Phyrfight Intel

Jack Thompson Blames Bill Gates for VT Shooting

“…the worst school massacre in world history was at the hands of Robert Steinhaeuser, who literally trained on the Microsoft on-line, hyper-violent shooter game, Counterstrike… As you know, I similalry [sic] went on NBC’s Today Show with the DC Beltway Sniper still unidentified and at-large a few years ago and told Matt Lauer and the nation that the triggerman would most likely be a teen video gamer trained on a sniper video game. The tarot card was a clue, but there were other clues. I was right, as Malvo trained on your Microsoft game, Halo.”

Just for reference, according to Bungie.net, in the last 24 hours over 500,000 unique players played Halo 2 online. According to Wikipedia, 9.2 million copies of the game have been sold worldwide. Also, according to Valve, at any one time there are approximately 150,000 people playing some form of Counterstrike. How can one honestly believe that these games lead individuals to violent behavior when it is so obviously a horrible fringe minority? On top of that, if you can show me an average young male in the United States who has never played any sort of violent video game, I’d be absolutely dumbstruck.

[Update] It has come to my attention that the version of Counterstrike that Cho was playing was not even published by Microsoft. Counterstrike for the PC was published by Sierra Studios. Though, Sierra doesn’t have enough money to be the victim of Thompson’s lunatic lawsuit frenzy.