Games Had Nothing To Do With V. Tech Shooting 99
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that an inquiry into the Virginia Tech shooting in April of this year has revealed no connection whatsoever to videogames. The shooter's lack of interest in violent gaming was widely reported among game news sites at that time in the year, despite the exploration of the idea on cable television news. The official report, filed with the governor of the state, lays that 'motive' to rest. From the article: "The report, which includes a mental health history of the shooter, Seung Hui Cho, notes that during his childhood he had 'played videogames like Sonic the Hedgehog,' yet 'none of the videogames were war games or had violent themes.' This flies in the face of statements made on Fox TV news by Jack Thompson in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, which laid the blame for the incident firmly at the door of videogames."
*surprise* (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:*surprise* (Score:5, Insightful)
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As to Thompson, I would like someone to explain what caused him.
Re:As to Thompson, I would like someone to explain (Score:1)
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Re:*surprise* (Score:5, Informative)
"Did he ever play any games?"
"No"
"Did he ever play any violent games?"
"Um, no"
"Are you sure?"
"Um, pretty sure. He mostly surfed the web"
"So, no games?"
Then they interviewed another and asked the same questions. Sorry, media, you'll have to stick with the real news.
Oz
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Anyways, since when is the media interested in, you know, FACTS? How many times have we seen one network get an "expert" on their s
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Or perhaps it's preaching to the choir. Nah - couldn't be that. This is a win. I can feel it.
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I'd be willing to bet that anyone who works at E Capitol Street Southeast in D.C. is shocked, dammit. Just shocked. And saddened. And such as. The children.
I'm surprised (Score:2)
Finally (Score:1)
Can we afford such blindness?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Jesus, he was abnormal. Why didn't anyone notice this obvious deviation from normality in time to stop his brutal rampage?
Seriously. I play violent games so I don't kill people. As games have gotten more violent, violent crime has gone down in the big gamer demographics...Correlation may not equal causation, but it is nicely suggestive.
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the same is true for porn. (Score:3, Funny)
Watch sex abuse statistics go down.
Perverts are too busy having a wank to actually go out and assault someone.
just as with games, violent people are too busy venting their frustration in the virtual world to take it out on the rest of us.
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The best study I could find (the same country just more porn) showed....
"Data regarding sex crimes, consistently and regularly recorded in police records, are clearly more available and definitive than those for quantitative or qualitative measures of pornography. It is readily obvious from the data (Table 1) that the incidence of rape has been steadily and dramatically decreasing over the period under review. The incidence of rape has progressively declined from 4677 reported cases
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"Kutchinsky showed that as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level."
There seems to be more evidence that porn = less sex crime than porn = more crime.
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Violent Crime Statistics [usdoj.gov]; note that the drop has been pronounced since the early 90's which coincided with the release of games like "Doom" which ushered in the era of true violent gaming. Correlation does not equal causation, but the argument that games have increased the violent tendencies of the young immediately runs aground on the fact that no such increase exists.
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Multiple people noticed. They intervened, he was investigated by the police and committed for mental examination. The people at his school, faculty, staff, and students, knew he was likely to do something violent. They took every legal step they could.
I know it terrifies people, but in the end there weren't any reasonable steps left to stop this guy. This kind of thing has happ
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I know that there is nothing that can be done to stop people like this...Hell, most of them ARE stopped, but there will always be a few that get through, and they will always do damage. All the recriminations and finger pointing, and Monday-morning quarterbacking in the world won't change it. People need to stop racing to place blame, and start trying to find better ways of fixing the problem.
Video games DID cause a senseless shooting... (Score:4, Funny)
Video games WERE responsible for Jack Thompson senselessly shooting his mouth off.
-Don
Re:Video games DID cause a senseless shooting... (Score:5, Funny)
C'mon, do you have to get our hopes up?
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Oh, THAT V. Tech (Score:4, Funny)
Pity he didn't (Score:2)
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From tfa:
Obviously, to prevent further school violence we must encourage the youth of today to play violent games, not repeditive puzzle games with bad disco music.
I suggest we start a fund to provide low-cost or free copies of Manhunt to inner city youth. Think of the c
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I'm quite certain that there are a certain breed of lunatic out there that would be inspired by violent games. But then again, these are probably the kinds of guys that would get inspired by
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Notice that the line peaks at around 1994, and then drops dramatically, declining by more than 50 per cent to 2005, the most recent figures available.
Then you need to gather data representing the share of people who play videogames (available from studies like this http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/75614.php [medicalnewstoday.com]
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You're not seeing the big picture. If I take those same video game statistics, and overlay them with a line of regression for the number of SUVs in the United States, you'd see that an increase in video gamers has a direct correlation with an increase in SUV ownership. In short, video games cause global warming!
Give me a break...
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While this is just a WAG, I would say that the random acts of violence that might be caused/prevented by playing violent games would constitute only a very small fraction of the total. The positive effect of video games couldn't even come close to explaining that 50% decrease. In fact, I would guess that the effect of video games (positive or negative) would just be noise compared to whatever other factors are at work.
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However...
I always like to use these graphs when I'm dealing with somebody who insists that something he abhors -- movies, television, music, vide
What's the correllation? (Score:2)
Both trends coincide with the dot.com bubble [wikipedia.org]. The economy has been known to have an effect on crime. ("Crime in the US is also concentrated to certain areas. It is quite common for crime in American cities to be highly concentrated in a few, often economically disadvantaged areas." [wikipedia.org]) In fact, weather has been known to have an effect on crime. Tempers rise as temperatures do, and who wants to burglarize a house in the middle of a thunderstorm or blizzard?
Methinks the drop in crime was due to lower unemp
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Regarding the Topic, (Score:1, Funny)
Even worse!! (Score:5, Funny)
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You say that now ... (Score:2)
Jack Thompson... (Score:2)
hmm (Score:1)
wtf people. (Score:5, Insightful)
Look. This is past. Cho is dead, the unfortunate people who were in the right place at the wrong time are dead, let their families and friends mourn in peace.
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Then I remembered I could just turn it off. Close calls, lemme tell ya. I don't even turn on the radio any more for fear of becoming a raving lunatic (as opposed to just a plain ol' lunatic, which I achieved many years ago...I think it was seeing Vanilla Ice in TNMT 2 that did it...)
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Then again, for all we know he might have gone in there swinging hunting knives. Then again, for all we know he might have gone in there swinging blades he pulled off paper cutters. Then again, for all we know he might have gone in the
Re:wtf people. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not justifying what he did, and of course I empathize much more with the victims and their families, but Cho's story is sad, not infuriating. No human being is "just" anything. If everyone shared that willful ignorance mankind would have no will to learn about its own nature.
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I'm a big proponen
If they spent this long investigating the link (Score:2)
Fox News B.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
Jack Thompson is just another idiot on Murdock's payroll who talks out of the part of his body that most people poop from. If he wants to start blaming video games, then he needs to be blaming the media (i.e. himself) as well.
While I do think that violent games desensitize us to some extent, I don't think they are at all the cause of the problem. Seung Hui Cho was just another angry kid, as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. They felt cast aside, rejected, and victimized because they didn't fit in with their peers. So took their anger out on the world around them...
Honestly, I'd think being involved in an online gaming community, no matter how violent the game, would've probably helped. Many people (likely the Jim Thompson type) percieve those addicted online games as being anti-social. Yet from what I've seen, most gamers seem have an elaborate network of online friends. This could've given Cho, Harris, and others a sense of community and a place to "fit in" or at the very least, escape from the world around them.
What I do think is a very real and disturbing issue is that they decided to carry out their anger with automatic weapons and how easily they could obtain them. The reasons behind this have very little to do with video games...
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Agreed
Cho had obtained all of his weapons legally...IIRC he had nothing but pistols (correct me if I'm wrong).
Frankly, I'm GLAD that he obtained the weapons legally. Now bear with me here, I know this is a hard thing to swallow, but still...look at it this way. Say he had gone to that gun store and they refused to sell him anything...that would ha
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A modest request (Score:2)
In writing, Virginia Tech or VT (use the former if you're worried about confusing us with Vermont).
In speech, VT (Vee Tee), Tech, or Virginia Tech, please. Not "Vah Tech", please (yes, it even bugs me when Jim Rome says it). How often to you call Georgia Tech "Jah Tech", or Virginia the "Vah Caveliers"?
Sorry, off topic, I know.
Sonic (Score:1)
I blame selective journalism (Score:3, Interesting)
What does the average audience get? That every time there is a report about shootings, games are involved. And the immediate connection is that whenever there's a shooting, games are involved (because you only hear of those where some kind of connection can be made). Result? Consult your imagination.
It's not that the news lie to us. Well, not always. But they do something that's about as bad, they select and skew stories. Everything that fits their agenda gets reported. Everything that goes against it is squelched. And of course, if you only hear that A is bad or B is good, you start to believe that this isn't a selected few cases, but that it's the way it is.
Be careful when you hear a few stories about something. It could be that you get to hear the occasional stray exceptions instead of the rule, because that's what furthers someone's agenda.
And yes, that should be common sense, and probably is on this board. But where else if not in a thread like this would a "no shit, Sherlock" information fit in?
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It has nothing to do with agendas. The exception is news, the rule is not ("man bites dog is news, dog bites man isn't"). No, what you should be suspect of is self-appointed experts like our friend Jack Thompson here, who use speculation as if it were well established fact in order to further their own personal crusad
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Perhaps he played too few games (Score:4, Interesting)
Aside, these documents are a fascinating read. If you're interested in psychology, security, forensics, or criminology you will find much interesting material here.
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i watch those cop shows all the time. (Score:1, Offtopic)
Seriously, I don't know why they show them on TV when all there doing is slowly turning me into a terrorist.
pointing the finger in the wrong direction (Score:4, Insightful)
This is meaningless (Score:1)
Video games still to blame! (Score:1)
This was all caused because he had a "lack of interest in violent gaming". If violent games hadn't existed, he wouldn't have had a lack of interest in them! You can't have a lack of interest in something that doesn't exist!
Think of the children!
Hogwash (Score:2)
Sonic the Hedgehog? (Score:2)
Slashdot editors: Don't feed the troll, please. (Score:2)