Is Virtual Reality The Ultimate Training Machine For School Shooters?
This is exactly what President Trump recently suggested. "I’m hearing more and more people seeing the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts," the president said in Florida recently. Thankfully, scientific studies---not to mention the Supreme Court---suggest otherwise. For the time being at least, the First Amendment remains outside Second Amendment hardliners' cross-hairs.
Writing at CNN, Jeremy Bailenson, author of Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do and director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, argues that VR could be a dangerously accessible way for mass shooters to learn how to kill more efficiently.
"if a possible mass-shooter wants to hone his craft, we shouldn't hand him an over-the-counter digital boot camp."
This is a rather extreme claim with frankly staggering implications. It's also incredibly silly, bordering on preposterous. Bailenson doesn't argue that we should censor or ban VR shooting games, but he does come up with some odd suggestions to make them less effective as "virtual bootcamps" despite, well, not being that at all.
Writing op/eds about virtual boot camps is only good for one thing: To provide virtual ammunition for the NRA and its toadies in government to steer the conversation away from guns and toward a scapegoat.
See the full opinion piece here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/03/08/no-virtual-reality-games-are-not-virtual-bootcamps-for-mass-shooters/#1e32a9646a2c