A few years ago, at TAM, Blake Stacey and I took Ben Goldacre to a shooting range — we wanted to introduce him to the real America. Once we got there, though, we discovered an unexpected challenge: we had to choose a paper target to shoot at, and most of them were horribly racist. It turns out you can’t choose a picture of a redneck picketing an abortion clinic to blow holes in, but you’ve got a wide range of photos of black people looking snarly and vicious and threatening to “kill”. We ended up choosing the most abstract target we could find, a mere black outline, which we discovered on closer inspection had all the major organ locations market out in grey. It was all a bit squicky.
This was several years ago, though, so we didn’t have the option of choosing this target, which is apparently quite popular right now.
Nothing scarier than a figure in a hoody, armed with iced tea and skittles, I guess.
There is a petition. You can sign it to try and make yourself feel a little better. I don’t think there’s a single thing that can be done to reconcile me to the fact that our country is populated with racist thugs and morons, though. It just is.
That is fucking horrible. Not even close to “funny” (I’m sure “it’s just an attempt to be funny” would be the first line of defense out of the mouths of the crackers who buy those targets…)
I used to think the Bin Laden targets were bad. But that takes the cake.
What’s the betting that the perpetrators of this sick insult are Christians?
How long will it take for them to come up with a PZ Myers target?
I’m guessing a few hours.
I’m sure someone has an Obama target already.
Nobody’s actually buying these.
Gun owners are completely responsible individuals who use their guns only for self-defense (except for the Other™ ones, from whom the guns are needed for defence) as every gun own will rush to assure us, ad nauseam until every argument of theirs are demolished and they retreat into “my cold, dead, hands” heel-diggery.
Augh.
WHY. Just WHY.
Cue the racist idiots whining “but he wasn’t a little boy like the media says– He was a 17 year old MAN!” * as if that excuses anything or makes the law seem any less hypocritical.
* Along with many other forms of derailing
For fuck’s sake.
This has been all over the internet for days now– imagine how Trayvon’s mom and dad must feel after seeing this shit. My heart breaks for them.
I would ask if the people who designed the target and the people who use the target have any compassion, but I know the answer to that and it scares the pants off of me.
Signed. Didn’t work. I don’t feel the least bit better about myself or humanity yet.
But No True
Christiangun enthusiast would countenance such a thing.I’m afraid of Americans.
Well, how else are they to “Stop Obama’s Gun Ban”?
When I first heard about this, the report stated that the target had already been taken off the market.
What’s the matter with a nice outline of John Dillinger, like in the old days. Or maybe just actual targets. You know, like a set of concentric circles with numbers in them. (Not to be confused with the smock that 7-11 employees ware.)
Here’s a poem with a bit of nicely integrated science.
OUTDOOR SHOWER
Crusted with dried salt, dusted with
sand, shaking from the cold Atlantic,
hair gristled with crystals, tangled with the
jellied palps of wrack—just step on this
slatted rack, pull the iron
handle of the forged world toward you.
The sluice courses, down your body,
in a swirling motion, milk smoke, the
silky rush of fresh water, supple and alkaline.
Eyes shut, you reach for the small
oil torso of soap, run it
along your limbs and whirl it on the points of the
three-point shower star of sex:
arm-pit, arm-pit, sex. Then the gritty
dial of your face, lather it and bring it
under the coursing and open your mouth,
stone-sweet well-water,
and then the head,
delve it in so the sand around the scalp
dances like the ions at the edges of matter,
and the shampoo, mild soldier,
take her by the shoulders and pour the gold eel on your head.
Then feel them going:
salp, chitin, diatom, dulse, the
blind ones of the ocean. Rinse till it
pours down your head like water, the dark
descendant pelt of the land creature. Now open your eyes—
green lawn, grey pond,
white dune, blue Atlantic,
the simple fields of God, liquid and solid.
Turn and turn in hot water,
column of heat in the cool wind and
sunny air, squeeze your eyes and then
open them again—look, it is still there,
the world as heaven, your body at the edge of it.
— Sharon Olds (November 1989)
Really? Why the fuck is this necessary?
Also, from the comments thread of the gun blog linked by the link in OP:
-Idiot 1: As for the people complaining about this,where are they when a hoodie wearing thug puts a bullet through the head of an innocent 2 yr old child during a drive-by in New Orleans.I never hear a thing out of Al or Jessie for this.Not enough media coverage I suppose,or that the fact that the perp is black makes it a non issue.
—Idiot 2: just remember what naacp stands for and it will make sense. No Action Against Colored People
Whoops. Apologies. I meant to post the poem in The Endless Thread.
The company that makes “skittles” may have something to say about that.
I do not want some silly petition. I want this guy sued for every penny he ever made and ever will make. Then I want the list of his customers who bought this put online. We will then see how “proud” these cockroaches are of their views.
#11 It was taken off the market because they sold out.
Wait…the shooting range didn’t have any normal targets? Only human forms? Is this common in the US?
I’ve shot guns a few times in my life and I haven’t ever even seen any target other than (what I consider) a normal target, i.e. one that you can use to keep score.
Of course here the laws are sane in that self-defense is not considered a valid reason for a gun license. Valid reasons are hunting or competitive shooting, and practicing using a human-shaped target would kind of put a lie to that…
The person behind this “product” was asked about it and he simply stated that he wanted to make some money off of this controversy.
The greed is good crowd need to go.
Our religious “moral betters” are more concerned about the detrimental effects of gay marriage and birth control, even though greed is one of the big seven. And they will happily support the “greed is good” crowd to address those issues, continue supporting a system that makes people more and more selfish, and wonder why things are getting worse.
Oh… My… Non-existent God.
@#17: It does not put the lie to that, it reinforces that. They do want to hunt humans. Carefully selected parts of humanity.
@Alverant #16
That’s my recollection as well. I first read about this on Gawker (which is admittedly not exactly a paragon of journalism), but the person who created it was quoted as saying that he was in it for all the money he could get.
http://gawker.com/5909587/seller-of-trayvon-martin-gun-range-targets-says-they-sold-out-in-two-days
There’s really nothing I can say about this. I live in a country where a young man can be shot on his way home from a convenience store, and his killer isn’t even charged until after massive public outcry. I live in a country in which someone can make and sell out of a target that basically declares open season on human beings. I think that a lot of the people who refuse to acknowledge the latent racism laid bare just don’t want to believe that this is the country in which they live.
Here’s the shooting range you need PZ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk01a63Imt8
Yea, I hate that motherfucker too.
Don’t loose all hope. Here in Kentucky my coworkers favor http://www.amazon.com/Zombie-Targets-Patient-Zero-Inches/dp/B004F8AZJO
I used to oppose gun ownership. Then I found out that the person most likely to be killed by a gun is the gun’s owner.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9747969
I still oppose gun ownership. But now I’m much more comfortable with the status quo.
Speaking of racists, John Derbyshire has decided to strip off the shiny varnish from his road-apple and display it for all to see at VDARE
(VDARE is a white supremacist site. You have been warned.)
What is funny, fifty years ago, this would have been acceptable for The National Review. If you go through the archives, you will find articles at VDARE that gleefully points this out. (I read these about a decade ago and I have no fucking desire to dig through old outhouses.)
But we will always have Johan Goldberg to be the respectable face of conservatism.
*snort*
Typo monster strikes again. That should be “Jonah”.
Of course the guy’s going to claim he sold them out. He also claimed (much later) that he was going to donate the proceeds to Zimmerman’s defense. Yeah, and the check’s in the mail.
Let’s be clear on this — I find those targets offensive and think the sentiment behind them is repugnant. I’m just saying I doubt this guy did anything other than squeak in fright and rush to take his page down as soon as he saw the reaction.
@DLC:
I know the adage “never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity” sometimes fits, but I don’t think it does here.
The guy is an asshole. I believe any amount of assholish stuff about him, and I’m not about to deny that there are other assholes out there who bought his stuff out. And yes, I’m ready to believe he wanted to do this for Zimmerman’s defense.
Sigh… What is needed is a special photocopy machine, and a sign, “Place stand here for a photo, before using range.”
I don’t have words for how vile this is. Is there any chance that the Hiller Armament Company will actually suffer for being such sick fucks? (financially, since they clearly have zero capacity for realising or caring what they’ve done. It would be fitting if at least they lost everything)
Every time that I start to think that maybe things are getting a little better I can count on P.Z. to spoil my illusion. I live and work around racists and homophobes and that picture still caught me off guard. More than anything else it made me feel impotent. I had really hoped to see an America that wasn’t hate-ridden in my lifetime. Now I hope that the next generation will see it. The age of the crowd at the reason rally and the fact that some of the children of racists that I know are realizing the stupidity of their parents opinions shows me that it will get better over time. I just don’t believe any more that any sizable percentage of existing bigots are open minded enough to let anything that I say or do influence them. I won’t stop trying but this is one more thing to make me think that most of what we say falls on deaf ears.
EnoNomi @23
That was great. promoting those might do exactly what I was alluding to, keeping some of the insanity from being reinforced in the next generation.
When I went to a shooting range last year, we got taught basics with oval-shaped targets about a foot tall the long way. There were also plain human forms and one with a burka (sp?).
RE; my comment @ 31
To be fair P.Z. has done a great many things to brighten my day on several occasions. This just wasn’t one of them.
Because women in burqas are the main threat?
Hey, let’s practice shooting at oppressed people!
SallyStrange: bottom-feeding, work-shy peasant
NIN…right they are, spot-on! Loved it!
[Applies tongue to cheek]
Ok, that’s it. PZ just stop.
Some people accuse you of manufacturing outrage, or at least marketing your website on it. Some people say you profiteer by highlighting misery, some people think that there is so much arseholery going on in the world that if you even reported on a fraction of it people would be lynching themselves.
Frankly, I couldn’t give a shit about any of that. I reckon it’s a red herring to distract from the fact that, more often than not, you’re making arguments about the status quo that people cannot refute.
Anyway, just stop. I am lying here with a liver the size of a withered peanut after a weekend of drinking so prodigious it might have created a new reality and you show me something as heinously racist as a Trayvon-esque gun target. At last have you no decency, man? I’m in a weakened state. I can’t process that level of bile.
I haven’t even read the thread yet and in 30-some comments, there’s bound to either be a gun nut or a racist or a troll saying something that even the world’s premier medications could not touch when it comes to blood pressure.
Just do me a favour, no cephalopods, they’re cute when my cerebrum is in top shape, but now I want visceral cute. Cute that hits the hind brain hard, yo. I need puppies, STAT. I want IV kittens farting rainbows. I want cute wickle babies with big eyes. And no cunning blenders, or out of control mowers. I, one of your readership, demand recompense in the form of Teh Cyoot.
I will accept photos of gay kisses and absurdly rainbow/colours of Benetton families as a substitute. But dammit man, make with the love, make with the cute, make with something that warms the cockles of the heart maintenant.
I am going to look at LOLcats right now, and maybe, just maybe if that doesn’t work I will consider looking at the Daily Squee. But that’s the hard shit. That’s like mainlining rainbow coloured fluffy sugar delivered by a bliss ninny on ecstasy. It may be a cute spiral I never return from. I could return to this site thinking that “we should all just get along” or “homeopathy works for some people” or worse “I think christianity is love”. Seriously, in my weakened state ANYTHING could happen.
Just show us some love PZ, just a little chink of light.
[/Tongue in cheek]
Louis
Janine,
Well, yeah. You wouldn’t want to shoot at the powerful, would you?
Revolution is like comedy; one should shoot up, not down.
There are racists in the Greek parliament as well and there is a petition to get Google to stop hosting their blogs: http://www.change.org/petitions/google-suspend-the-official-greek-nazi-party-blogs-on-blogger
Hey! I’m a gun owner, and I agree with you folks 100%. There’s a sickness in the gun enthusiast subculture that is racist, more generally anti-American, and bordering on treasonous. It isn’t every gun owner of course… but it is way more than enough of them that the broad-brush generalization isn’t at all unfair.
America’s got a thread of racism and violence that runs through our entire history, and yet every time something like this happens there are people who make excuses for it or pretend that this is some sort of temporary response to something like a black man in the White House and that things will soon settle down. The reality is that this is America, this is who we are as a country, and the fact that people are more or less open about it under different circumstances doesn’t mean that it isn’t always prevalent just under the surface.
I’ve gone shooting at three different ranges in Texas, and at all those either profile targets (a shape of a torso and head in orange or some other high contrast color) or circle targets were the norm. Most give one free target, then sell others, and the freebie is as I mentioned. There are some others that look like generic criminals, I’m sure there’s terrorists also, and of course zombies. And this is in Texas. At the gun shows there’s one vendor that sells lots of different targets, and again, they are mostly orange and used for scoring. Those with pictures of someone cost a good bit more, and so are really a waste of money.
Joe #40
If gun owners were on the whole a lot more responsible with their weapons, there wouldn’t be such a big call for gun control. Personally I call for more gun responsibility than anything. I don’t care how many guns a person has provided they know how to use them properly and treat them with the respect owed a weapon that kills so easily that it could happen even by accident.
Alverant, I’m calling for more gun control. I don’t for a minute trust most of the people carrying guns to handle the responsibility, or to even understand that it is a responsibility at all.
Quick someone needs to make a zombie Jesus target.
@Joe
Except that being racist is in fact extremely American, as evidenced by the very controversy this thread is about, and “treason” is a totalitarian concept based on allegiance to real estate over principles.
Calling bad people “un-American” is the same as calling them “un-christian”. It’s pretending that everything good is your country/ideology and everything bad isn’t. Please don’t do it.
Seriously, I’ve only EVER heard either of those words used unironically by Americans. If I called someone an “un-German traitor” here I’d probably wind up on some sort of secret service watchlist.
There’s been a fair few people here wondering why some countries have hate speech laws. This is why. To stop this sort of shit.
@Zeppelin
I get what you’re saying, but I was talking in a literal sort of “armed warfare from within, with the goal of destroying the nation” meaning rather than a more philosophical “not adhering to a presumed set of principles and values” sort of thing. Kind of “let’s kick off the race war already, I’m tired of Alabama being connected to California by laws and/or geography… can we rewrite geography?!?!”
Does anyone remember how upset the Republican Tea Partiers were when it was suggested that the marks used on Sarah Palin’s map to indicate which Democrat politicians to vote against looked like rifle cross-hair? (Especially the one targeting Gabrielle Giffords’s congressional seat)
There have been Obama targets complete with watermelon since the 2008 election.
The funny/sick thing about “Obama’s Gun Ban” is that there isn’t one. When he had 60 votes in the Senate and a majority in the House the Democrats put forward no gun control bills at all. Not one. In fact, Obama signed into law bills broadening the right to keep and bear arms. The silence from the thugs who make up the Right was deafening.
Meanwhile they are all getting down on their knees to give sloppy rim jobs to Mitt Romney. Romney pushed through several gun control bills as governor of Massachusetts including making the Ugly Gun Ban permanent.
And yes, I’m a lifelong Democrat only because there isn’t a Socialist or Labor Party in this country. Card-carrying member of the ACLU. Race-mixing kike. CCW-holding, gun-owner who teaches women, Negroes *shudder* and queers how to shoot.
I’m with sosw on this; I’ve never even seen a target that was person shaped. Everything I’ve ever used was either a regular target shape or some empty container I pulled out of the recycling bin.
I enjoy target shooting, but the idea of shooting a person shaped target squicks me out (though I can neither confirm nor deny that I may once have used a photo of a colleague I hated).
well, as consolation then, I would tell you this, PZ:
History has shown these moronic sheep to be easily manipulable by controlling the message their trusted authorities provide to them.
There *might* be a higher percentage of them now than say, just post WWII, but nothing has changed otherwise.
so, there’s hope, just not the kind of hope where you will get some kinda fucking miracle by hoping the authoritarians will all just disappear one day.
There’s really only one pragmatic choice at this point:
control the message.
…it’s a brave new world.
And those very same people are also saying that we can’t hold Mitt Romney responsible for assaulting another person when he was “only” 17.”
A common form of practice target in the US is this:
Person-esque target
I can understand why you would be squicked out. However, has anyone here ever played a video game that involved shooting of any kind? Even amazing, smart, very humanist video games like Mass Effect often have humanoid targets – do you get squicked out by that? Or is it different because the weapon and the target aren’t real?
…Wow, link fail.
Well, carlie, everyone knows that crime hardened black street thugs grow up faster than pampered white rich prep-school kids….
Rip, it’s the context that makes up much of the squick. If Mass Effect had a humanoid enemy in a hoodie carrying a bottle of iced tea and a bag of skittles (which it threw at you to ping you to death, one hit point at a time), that would be pretty squicky. Whereas a hoodie wearing baddy in any gun firing video game would not have been that squicky before the Trayvon Martin killing.
1) I actually do get squicked a bit playing games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect
2) It’s that reason that I actually wish the games would implement a mercy mechanic…especially for fucking Skyrim where enemies psuedo surrender. That’s just needless as it means it’s a choice between breaking character if you’re trying to play good and killing someone whose giving up, or ignore them long enough so they start attacking you again.
3) Big difference between that and making it in the shape of an actual murder victim.
4) Humanoid targets in videogames have some difference in that they move and are fighting back, so RP wise you can justify it as self defense
Good question, Rip. For me, games with human/humanoid targets aren’t squicky because they aren’t real, and as Amphiox says, context is quite important. The target pictured here is squicky because it references a real event. Pre-Trayvon, I would have thought it was absurd (I mean, the figure has Skittles and a drink, how can he be a threat? Why would you ever shoot this guy?) Now though, it’s disturbing. And I think in general it would be hard to shoot a real gun at a person-shaped target without it bringing to mind the concept of shooting a person.
There was a sign on the wall above the trash can outside the front door of that shooting range. It read, with an arrow pointing down, “Voting for Obama? Throw your guns here!”
Rip:
I don’t get squicked out, no. But it’s about the fantasy– with my actions, I’m not saying that a real person deserves to die again or that his death is the fodder for “jokes”. With games like Mass Effect I’m not going to hurt anyone further by taking out Reapers or Cerberus troops or whatever, nor am I reinforcing that racist bullshit.
Video games are (generally) not particularly realistic, except the Call of Duty series, but even that rarely makes it ‘Country A vs Country B’, you tend to play as people from across nationalities. I personally don’t like Call of Duty, but compared to say…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Cleansing_(video_game)wherein you run around killing black people, latino people, and Jewish people, and then the prime minister of Israel; it’s extremely nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Cleansing_(video_game) wherein*
You’d be surprised how easy and even satisfying it is to shoot a human-shaped target with a real firearm when you’re in the right frame of mind. 13 weeks in Marine Corps boot camp makes it real easy to “war game” killing all sorts of people in all sorts of situations with all sorts of weapon, or with your bare hands. I don’t even particularly object to that sort of training, because it will save the lives of the people trained to think that way.
I DO object to people with that sort of training being part of an occupying force like in Iran and Afghanistan. Military training isn’t police training, and when interacting with a civilian population, police training is leaps and bounds more appropriate than military training. Long-term occupation of civilian areas by military troops leads directly to the atrocities we’ve seen over the last decade, and the people in charge should be locked up for creating the environment where war crimes were inevitable.
I also object to America police being outfitted in military gear, transported in military vehicles, and pretending to be an occupying military force when dealing with the public. Believe me when I tell you, putting on a uniform changes who you are and how you act. I spent four years in the Marines and didn’t have my hands in my pockets for more than 20 minutes of those four years, because you learn to carry yourself differently when you’re usually in uniform. When you’re in full combat gear, you automatically get ramped up whether you like it or not. You’re primed for action, and action means violence, and whoever you’re acting against becomes the enemy. It is no surprise that when civilian police wear full tactical gear, they tend to use excessive force. The clothes make the (hu)man, and tactical gear makes people violent.
So in case anyone can’t see where I’m going, I’m especially disturbed by civilian gun owners adopting a militaristic mindset. They don’t have the sort of daily discipline over their lives that the military has, or that even the police have. The military and police have all that innate organizational discipline, and they STILL screw it up more often than not, so what chance does a civilian have to control their actions when they are armed and pretending to be warriors?
That’s why I’m all for incredibly strict gun control… because the best of us become the worst imaginable even with the weight of heavy restrictions, so there’s no way to pretend that regular people with no restrictions won’t become murderers given half an excuse.
Military training was actually changed after WWII specifically to make it easier for soldiers to pull the trigger on a human-shaped target, conditioning them to fire reflexively at the target without thinking of the target as a human being. After observations and reports concerning the reluctance of WWII soldiers to fire at the enemy, this change in training was instituted to plug what was perceived to be a gap in the training of soldiers. Thus by the time of Vietnam, the “willingness to fire” rate had almost doubled.
The irony being that despite this supposed “improvement” in soldiering effectiveness, the US military was never again as successful tactically and strategically as WWII, and neither did any post-conflict occupation ever turn out as well as the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan did.
@Amphiox:
I’d say that the training would have been awesome if America had ever got to fight WWII Part 2. Unfortunately for the architects of that style of warfare, we’ve never been in that sort of environment again. And the larger point that I was trying to make is that if the military training is less than useful on the battlefield, how much more of a disaster is a half-assed version of that training delivered to an untrained civilian population that can be more heavily armed than the soldiers in wars 70 years ago?
I’m a fairly active gamer, have been since the early 80s. I play a decent selection of games (although I’m not into most FPSs, especially military ones and multiplayer ones) and I find them totally impossible to compare to target shooting. Oh and although I enjoyed them, I’m not sure if I’d consider the Mass Effect series all that smart or humanist…
Anyhow, the main reason I find games significantly different is that they have an entire fictitious world, not just a single fictitious target, and the worlds provide narrative and context. One of the reason most games involve killing things is that it’s the easiest way to have antagonists that can make a game…well, a game (it takes some extra cleverness to make a game with plot without something like that – games like Portal are not exactly common). Often they involve role-playing – you are forced to be or can choose to be the bad guy. And you can make choices from the perspective of your character rather than yourself.
Context and narrative are everything. That’s why to me shooting human-shaped target would feel weird, but shooting actual people with a paintball gun, or shooting (or blasting with magic, slashing with swords etc.) virtual people in a virtual world doesn’t.
Rip: One of the essential differences is in the physical properties of the objects you are controlling. With video games you’re practicing pushing buttons on a device that cannot have any effect on the real world. In a gun range you are controlling an object that could end someone’s life right then and there should one be evil enough to step back far enough to point it at another person.
I’ve occasionally been squicked enough by video games when the brutality of the game play is extreme to stop playing. But I’ve been weirded out every single time I’ve shot a gun regardless of the nature of the target. The realisation that the object I’m holding is designed to end life makes it an uncomfortable experience.
Sort of on topic. The race of the victim isn’t explictly mentioned, but take a guess.
Yes, all gun owners are racist morons. Lump us all in one group. We’re just a stereotype.
That target is horrible, but you’re painting with a pretty broad brush here.
Does it honestly not cross any of your minds that the racist prick who printed this is just looking for a shitload of free publicity and “Buzz”?
And here you lining up to give it to them.
Congratulations, suckers.
“I don’t know how to argue and support a claim, so I just assume my conclusions.”
erichoag, you can’t even seem to approximate a thinking person by accident.
“Buzz” off.
Note to erichoug, the phrase “no publicity is bad publicity” is a falsehood.
And you can rest assured that whatever publicity they might be trying to get, their target audience is NOT going to be anyone who frequents this blog to any extent.
On the other hand, the people who might be energized to oppose what these racist pricks are doing, on a meaningful level, ARE.
Which brings us back full circle: Earth to erichoug, the phrase “no publicity is bad publicity” is a falsehood, generally used as a means of self-comfort and self-deception by someone who is drowning in a morass of bad publicity.
Not unlike what is about to happen to you here, after managing to excrete out a comment of such monumental ignorance as you have just done.
Why yes it did occur to me and I dismissed it as irrelevant.
I also occurred to me that the ones who most benefit from hateful shit being ignored are the people who derive their incomes from exploiting the fears of others. Exposing bigotry each and everytime it rears it’s ugly head and might become unacceptable to claim in public that everyone who doesn’t recite the right magic spell deserves to be tortured forever. Can’t have that, might cut into one’s* profits after all.
*And by “one” I mean fear-mongering Cymothoa exigua like erichoag.
Have a lost and lonely “it” to be inserted above in the position most pleasing to you grammatically. Sigh, good thing I’ve moved to Australia where I can blame my poor English on cultural differences. ;)
erichoug:
Fixed that for you.
Just ignore them – they’ll go away.
…right?
I was talking less about this specific target board (which is absolutely horrid and racist, obviously, but I felt I wasn’t up to the task of railing against it [I’m no Louis], and had a somewhat interesting thought) and more about humanoid targets in general. I’ve only fired a gun four times, all at my old TV at a quarry that’s been reappropriated by local gun enthusiasts, but I was curious to see what non-Americans, not used to our targets, thought about humanoid targets in video games, that’s all.
1) I actually do get squicked a bit playing games like Fallout 3 and Mass Effect
2) It’s that reason that I actually wish the games would implement a mercy mechanic…especially for fucking Skyrim where enemies psuedo surrender. That’s just needless as it means it’s a choice between breaking character if you’re trying to play good and killing someone whose giving up, or ignore them long enough so they start attacking you again.
3) Big difference between that and making it in the shape of an actual murder victim.
4) Humanoid targets in videogames have some difference in that they move and are fighting back, so RP wise you can justify it as self defense
1. Hm, I can’t really understand, having played violent video games from a young age. I’m desensitized to digital violence and I’m aware of it. On the other hand, I visibly cringe and usually look away whenever I see gory practical effects in film, so… I suppose polygons don’t bother me, but film and the real thing do. The Fallout series is definitely understandable though, the entirety of it is gory and deliberately disgusting to amp up the effect of “life after the bombs drop is the worst thing imaginable.” Mass Effect is a little harder to understand, considering there’s no gore. Its squick is much more psychological, like the *spoilers* child at the beginning of Mass Effect 3.
2. Funny enough, a mercy mechanic was implemented back in the 80s in Ultima IV. In that, to finish the game, you had to basically become the messiah by embodying 8 virtues, one of which was Honor. Being honorable involved not killing anything that’s fleeing, even always chaotic evil things like orcs. Bioshock also had a mercy mechanic, to a degree, with the Little Sisters.
Many games, actually, have small decisions where you can either be merciful or a ruthless bastard. A few games even have the option to go completely pacifist – interestingly, the first two Fallout games had this option where a highly charismatic, intelligent character could go for the entire game without firing a shot, and a few games allow you to pick non-lethal weaponry to make sure any bad guys are merely knocked out (Thief, the early Rainbow 6 games, SWAT, and the Deus Ex series allow this option, while the newest Batman games actually enforce this [Batman’s one rule, remember?])
3. Very, very true. Not much to say here.
4. Also true – when a band of raiders comes to kick your ass, you have roleplaying justification to respond with the force of your divinely powered asswhooping abilities (such as being the Dragonborn in Skyrim). However, as I mentioned above, a few games let you either talk your way out of a bad situation or respond violently but without killing them.
HTML hates me today. I quoted Ing in my last post.
If only these despicable, but ‘legal’ affronts had an equally legal means of protest that was proportionate to the repugnance of the act. Something along the lines of LITERALLY shoving a diseased porcupine carcass into painful orifices of the designers would be most apropos. What kind of knuckle-draggin’, gun-culture mental defectives would think this was…whatever the fuck they thought it was at the time. If they thought it was ‘funny’, I’m reserving the right of shoving two lemon juice marinated postmortem porcupines in each of ’em.
It’s more hoodie-ist than racist. If you regard hoodies as a black thing then it’s YOU closing the racist loop. Is there some stereotype about Skittles and canned tea I’m not catching? Of course if it were hoodie clad dude with a watermelon under one arm and a bucket of KCF in the other hand, then I’ll bite. Just old school I guess.
Follow-up. I totally didn’t know Skittles was a Trayvon Martin thing. Disregard previous. This target sucks.
I have seen similar kinds of silhouette targets all have been in bad taste and insulting jokes which I think is their appeal. Not interested just plain “bulls eyes” for me easier to tell what you are doing. In the army we had as I remember popup metal silhouettes mostly. I think the point was to get accustomed to man shaped targets that was the point to be able to kill other people.
I am not very fond of games where you shoot monsters or “bad guys” or any of the close quarters combat action type games. Tanks and planes and artillery OK.
I understand that people say that the games do not make you violent I do not know I have not read about the studies or do not know if there is any cause and effect or what it might be.
I have heard though that they do use simulators in training law enforcement and the military might be more than just a good sales job which it is. I think the training would come into effect under stress where there was not the time to think having already been used to killing man shaped targets.
It might be dangerous for me to be flying around in a fully armed P51!?
unclr frogy
Unclefroggy:
There is a method to the madness of having the human shaped and sized target for law enforcement and military. Very likely the psychological factor of overcoming aversion to shooting another person is part of it, but having the target of average human shape and size allows one to better gauge the range and effective shot groupings to take out a (hopefully legitimately targeted) criminal or enemy.
It should not be legal to sell items like this which are promotional of racist violence.
Currently, this would probably be prosecutable in the UK, although it’s just as likely that the police would confiscate the merchandise; that’s adequate, I think.
@ life is like a pitbull with lipstick ॐ
In South Africa you might be prosecutable under:
Obviously, one could try and weasel out by saying the target is of an individual and that the law was cast more generally. This all under the right to freedom of expression. Why did the law not take such individual instances into consideration? Perhaps because one could prevent the production and sale of such targets under the requirement that the individual is to be protected from others undermining: “Freedom and Security of the person”, “Life”, “Human Dignity”. Obviously only that last will apply in Trayvon’s particular case.
Your suggestion would likely be the route followed there too as it is the “less restrictive means to achieve the purpose.”
One tends to think that this shit is so bad that surely there is a law expressly forbidding such behaviour (as the selling of such targets), but no, this is not necessarily so. Such a thing would likely need to be fought out in court. (As much as I might feel personally shocked, I can see how this can be the better route by at least granting freedom of expression its day in court. )
I imagine it’d be hard for lawmakers to enumerate all the possible ways of encouraging racist violence.
And that’s even assuming they’ve been convinced that doing so is a laudable goal to begin with. A disturbing number appear to believe that bigoted violence is a useful social control.
Rip- I haven’t played any shooting games since DoomII (which I last played in 1999), but I vastly preferred shooting demons and undead to shooting Nazis in the Wulfenstein level. I loathed that level, and would usually use the cheat codes to skip most of it.
Why I liked that Fallout 3 had entire quests that could be done non-violently. Also ME2 had a lot more options to talk your way out of a fight (or rather talk them out of getting themselves killed)
By a mercy option I mean a chance to take someone prisoner rather than kill them when they surrender. It can’t be done in Fallout 3 or a lot of those settings where there’s no penal system, but Skyrim both has prisons and has enemies programed to surrender…Wtf?
I used to be a big fan of FPS-type games. However, after I took up shooting as a hobby, I actually did start to find pretending to shoot people (i.e. gaming) rather distasteful.
(But then, I was someone who generally tried to avoid civilian casulties in Syndicate, and spent ages trying to find a way to non-lethally take down Herman Gunther in Deus Ex)
Pretty much all the targets that are used at my range are the “black circle with rings”. The only “human” targets I’ve ever seen used are the old-fasioned “German Stormtrooper” ones (very rarely) and a blured/swirled-out version of the same that doesn’t obviously look like a humer (slightly more common).
Well, seeing, as you’re humans in racist societies, yeah, you actually are all racists, dude. You have no idea how pathetic you sound complaining about that in a thread about how gun owners are shooting at blatantly racist targets.
I recognize you had the sense to retract this idiotic statement, but do you have any idea how irritating it is when white people proclaim obviously racist things not to be racist, and that the anti-racist is the TRUE racist? Seriously now, just for forming that second thought, I’m still going to tell you to go fuck yourself.
I also cannot play God of War due to the villian protagonist
I actually have no problem with killing people in games. When I play as myself, I strive not to, you know, actually do so, choosing the most nonviolent solutions possible (Which was kind of hilarious in Dragon Age; Apparently letting literally every other humanoid I possibly could off the hook was fine with alistair, but not when his daddy issues are on the line), but that’s because that’s what I’d specifically do. If I’m not playing as myself in a game where that’s reasonable, I’ll have no problem doing it. I dunno, they’re not real. I couldn’t pull the trigger, or even just punch someone, absent real need, but however much it resembles one, a facsimile of a human isn’t a human. Maybe I’m just weird.
Also just fine and dandy in roleplaying games, to the extent I’m perfectly comfortable referring to mooks as ‘scenery’.
Improbable Joe wrote: “That’s why I’m all for incredibly strict gun control… because the best of us become the worst imaginable even with the weight of heavy restrictions, so there’s no way to pretend that regular people with no restrictions won’t become murderers given half an excuse.”
But Joe, the average civilian gun owner has far MORE restrictions placed on him, and far LESS presumption of innocence in a shooting, than police or military, and the vast majority of civilian gun owners do NOT descend into monstrosity or barbarity.
The Trayvon Martin case is mainly noteworthy because the shooter was a civilian. Police do things similar to what Zimmerman did, in similarly questionable circumstances, with alarming frequency and often little public attention.
http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2012/03/treyvon-martin-and-cult-of-government.html
I agree with you about the difference between military and police training, but there seems to be less and less difference between the two in America.
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america
I disagree about the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – there shouldn’t be US soldiers OR US policemen in those countries. It’s not a training issue, it’s a “should we occupy another country” issue. I say no.
I also disagree with your desire for extreme gun control. I believe that police and military personnel often behave with much less responsibility, and certainly less accountability, with their weapons, than do private citizens.
The Hoodie target is extremely stupid and in poor taste. So is a lot of what gets published in America. People who wish to ban “hate speech” should note, in some circles ‘blasphemy’ or speaking critically about religion has been characterized as hate speech. It grates, but if we stoop tp censoring assholes they’ll have a precedent with which to censor us. Grit your teeth and bear it, free speech isn’t pretty.
I shoot at silhouette targets when doing defensive handgun drills. There is no racial or political component to the targets that I select, but they are shaped like a generic head-shoulders-torso of a human male. I do not believe black people are the “enemy” nor do I subscribe to the racist ideology that produced the hoodie target, and I resent being labelled as racist because I own and use firearms. The things some fellow gun owners say about me because of my pro-gay, pro-abortion, atheist views are just as nasty as the things fellow atheists and liberals say about me because of my gun ownership.
The new Star Wars The Old Republic has a light side/dark side thing, usually, regardless of which “side” you are on, Republic or Sith Empire, you get the option of sparing someone, or cutting them down. This means you can be on the side of the Sith, and end up with a lot of light side points, or one the Jedi side, and be flat out evil about things.
However, such options are only provided with “key” bosses, not the general populous, and there are 1-2 enemies that will flat out refuse to let you arrest them, instead of killing them.
@brownian
Ok then how’s this. I, being a rabid gun nut, as you well know, Have never seen or heard of these targets. I haven’t seen them at the range, I haven’t seen them at the gun show, I even looked on a few of the more whackadoodle gun sites and I cannot find anyplace to actually buy the, have a look if you don’t believe me.
The only reason anyone has heard of these targets is because of all the outrage on the web. He didn’t even have to pay for his advertising. It will be a dog wistle to all the racist assholes out there and that is all he is interested in anyway.
I really don’t understand why you are upset about my opinion. I think these targets are bullshit same as you and the guy selling them is a racist asshole. The only difference is I don’t think we should be spreading it around.
Haters gonna hate, you don’t have to help them.
God-fucking-damn it. This stupid idea needs to die. Shouting out racist shit is helpful. Not letting them get away with it is a good thing. Being silent gives them impression we agree with this shit. This isn’t helping them. Did you not read the part that “no publicity is bad publicity” is bull-fucking-shit?
Someone made a Trayvon Martin target and you are saying to shut the fuck up about it. You do realize they see you as an ally for telling people to stop exposing racist shit right? You sure as fuck aren’t an ally to us. WTF is wrong with you?
EricHoug,
So your argument runs like this:
1) Someone makes an obviously racist Trayvon Martin gun target (which you cannot find for sale).
2) Outrage about said target on the internet (which you can find to read) only serves to draw attention to said target, advertising it to potential racist clients.
3) Therefore anyone expressing outrage at said target should be silent in case someone not outraged by it sees the outrage and is drawn to the target in some fashion (either as idea or potential purchase).
Hmmmm I wonder if there is a simple flaw in this argument. I wonder. Could it be a word, highlighted in some fashion, draws from a wide range of false assumptions and makes us arrive at false conclusions?
Why yes it could! Excellent! Thank you for playing.
After all, it’s not only possible but likely that in addition to drawing the wrong kind of attention to the Trayvon Martin racist target, the right kind of attention is also drawn. Dyed-in-the-wool racists are unlikely to be swayed by anything, they will view the target and approve. However, not everyone is a dyed-in-the-wool racist. Many people will be drawn to view the target, see the arguments surrounding its inappropriately racist nature and consider their own inherent racist conditioning. Something, since we live in largely racist societies (or better put: societies with a racist legacy and facets), that is part of the process of evolving personally and socially away from racism.
So I don’t disagree that raising the profile of any thing can attract the wrong kind of attention from unpleasant people, of course it can. I don’t think however, this is the only sort of attention these things can attract. Light is an excellent disinfectant. Shine enough light on a murky, lurking nasty, and you expose it. Even if that light is merely reflected and considered privately.
Louis
Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad, is why I am ‘upset’ at your dumbass suggestion we just ‘let this shit go’. For the last 30 years or more, we were told to ignore things, and if you haven’t noticed, racism hasn’t really gotten much better in the last 30 years. Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Do you know how much we’ve heard this shit? Morons like you have been saying this shit for more than a century. Ignoring problems doesn’t solve them, fuck off.
God fucking dammit, it’s not like you behave this way with anything else. By your argument, you should have been ignoring us whenever we said anti-gun things you didn’t like, and you shouldn’t have said anything now. Fuck off, toad.