all in the name of progress that almost never reaches people it professes to help. After dinner, while cleaning up my Mum wondered out loud how different their lives would have been, had they lived in that house instead of this one in Mumbai. My sister and my cook began to imagine hilarious scenarios of stereotypical country life, of menial labour — because bonded labour is the new funny, People Of The Olde Interwebes — and suddenly she exclaimed, “They would speak a different Gujarati! And their English would sound like something out of a bad nightmare. I’m so glad they live here”. The idea that language and dialect would be different troubled her, especially that the family’s English wouldn’t be as ‘polished’ as it is now; their past-present-futures are different when this new dialect is injected in. The friends in question started marking the differences, he said he wouldn’t have been a corporate lawyer, she wouldn’t have been able to work and so on. Through this dinner I was stuck with a bitter taste in my mouth thinking how easily the Other is always an intruder, a predator, dangerous; it unsettles this well-established center. The Lady in question concluded, “We could be better people living here. Can you imagine us there? We would have probably been zamindars or something” and many other UnEntertaining variants of playing the Desi Coloniser. It’s always easy to claim superiority if you’ve already relegated a space that unbelongs and is unhinged as different, for this is what difference boils down to, an excuse to claim, possess and punish in one swift act¹.
Long after this dinner, I was still thinking of the above conversation. I couldn’t put down exactly what unsettled me so deeply, it was only when I started rereading Spivak’s essay ‘Can The Subaltern Speak?’ did the pieces fit together. At one point she writes, “The Coloniser constructs himself as he constructs the colony”; like did this couple. While imagining this alternative life, their present life was romanticised and their rural “would-have’s” were conspicuously ‘backward’, which is precisely why selling away that house didn’t pose a big problem to them. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only instance I’ve heard or experienced where more ‘developed’ or narratives of ‘progress’ take center stage. This week my friend put up a picture of me on Facebook dressed in traditional Indian clothes. A few people who know me from my blog and know this friend found it startling that someone who speaks so ‘freely’ and ‘liberally’ on many issues can choose to bend down tradition’s way. These are times when my ethnic identity or just wearing ‘ethnic’ dress becomes interchangeable with embodying tradition and essentialism; the alternative is to completely disengage with this identity and embrace being
‘universal’Western. What’s the problem with e-showing and choosing to dapple in my ethnicity — out here as a Hindu woman of a certain caste and class privilege – you say? More often than not, I’m perceived as someone who doesn’t necessarily have a voice or someone who is touting for my country’s oft spoken about ‘traditionalism’. Anyone who knows me, even a little bit, knows about my strong distaste for patriarchy. Somehow in traditional clothes, the ‘me’ they saw was a different one, and immediately an inferior one. One acquaintance even wrote to me asking if everything was okay because as she put it, “This is so out of character for you!”. And on Facebook, a tiny argument broke out assessing if I’ve changed or not; while no one talks to me just about me. This is another advantage of being Othered — as DustyLadies, this is a common experience for us — words fly all about you, but you will never be able to catch them. Like the figure of Sati (the widow who has to put herself on her husband’s pyre and be immolated with him), there are only two readings of DustyLadies. Either some ‘progressive’ Westerner is telling us how terrible our lives are, because we follow certain traditions or our Male Counterparts who speak for us (like they did in the case of Sati) and almost always showcase tradition as a voluntary act. Meanwhile the woman on the pyre burns.Disgruntled by the thin demarcation between ‘ethnic’ and ‘orthodox’ I turned to a few close activists who know the rural realities of my country better than I do to see if there was anything of credit in this construction at all. While they understood and sympathised with my situation when speaking in a Glocal context, they referred to Indian rural women as “ourselves undressed” more than once. While this binary is troubling, damaging and too narrow, this is a very common opinion; it perhaps even has a dash of truth lodged somewhere between the Othering and imperialism. But once again, voices are being dubbed as ‘tongue-dumb’, as ‘backwater verses’ and god knows what else — I had tuned out of the conversation long before this part — these voices are repeatedly disallowed of agency and choice. My school teacher always talked of dislocating discourses from their words and environment, to see them empirically in order to arrive at a fair conclusion. One Dalit activist I know is trying to get her anthology of short stories published, and is often rejected because it doesn’t ‘tap into the tribal sentiment’ of Dalit women. Because her voice is different, because it cannot be localised to this part of this state, coming from this dialect and community, it’s declared ‘inauthentic’. Another example is of the poet Kamla Das who salaciously wrote her autobiography in order to earn much needed money, later she interrogates her fault at leaving out or exaggerating certain parts of her life, blaming the ruthless form of the autobiography for expecting a specific role out of her, and then she blames herself for giving in. Because, once again, her relationship with truth is a controversial one, her poems are rejected as ‘authentic’ experience of an Indian Woman. We still want to adhere to the well-formed Indian Doll Figurine in the words of Torru Dutt or Sarojini Naidu.
Voices of Dusty People — Dusty Ladies in particular — undergo a lot of censorship, self-imposed or otherwise, and in this case to dislocating such voices becomes a double bind, not only you strip them of any ethnicity, authenticity and value, they’re reduced to muffled words that easily slip into the ‘Ourselves Undressed’ bind that the West is waiting to devour. I’m not arguing that anyone who identifies themselves primarily through their ethnic persona is wrong but rather I am more than what I dress, how I speak. When you ‘other’ me, immediately cast me two steps below everyone else because of my difference, dislocated from my soil, all you will find is an empty shell of ‘me’.
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1. See the brief history of colonisation circa start of time till present date.
Posted by Jaded on November 26, 2010
http://jaded16.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/dislocating-discourses-rewriting-boundaries/