One week ago, Susan Du reported Rep. Jeff Backer tries to blame Minnesota's ag pollution on... goose shit in the City Pages, where readers learn:
The Department of Agriculture has referenced extensive research by the University of Minnesota on nitrogen fertilizer's role in groundwater contamination, and in 2013 the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency published a detailed study, "Nitrogen in Minnesota Surface Waters," which included a shoutout to bird shit.
According to that study, geese are an example of a "very low [nitrogen] contributor," responsible for "approximately 0.1 percent of the statewide nitrogen load to waters."
Reading around in rural newspapers this sunny April afternoon, Bluestem learns in the Stevens County News report, Audience seeks Westrom, Backer support on two gun bills, that Backer has used a similar deflection strategy while addressing school shootings:
Minnesota State Sen. Torrey Westrom, R-Elbow Lake, and Rep. Jeff Backer, R-Browns Valley, spent most of their town meeting in Morris on March 23 listening to audience members ask them to support stricter gun laws in Minnesota.
Westrom and Backer were at the Morris Public Library from about 11:15 a.m. to noon.
Westrom and Backer said that school safety is a topic during this year's legislative session.
An audience member asked if the two legislators would support two bills that would make the state safer in relation to guns. . . .
Westrom and Backer said the Second Amendment must also be considered when gun laws are discussed.
Audience members said universal background checks would not infringe on the rights of a law abiding citizen.
Backer said there are many issues involved with school safety from violent video games to pornography that degrades women and access to mental health services. . . .
That approach sounds as if he's channeling Kentucky governor Matt Bevins' utterances in February. Newsweek reported in Guns Aren't Responsible for School Shootings, Blame Music and Video Games: Republican Governor:
Just a day after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Bevin limited his public criticism to the First Amendment, not the Second.
"I'm a big believer in the First Amendment and right to free speech, but there are certain things that are so graphic as it relates to violence, and things that are so pornographic on a whole another front that we allow to pass under the guise of free speech, which arguably are," he told the Enquirer. "But there is zero redemptive value. There is zero upside to any of this being in the public domain, let alone in the minds and hands and homes of our young people."
Rolling Stone reported in Blaming Video Games for School Shootings Is Misguided, Dangerous:
Those who perpetrate acts of violence in schools are more than three times less likely to play violent video games than an average high school student.
Politicians, are once again, wasting no time blaming video games for the Valentine’s Day shootings in Florida which left 17 dead at a high school near Boca Raton.
During a radio interview, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin blamed video games for creating a “culture of death” and argued that these games are “. . . garbage. It’s the same as pornography. They have desensitized people to the value of human life, to the dignity of women, to the dignity of human decency. We’re reaping what we’ve sown here.” This politician is mimicking the rhetoric of a small vocal minority of video game researchers who have been blaming video games for school shootings and other horrific acts of violence for decades. With little to no evidence they have testified before congress claiming “. . . an estimated 10 percent to 30 percent of violence in society can be attributed to the impact of violent media.” Published op-eds declaring “Controlling the use of violent video games is one step we can take to protect our society from violence.” And even claiming that the public health risk of violent video games is comparable to that of smoking and lung cancer. The problem is such fear mongering provides politicians with a red herring to hide behind while avoiding addressing the real issues related to violence.
When scholars have examined real-world violence – school shootings, homicide, and aggregated assault – any tiny links between video games and mundane acts of aggression completely disappears. Research done by the US Secret Service and our laboratories have both found that less than 20 percent of school shooters played violent video games with any amount of regularity. Not only is interest in violent video games rare among school shooters, these perpetrators express much less interest in this violent medium than most other individuals. If you were to enter any school in America you would find that about 70 percent of the male students habitually play violent video games. If there is any link between violent video games and school shootings it is in the opposite direction expressed by politicians and researchers examining irritating loud noise exposure – those who perpetrate acts of violence in schools are more than three times less likely to play violent video games than an average high school student.
And in the New York Times' Do Video Games Lead to Mass Shootings? Researchers Say No.:
Media scholars say the claims about video games and violent movies — a common one in the wake of mass shootings — does not hold up to scrutiny.
In a 2005 essay for PBS, Henry Jenkins, a professor at the University of Southern California, said that juvenile crime in the United States was at a 30-year low even though large numbers of young people play video games.
“Researchers find that people serving time for violent crimes typically consume less media before committing their crimes than the average person in the general population,” he wrote. When it comes to video games, he said, “the overwhelming majority of kids who play do not commit antisocial acts.”
According to a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of American adults — including roughly equal numbers of men and women — play video games, whether on a computer, a TV, a gaming console, or a portable device like a cellphone or an iPad.
In Japan, about 60 percent of the population played video games in 2016, according to NewZoo, a gaming market research company. But almost no one is killed by a gun in the country, which bans possessing, carrying, selling, or buying handguns or rifles. There were only six gun deaths in Japan in 2014, compared with over 33,000 in the United States, according to GunPolicy.org, which tracks published reports on armed violence, firearm law and gun control.
In 2013, The New York Times looked at research on whether games negatively affect long-term behavior, and more recent science does not contradict these findings.
A burst of new research has begun to clarify what can and cannot be said about the effects of violent gaming. Playing the games can and does stir hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior in the short term. Moreover, youngsters who develop a gaming habit can become slightly more aggressive — as measured by clashes with peers, for instance — at least over a period of a year or two.
Yet it is not at all clear whether, over longer periods, such a habit increases the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime, like murder, rape or assault, much less a Newtown-like massacre. (Such calculated rampages are too rare to study in any rigorous way, researchers agree.)
The argument that violent video games are to blame for real-world violence has been rejected by conservative titans including Justice Antonin Scalia. In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that violent video games promote real-life violence when it ruled 7 to 2 in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that California could not ban the sale of violent video games to children.
“Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively,” said Justice Scalia, writing for the five justices in the majority. “Any demonstrated effects are both small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other media.”
Bluestem isn't a fan of any sort of video games--and while we can see the connection to porn and the degradation of women, it doesn't seem connected to school shootings like that in Parkland, where both young men and young women were murdered, along with the brave adults who tried to defend them.
Photo: Jeff Backer, sleeping during the 2017 Water Summit in Morris (photo by a now former constituent), as we reported in Republican guy who voted for Minnesota's buffer bill continues to grandstand against it. Maybe he slept through the news about nitrogen pollution and school shootings as well.
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