Boy nearly strangles sister over Bioshock, Jack Thompson responds harshly

CyberSentinel - 822 days ago

On the murderer.

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xhi4 - 821 days 23 hours ago

wow.

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RadientFlux - 821 days 23 hours ago

"The boy's parents admitted that they felt that the futuristic first-person shooter (which includes gameplay where mutated little girls are killed to gain powerups) had influenced his behaviour, but that they were not to blame because he was old enough to purchase it himself."

ah pass the blame... don't blame the person who actually killed the other one... no let's blame media. It's easier and we don't have difficult questions to answer.

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crck - 821 days 22 hours ago

Putting 360s in pans of water to keep them cool. Strangling people over tv time. Throwing siblings off buildings.

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mighty_douche - 821 days 22 hours ago

the game has an '18' on the side of it, that means its not suitable for children!

still my parents used to buy me MORTAL COMBAT and stuff when i was young and i never strangled anyone... or did i....?

to be honest, people can try and blame the parents, or the game, or the developer or whatever, but more than likely the kid was just already A LITTLE £UCKED UP!!

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spandle - 821 days 22 hours ago

I remember once my brother interrupted me when playing streetfighter 2 and i accidently let fireballs come out of my hands and fried him!

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GameHero - 821 days 22 hours ago

when I got half way through the game and it freezes so bad its unplayable!

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Azures - 821 days 22 hours ago

this guy hasn't been disbarred yet?

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Noodlecup - 821 days 22 hours ago

The American education system, it's a complete joke, American knows it and so do the rest of the world. Kids are growing up crazy and stupid, something needs to be done.

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power091999 - 821 days 22 hours ago

It's just easier to blame video games.

I mean we all know there has never once been a movie, or TV show that would attribute to this.

Hell a News paper for that matter. I read about extremely violent crimes in the news EVERYDAY.

None of those media outlets would have anything to do with it.

I have played video games since I was a child, and never once had a thought of strangling my sister.

Want to know why? ..Because I was RAISED properly to respect other people.

The only blame that can be given is on the parents, and the person that committed the crime.

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Skerj - 821 days 22 hours ago

Hail Canada.

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Alymon - 821 days 21 hours ago

First, in order to commit murder, the kid (who happened to be 17, which made it legal for him to purchase the game in the US) had to have had a violent predisposition. I'm sure this wasn't his first violent outburst, just his most serious.

Second, the video game didn't trigger him to kill his little sister. It's not like he was playing the game and decided "Oh ADAM is cool stuff, I should go extract some from my Little Sister". His sister nagged him, so he killed her.... it's completely irrelevant what he was doing prior.

Third, when did the actual crime occur and when did he start blaming video games? Because neither is mentioned. From the way he stated it, his line seems very coached. My guess is, he killed his sister, got caught, spoke with a lawyer, and his lawyer told him to blame the game in an effort to get a lesser sentence (possibly with some influence from Thompson).

Overall the story is just too disconnected and too sparse in details.

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Herby - 821 days 21 hours ago

If you can't tell between a video game and reality then clearly there is something wrong with your mind. Maybe the guy was doing drugs or something.

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pkb79 - 821 days 21 hours ago

I'm always amazed by the influence games have on kids. A 6 hour game can have a greater effect on a child then 15+ years with his parents. It just makes such valid, logical sense that the game and not his upbringing gave him these behavioral problems. Besides if he is old enough to play the game how can it have any negative effects on his behavior.

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k1ngd4n - 821 days 21 hours ago

i need 2 beat sum sense into jack thompson hey but that might just b cus i play computer games so i can blame the games instead of myself. i wonder if hed blame me or games huuuuuummmmm only 1 way 2 find out! but seriously he does need a good slap! wot kind of fool is anti computer games? oh i forgot there evil cus hitler played computer games thats y he wanted 2kill all the jews. and bush obviously played some war games thats y he bombed iraq.

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FCOLitsjustagame - 821 days 21 hours ago

There are whole bunches of people killing others and poudly proclaiming its their religion (all sorts of different people from different religions). Maybe they should ban that first since it is far more prevelant then video games. Once Jackie boy and the others who use the religion to beat down other people have their issues resolved then we can tackle video games.

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nirwanda - 821 days 21 hours ago

blame something, claim insanity and get a shorter sentence but it's muppets like thomson that buy into these theories and publicize this stuff get himself more work and fame so he can charge his clients more think about it if you wanted to sue a games company who would be the first name that pops into your head.

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The BS Police - 821 days 20 hours ago

Should I blame Halo 3? lol.

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mariusmal - 821 days 20 hours ago

i dont get it. i have grown with lots of violent games, like all european kids. hey blame games and not a society that promotes violence, hey dont blame the parents that didnt incute in him sense of bad and wrong. when i was 6 years old i already know that if i strangled my sister i would go away for a long time and it was SIMPLY WRONG. years ago it was TV that created killers, then it was the music industry, now it's games. what's next ? sex ?
btw... i dont know how its there.. but here it's rated 18 plus. so how is a teenager playing this ?

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caffman - 821 days 20 hours ago

when will he just go back to looking at gay porn

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yoshifett - 821 days 20 hours ago

I can't find this news story on any reputable sites. Did Thompson make this up? Don't matter, he's about to be disbarred and thrown into jail.

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xionpunk - 821 days 20 hours ago

Well there you go, the statement made by the parents says it all. Any descent parent (ignoring the the fact that if they were descent this wouldnt have happened) would have been so crushed that they would have taken the blame upon themselves. Not pass it on to the most convenient thing. Mainly the a$$hole kids fault, parents are not innocent though.

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Sodium - 821 days 19 hours ago

Can you find this "latest report" from the KCTV5 web site?

http://www.kctv5.com/index....

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Oncnawan - 821 days 19 hours ago

The 17-year-old did not kill his little sister. He merely "attempted to strangle" her. The original poster is twisting the news by misquoting the original article.

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thevoiceofreason - 821 days 19 hours ago

What is it with delinquent, out of control, murderous youths in America? I couldn't agree more with Jack Thompson, the "bastards" responsible should f*cking fry - that'd be the scum brother then who's trying to claim the attempted murder of his sister was prompted by his supposedly mature and adult mind's incapacity to distinguish real life (which has been right in front of his eyes for all of his life) from what he see's in tv land. Maybe it wasn't the game, maybe the tv told him to do it? Or better yet, lets appeal to all the religious nuts in the USA and claim the devil possesed him or some bullshit, surely several million people will buy that version? Oh and does anyone else think the parents should be imprisoned also for raising such a disgusting child in the first place then having the ordacity to attempt to play down their own daughter's attempted murder as something brought on by the mind controlling effects of video games? I don't know about the rest of you, but if someone has the urge to murder people in real life, they're clearly sub-human who are sick in the head to the point of being beyond rehabilitation or help and really, deserve to be cast from society and kept locked away from sane people. Hope the little f*ck goes down hard for his whimsical desire to rob his own sister of her life, even if it was an unsuccessful attempt, he still shouldn't be let to go free in society.

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ygxbrayzie - 821 days 18 hours ago

Fakk his is funny

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Kareem - 821 days 17 hours ago

I would blame the parents for letting the boy play the game.

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MK_Red - 821 days 13 hours ago

I hope someone strangles Jack Thompson. Thank God Destructoid showed the truth.

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DwightOwen - 820 days 23 hours ago

--Jack Thompson has since released an ominous statement in which he says that “Justice will be served to the bastards that caused this crime.”--

http://www.destructoid.com/...

OOPS!

Looks like Jackie-boy has taken a few pages from the playbook of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Nancy Grace, and the Pot Bangers.

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detales - 820 days 20 hours ago

Response from the author of the blog:

First, thanks for even reading the article. What's worse than negative publicity (Which I have MORE than enough of. Check out my biggest article about Goatse being on the CNN/YouTube debates) is no publicity.

The fact is (heh, "fact") that the article accomplished everything it was meant to accomplish. Though I won't say the article is fake, I will say that anybody who believed the article also recognized how ridiculous it is that nobody held Sean Connor responsible for his own actions, including his mother and Jack Thompson.

I'm a huge gamer and an even huger fan of Bioshock, some of you express a concern that the Jack Thompsons of this world will use this as fodder, but the fact is that this article actually does more to discredit the Jack Thompsons than it does to support them by pointing out how ridiculous their platform is.

And for anybody who wants proof of this, try to find one comment from somebody which argues that this is a good example of the dangers of videogame violence. There isn't one. Instead, all of the dialogue created around the article has been defending videogame violence, and thus supporting videogames.

Like all my articles, it's not the story that is important but the conversations started because of them. And this is no exception.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,
Ben Goldman
Detales

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