Lawyer Blames Video Games for NIU Shootings
Few things makes us more angry than taking advantage of tragedies to push personal and political agendas, especially when when that agenda lacks things like supporting evidence... or logic.
Jack Thompson, a self-described Christian conservative and Republican (which is an insult to Christian conservative Republicans everywhere), has made a career of crusading against so-called obscenity and violence in media such as rap music and video games.
His latest rant came on Fox News about the Northern Illinois University shooting and its connection to the first person shooter 'Counter Strike.' The Fox News interview is shameless on so many levels. Thompson refers to video games as simulators for practicing massacres, implies that he predicted the NIU shooting in a book he wrote (plug, plug), and he referred to a Harvard study suggesting that people are likely to copycat behavior in video games. He failed to mention that the killer spent time in a psychiatric institution or that he recently decided to stop taking his prescribed anti-depressants.
Let's take Thompson's logic and apply it elsewhere. According to him every school shooter has played video games, therefore video games are the cause of school shootings. The Oklahoma City bombing and the September 11th attacks were perpetrated by morally and socially conservative religious fundamentalists, so perhaps Thompson is a potential terrorist -- let's ship him to Gitmo. We still water-board don't we?
From DailyTech
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