iPhone gun apps cause knee-jerk reaction
Or should that be a pump reaction?
Bored anti-gun lobbyists are attempting to take back some of the media time from the current trend for knife amnesties by raising concerns over a series of iPhone applications that simulate firearms.
Bang!Bang! and Boom!Boom! from software developer Damabia have been targeted by the campaigners as 'irresponsible'. The applications have been given an advisory warning on the App Store for nine year olds and over, with a description indicating “mild realistic violence” and “mature, suggestive themes”.
“This is just another sign of businesses putting profits before responsibility,” Claudia Webbe of the advisory group Operation Trident. “This is hugely irresponsible in a climate when we are trying to get guns off the streets.
“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 applications show a close-up animation of a gun mechanism in action, and has spawned a collection of five different firearms related games.
The App Store listings offer you the chance to “experience the sweet release you can only get from a finely crafted firearm”, which does comes across as slightly macabre, though a quick skim through the rest of the description clearly shows the sense of humour laced into this essentially useless application.
How this is any different to half the games out there - many of which depict a far more realistic interpretation of firearms and, well, death - is anyone’s guess.
Even Apple, with its increasingly prudish approval process, obviously didn’t see this as an issue, though it’ll be interesting to see whether it backpeddles in light of the complaints.
