A tax on videogames would combat knife crime in UK, claims a government advisor who lost his own son to inner city youth crime. According to the rather outrageous suggestion, videogames are “too cheap” and this makes it easy for children to buy them, which in turn causes them to become violent psychopaths. Typical logic from a man thinking with his heart and not his brain.
“I have young people who I mentor and I see them go up and buy the games and it saddens me that they are being able to have such a negative impact,” claims Richard Taylor, who personally advices Gordon Brown on knife crime issues. He also criticized rap music, claiming that music, “especially from America,” is far too negative.
First of all, I’d like to just say that I work, earn a good amount of money, and I find videogames too expensive. In the UK, the latest Xbox 360 or PS3 game can already sell for £50. Proposing an even greater tax, on top of the value-added-tax that is already factored into a videogame price, is incredibly unfair and punishes everybody for the sake of a few criminals.
That doesn’t even factor into the completely illogical idea that videogames cause knife crime. In a recent Destructoid feature, we researched murders that had been tenuously linked to videogames and discovered that only twenty-five deaths had involved games, and most of that involvement was circumstantial at best. Twenty-five deaths in all of human history compared to the thousands of deaths that happen in the UK every year is a pathetic number, and trying to claim that games cause knife crime is even more so.
Go ahead, make it so children can’t affort videogames. You know what’ll happen? Knife crime rates will stay the same, and I can guarantee you that cases of theft and mugging will go up. Idiots.
Published: Mar 11, 2009 02:20 pm