Apple, Don’t Cave to Anti-Gun Zealots Over iPhone Apps
It seems that some new iPhone games in the App Store have the British anti-gun lobby’s knickers in a knot.
Macworld UK’s Nick Spence says reports in British newspapers claim the series of iPhone and iPod touch apps developed by the French firm Damabia, such as Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Pro, Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Free, Bang!BANG!, Bang!BANG! OG Edition and Tak!TAK!, are glamorizing “gun culture,” particularly among young people, and have caused “outrage among anti-gun campaigners.”
Claudia Webbe, chair of an independent advisory group for the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Trident gun-crime force, is quoted commenting, “I am stunned this game should ever have been allowed to have been made. We have spent years trying to get imitation guns out of shops and this sort of product undermines that effort.”
The always-strident anti-gun lobby is demanding that Apple pull the Damabia apps, which are either free or sell for 99 cents and are rated 9+ in the App Store for “Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes” and “Infrequent/Mild Realistic Violence.”
I say get a grip, and I profoundly hope Apple will resist this political-correctness bullying.
I’m old enough to have spent my formative years in an era before the bane of political correctness had exerted its clammy grip on our culture, and in which youngsters playing “cops and robbers” with “imitation guns,” was not only not frowned upon, but considered a normal and commendable rite of childhood.
I’ve been around guns, imitation and real, literally all my life — a part of “gun culture” if you will, and it’s not something I have any inclination to apologize for. As a young child living in rural Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada, just about every family in the communities I lived in owned (and still do today) a gun — usually several. One wall of my bedroom was a floor-to-ceiling pegboard mounted with firearms replicas (I would bridle if anyone called them “toys”). I wouldn’t have anything that wasn’t a passable likeness of a real weapon.
I was given my first real rifle when I was 12, a bolt-action Winchester .22 that belonged to my father when he was a boy, and in turn to my older half-brother who passed it along to me. Virtually all my male peers during my early teenage years had their own .22s. We had a lot of fun with those guns and 40-odd years later, to the best of my knowledge, not one of us ever became a homicidal maniac or killed, hurt, or even threatened anyone with a gun. Guns don’t make people evil.
I consider gun culture a positive element in society, and know for a fact from experience that high levels of firearms ownership (probably 75 percent, in the virtually crime-free community where I currently reside) do not increase crime and social violence. The opposite obtains, and is scientifically verifiable. A major study by John Lott at the University of Chicago found that for each 1 percent reduction in gun ownership, there is a 3 percent increase in violent crime. Lott observes, “When crimes are committed with guns, there is a somewhat natural inclination toward eliminating all guns. While understandable, this reaction actually endangers people’s lives.”
I’m not insensitive to agonizingly relentless incidents of senseless, insane violence that keep occurring all over the world these days, many of them involving guns. However, in one of the most shocking and disturbing recent ones, in a Boston suburb this week, the weapon used was a kitchen knife, the only guns involved being in the hands of police, one of whom used his to dispatch a deranged predator and save a life. So, should we go hysterical about demonizing and banning kitchen knives?
Damabia’s latest App Store offering Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Pro Edition for iPhone and touch, includes the eponymous shotgun, as well as a .40 cal semi-automatic handgun, a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, a submini automatic handgun and a fully automatic assault rifle. Damibia says Boom!BOOM! Shotgun Pro Edition “lets you experience this childhood game of cops and robbers in a whole new way… with stunning visuals, ear-popping sound.”
Hmmm. Damibia’s ad copy seems almost purposefully inflammatory, which is especially interesting being as they’re based in France of all places, and not the supposedly gun-besotted U.S. I would suggest they tone it down a bit, but I still support their right to develop and distribute these programs. Censorship scares me a lot more than guns do.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Fair enough argument but remember you grew up in a very different culture to those in other countries when it comes to guns. In the UK there is a significant and growing gun problem. Without arguing the rights and wrongs of gun ownership, very few people in the UK own a firearms license. Youtube has many ‘gang’ related gun posturing videos and kids are indeed drawn to the glamorous faux gangster aspect of a gun.
Now, the British Press go ridiculously overboard with fake outrage at things like this but please remember the difference the environment we grow up in has on our actions as teenagers. No British teen would have had the upbringing you did, and certainly not any inner city one.
While I agree that apps shouldn’t be censored, I think you’ve done us a disservice here by posting this blog based almost entirely on your own particular point of view. It’s an honest writing that admits it’s bias, but you must realise that your experience is a minority one and that your feelings about the issue are not really relevant to the facts.
I also grew up in the “pre PC” culture, and remember my friends playing with toy guns but in those days, the guns were not “replicas” in the sense used by the people who you are criticising here. In those days a toy gun could never be mistaken for a real one, and a kid going “bang-bang!” would never make a nearby officer draw his piece. The experience back then, just doesn’t translate to today’s world.
Today’s “replicas” look and feel like a real gun and some make noises (like the iPhone app) like a real gun as well. They are a real problem and lots and lots of kids are killed each year as a result of waving a replica gun around at school or in the street. That’s why there was a big effort to “ban replicas” (not the toy guns you remember), and that’s why the US law that such replicas must have certain markings that identify them as clearly fake.
Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are like the Nevada and Texas of Canada respectively. I appreciate that you grew up in a gun culture, but your experience is rather unique, rural, and anachronistic.
I am against censorship of any kind unless there is a proven harm and in this case there is not, but if I was to censor apps in the app store I would censor this one long before I would censor some of the other “adult” apps that have already been denied. The world has too many guns, and too many kids are killed each year because some cop or some gangster thought they were being shot at.
Giving every twelve year old access to an app that perfectly mimics the sound of an assault rifle is not a good thing. It’s a real problem that you shouldn’t minimise or dismiss IMO.
Tone down your post! You clearly can’t identify your own biases, and the fact that the culture from which the criticism stems is utterly different than your own. In the UK, gun control is not a contested issue, and so it is understandable that an application on sale here, but designed with a different culture in mind will draw ire.
While I agree that censorship is really the issue here, considering gun culture a positive element in society is plain daft. I presume you are from the US – which has a pretty high murder rate… due to the fact that you all have guns.
But I take your point, we all grew up playing games like Doom and that didn’t turn us into murderers. But thinking guns are acceptable is pretty archaic.
I am against censorship of any kind unless there is a proven harm…
That is a very, scary viewpoint.
It’s been over thirty years, but I was a teen in London back then, and I always had a toy gun as far back as I remember. Just because you grew up with toy guns, does not mean you’ll love guns when you grow up. I am all for tighter gun laws. I also grew up eating meat, but guess what, I gave that up 30 years ago too. I think Dick Cavett was right when he said “if violence on TV causes violence [in society], then why isn’t there more comedy on the streets?”
“I consider gun culture a positive element in society” and YOU are frightening. The UK is not a gun culture, the police don’t routinely carry firearms. Citizens do not have guns at home, it is VERY rare. Comparing the number of gun crimes in Canada and the USA to the UK, the latter is VERY safe from gun related problems.
I grew up in a rural setting, took gun education courses as a youth was taught about how much responsibility they require to use properly.
I couldn’t disagree with you more and I think your post shows considerable naivete.
Most guns are in the hands of irresponsible people who do not use them for their intended purpose.
My right to live trumps your right to own a gun any day of the week.
This is an Apple blog. Oh yeah, that’s part of the site’s name.
This post by Mr. Moore is not an Apple post but just a post about someone griping about political correctness and “The always-strident anti-gun lobby.”
If I wanted to read this drivel I’d go to Fox News, Bill O’Reilly’s, or Rush Limbaugh’s media empires.
I like many aspects of the Apple Blog. It’s too bad that one writer is making me never go back to this site. Ever. Kudos to Mr. Pigford, Mr. Reestman, Mr. Bookman, and all the other fine folks at this blog.
Apple and Google supported the fight against Proposition 8 in California to end same-sex marriage in California. So Apple is not about political correctness or censorship, if you believe outlawing same-sex marriage to be a type of censorship.
I came to the Apple Blog to get my tech fix, not hear some dinosaur reminisce about irrelevant culture wars and spew out nonsensical statistics about guns and crime.
There are many other Apple blogs out there without this type of polarizing opinion piece masked by an Apple technology facade.
I go to my RSS Apple feeds for tech, not inflammatory opinion.
RSS feed deleted. It’s too bad, so may other good writers here.
Nicely stated, Mr. Moore, but @kais sez: “My right to live trumps your right to own a gun any day of the week.” Sorry. You’re quite possibly dead wrong on that one, my friend. Your right to live is in most cases assured by the Second Amendment and folks who exercise their rights against criminals who by definition don’t give a whit about laws. Citizens in the U.S. with firearms prevent more that a million crimes each year. The state constitution of Pennsylvania, used to draft the U.S. Second Amendment, states clearly, “the right of citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the state shall not be questioned.” Heller finally codified that clarification. @kais is as wrong as the rest of the anti gun folks and his naivete won’t do a thing to save his bacon when the next bad guy wants him or his money – then decides to cap his ass. The U.K will eventually rue the day it confiscated firearms from citizens, err, excuse me, subjects.