Germany banning Paintball

[Standby]

Maybe they should outlaw ACTUAL guns rather than trying to place the blame somewhere else.
Am surprised videogames werent mentioned in the article, although it's prolbably only a matter of time...

 

[Christemo]

heard it at noon today, thats just sad. they just have drive up to denmark (my land, and their neightborland) and then they can play paintball here, like when we drive down there to get tattoos in the face and on the neck (thats banned in denmark).

 

[razer17]

That Poe's Law thing is interesting, but frankly it's unsulting that you'd rather assume that I was an insulting, stereotyping moron rather than a person making a lighthearted joke.

And I said to look up the word "compare", not "similar", but I'll assume that was just a simple mistake. It doesn't matter anyway. But don't you think the pedophile thing was a bit pointless? Yes you could compare me to a pedophile, but you would find many more differences than similarities. That is opposed to the subject at hand, where I compared the actions of 1930s Germany to Germany's banning of paintball and found quite a few similarities. So if you said I was similar to a pedophile, you would be lying.

And I really don't see what you meant by your last point. How does going through racial epithets in school make you be annoyed by linking Germany to Nazism? They see completely unrelated to me. And by "went through" did you mean you were called them? I don't know what you were trying to prove, but as a Jew I've been called a kike plenty of times, it hasn't effected me.

And yes many people would prefer to forget about the Holocaust, but that doesn't mean they should. We Jews make a point of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive in the hopes that such a thing will never happen again, as I believe everyone should. Ignoring or forgetting about the Holocaust is both irresponsible and insulting to all the people who were victims of it.

i only assumed you were being serious because it seemed it. on the internet, and this forum in particular, i normally give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are joking.
and yes that was just a mistake, i meant compare. and the example was just the best thing i could come up with. and my last point was because, due to my german heritage (even though i was born in england and only lived in Germany), because people knew my mum was German, there was constant links to me being a nazi and all that. therefore i get very annoyed when people still link germans to nazism in this day and age.
and i didn't mean we should literally forget the holocaust, nor should it be forgotten.
so anyway, it was my mistake that i misunderstood your post, i apologise for that.

 

[Irridium]

Really? Banning paintball won't do anything except piss people off, then another shooting will happen and they'll probably ban kids playing "cops and robbers", and then another shooting and BAM, TV and movies are outlawed. Just digging a hole Germany...

You didn't see the U.S. trying to ban paintball after the Virginia Tech shooting.

 

[Lavi]

Makes sense, they're worried about activating their genocide gene

 

[Psypherus]

If they banned Laser-tag or Paintball over here in Canada because of a school shooting then I'd probably feel like shooting up a school out of spite

 

[chuckman1]

Glad I live in (insert link to the song America Fuck Yeah here because there's none I can find with any audio, if you've never heard it watch http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/12-MOH-Airborne )
P.S. Sorry.

 

[ElephantGuts]

That Poe's Law thing is interesting, but frankly it's unsulting that you'd rather assume that I was an insulting, stereotyping moron rather than a person making a lighthearted joke.

And I said to look up the word "compare", not "similar", but I'll assume that was just a simple mistake. It doesn't matter anyway. But don't you think the pedophile thing was a bit pointless? Yes you could compare me to a pedophile, but you would find many more differences than similarities. That is opposed to the subject at hand, where I compared the actions of 1930s Germany to Germany's banning of paintball and found quite a few similarities. So if you said I was similar to a pedophile, you would be lying.

And I really don't see what you meant by your last point. How does going through racial epithets in school make you be annoyed by linking Germany to Nazism? They see completely unrelated to me. And by "went through" did you mean you were called them? I don't know what you were trying to prove, but as a Jew I've been called a kike plenty of times, it hasn't effected me.

And yes many people would prefer to forget about the Holocaust, but that doesn't mean they should. We Jews make a point of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive in the hopes that such a thing will never happen again, as I believe everyone should. Ignoring or forgetting about the Holocaust is both irresponsible and insulting to all the people who were victims of it.

i only assumed you were being serious because it seemed it. on the internet, and this forum in particular, i normally give people the benefit of the doubt and assume they are joking.
and yes that was just a mistake, i meant compare. and the example was just the best thing i could come up with. and my last point was because, due to my german heritage (even though i was born in england and only lived in Germany), because people knew my mum was German, there was constant links to me being a nazi and all that. therefore i get very annoyed when people still link germans to nazism in this day and age.
and i didn't mean we should literally forget the holocaust, nor should it be forgotten.
so anyway, it was my mistake that i misunderstood your post, i apologise for that.

Really? Poeple messed with you just for having German heritage? That's surprising, but then again I must remind myself that since I'm in America, everyone is from somewhere else. So I guess we're more open about that.

And I wouldn't think that that post would be taken seriously, but considering the sort of responses it's getting I suppose I was wrong. Maybe I should have just straight up said they're similar.

 

[Vanguard_Ex]

Well I don't know about you guys, but I've never thought as a result of shooting at my friends with paintfilled capsules: 'Hmm...I could get used to this. I wonder if I used bullets...'

 

[Vanguard_Ex]

Your image posts always warm my heart xD

 

[garfoldsomeoneelse]

Your image posts always warm my heart xD

 

[Vanguard_Ex]

Your image posts always warm my heart xD

You're somewhere in the top of my mental list of favourite Escapists right about now ^^

 

[Kunzer]

Wow. In response to a school shooting?

I don't know if anyone else here has ever both played paintball and used a real gun, but the similarities are shockingly small.

Lame Germany, very lame. I thought you were better than that.

Yeah, I'm a part of that demographic. It's like comparing the act of throwing a bowling ball and tossing a baseball. Night and day.

I think everyone here knows that it doesn't matter what the sane people do. the insane people are going to mess it up for the rest of us.

Something like this goes wrong and then politicians find a scapegoat, which tend to come from a list of my hobbies. (paintball, video games involving guns, online video games, recreational firearms use at the local range..)

Sad times.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Paintballs don't even hurt. Yes I have been shot three times with 2 different paintball guns and it actually made me laugh cause they worked perfectly and yet they tickled. This a bit of a over reaction.

How much they hurt isn't in question. Is it even legal to OWN a firearm in Germany?

I don't know the answer to your question. However, paintball markers are not considered firearms even though they perform the same essential function (i.e. they both shoot projectiles). That said, I'm not terribly surprised by such a move.

Back when I played paintball regularly, I consistantly ran into people who treated the sport as a sort of warfare simulation, and to an extent that is more or less what it is. But once one moves past the fact one is using a marker, what I found is paintball is essentially little more than a game of tag in it's core concepts and components. Competative paintball is only loosly related to warfare, but often recreational paintball (google D-Day Oklahoma for example) is designed specifically to resemble combat.

And, unlike video games where on has difficulty arguing that the game actually teaches someone how to be a better killer, the operation of a paintball gun is entirely similar to that of a real firearm. Yes, there are distinct differences between the two that limit just how much skill one can transfer from a gun to a marker (outside the fundamentals of marksmanship, there isn't much that is applicable to both) but at the end of the day you are still given what appears to be a gun and you engage in a game where you shoot other people.

I myself don't buy that there is any connection between paintball and violence any more than there is a connecton between any sport and violent behavior, but given Germany's recent actions used to deal with similar situations I can see how they can make the logic train jump the track.

 

[jasoncyrus]

If banning violent games stopped people from going on murderous rampages then the Epic staff would've been locked up by now, martial arts would be banned and no one would e allowed to play cops & robbers.

 

[hannahdonno]

Your image posts always warm my heart xD

You're somewhere in the top of my mental list of favourite Escapists right about now ^^

But what about Hannah?
D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D: D:
Then again, no one wants to be your mate anyway.

 

[Ziren]

Another German here, and I must say that I am amazed by the outright misinformation people here have about German censorship laws:

In Germany, video games are neither banned nor censored because of violent content. That happens only to games, that do something along the lines of glorifying the holocaust. The worst violent content can do is getting a game (or other forms of media) on the index, which means that stores cannot openly display them, aren't allowed to advertise them and can't sell them to people that are younger than 18. Of course most developers want to avoid this rating, so they are censoring themselves to get it down to just 18+ or 16+.

Maybe we could solve this problem by getting Germans to write letters and protest to get the government to realize how stupid they're being.

For some reason I don't feel like this is going to be a very long-lasting thing. Paintball (and laser tag) are so obviously harmless. The only reason this is happening at all is because of the panic over the shootings and the government feeling like they need to do something. Eventually, someone's got to realize they're wrong.

Which is why I suggest protests, to make them realize it faster.

This will most likely not work, because the politicians probably already know, that this law is ineffective. It's just that they feel like they need to do something to appease the population (the next Bundestagswahl is this year). The arms lobby has to much influence (read: money) so they ban something that is of less economic value and can somehow be linked to the shootings. Of course this is just a bad case of populism, which is especially evident since none of the perpetrators in Germany did even play paintball.

 

[SecretTacoNinja]

Oh Germany... Don't sink this low...

The gunman was so very obviously mentally unstable, why ban Paintball and video games? That's just... silly.

 

[Undo]

Quick update, they pulled back from their idea of banning it.
While they do still want to find out how dangerous it truly is, it's a good bet that this thing is history.