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Highway Shooters Claim To Emulate GTA
Thanks to Yahoo! for their story regarding teenage stepbrothers who randomly fired at cars on a Tennessee freeway, killing one person and wounding another, and told police they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto's sniper mode. According to the piece: "From a wooded area near their home at the Smoky Mountain Country Club, the boys fired a .22-caliber rifle up to 25 times through a break in the trees at cars driving along Interstate 40 about two miles east of Newport. They said they were bored and decided to shoot at tractor-trailer rigs, just like in the video game, 'Grand Theft Auto.'" According to this IOL/Reuters article, "Prosecutor Al Schmutzer told Judge Ben Strand that the boys told authorities they were mimicking the video game by trying to hit the sides of passing trucks."
I did this as a kid (with a BB Gun) and that was before GTA. I guess I can blame it on the Duke Boys.
so that's what you're suppose to do in the game...
no wonder I suck playing GTA3.
-my other sig is your mom
There's not any tractor-trailers in GTA.
Sorry Mr. Prosecutor, got to come up with something better than that.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
We need to make a game where people jump off a cliff and kill them selves to finally clean out the shallow end of the gene pool? Sheesh. People will say anything these days to shift blame from themselves.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
When I was nine, I wound up in the hospital with three broken fingers becuase I tried to imitate Super Mario by punching bricks that were floating in the sky. Those were the days.
The ESRB rating for GTA3 and VC is 17+. What were these kids doing with a game that they shouldn't be playing? They should sue the parents for negligence.
the pun is mightier than the sword
The real question is, who was dumb enough to give these kids a gun.
They should receive the same punishment, because through their action/inaction they helped kill this driver.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
"Prosecutor Al Schmutzer told Judge Ben Strand that the boys told authorities they were mimicking the video game by trying to hit the sides of passing trucks."
Yeah, and he probably forget to mention to the judge that due to the lack of parental attention and involvement in these boys lives, they grew up to be anti-social and depressed kids who deep-down really just wanted somebody to pay attention to them while their parents sat on the couch, drank beer, and worshipped the idiot box.
Now if they were imitating a game by shooting at tractor trailers and trying to hit the trailer (those of which ther are none of in GTA3/GTA:VC) how the hell did they hit people. They must not play many FPS's either if they cant hit the broad side of a truck without hitting a person in another car ... This is just what the Games=Violence activists need, more ammunition (no pun intended)
Maybe they should outlaw tractor-trailer rigs. That will fix this little problem.
Kids these days are awfully lucky. When I was a kid, we actually got blamed for what we did. If I'd had excuses like this childhood would have been a hell of a lot more fun.
I was unaware that Tennessee was even a state still. Damn NY public schools.
and went on a fencing spree into the city and also had sex with anything i saw..
seriously, geez...
i don't remember shooting tractor rigs in gta though..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think the sad facts are, idiots and psychos will always find something bad to emulate. If there were no games, they would been inspired to shoot at people by a movie. If there were no movies, they would have been inspired by the Washington sniper, or the US government.
If someone doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality then obviously playing computer games and watching TV could cause them to do something bad. But the problem is with them, not with the game or film.
Point 1) There are No Tractor-Trailers on the roads, for shooting in either Grand Theft Auto III or Grand Theft Auto Vice City. Looking into previous revisions of the game, which don't have the aforementioned 'Sniper Mode', the closest you can get to a Tractor Trailer is a snub-nosed fuel tanker truck.
Point 2) Where did they get the gun? Notice how everyone is 100% ready to jump on the video game... my question... WHERE THE FUCK DID THEY GET THE GUN? I mean, of course the gun isn't dangerous. No way. Guns never kill people. That's why cops and 'sportsmen' carry around RAZOR SHARP DVDs.
It's fucking obscene. I can't wait to see what happens to such good titles (and yes, you have to admit, even if you hate the content with a passion, the games are done really well..)
Informatus Technologicus
The best line by far is :"I didn't want to hurt anyone"
.22 rifle and shoot at cars...wtf are you trying to do?
You got to be shitting me. You take a
If you're shooting a rifle anywhere but at the shooting range, you're shooting to kill as far as I know.
Even in GTA, you only ever shot to either blow up the truck or kill the driver.
It's absurd that anyone believes their bullshit.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Sure it's conceivable for a 13-year-old to have a concept of "the rest of my life", and for him to imagine the guilt he will feel over that length of time, but could that maturity and self-awareness really exist in the sort of kid who shoots at cars because he did it in a computer game?
Methinks an adult had a hand in writing that letter.
Personal responsibility and accountability is perhaps the most important thing that people can teach their kids. However, it seems that popular culture is increasing making it appear that people are rewarded for lying, cheating, killing, bribery, getting something for no effort, etc. Take Enron, WorldCom, the current Republican administration, reality television, nationalized health care proposals, Grand Theft Auto (to be on topic, of course), public schools, the Earned Income Credit, short-term cash loans, pre-approved credit, six-year car loans, no-money-down mortgages, rent subsidies, many organized religions and labor unions, student loans, professional sports, soft drink commercials, and so forth.
People need to be much more cynical than they are. They need to realize that both large government (whether Republican or Democrat flavored) and large corporations do not act in the interests of individual people. They are much too wealthy, powerful, and corrupt to care. They are their own means and their own ends. People need to stand up for themselves in the midst of this, vote their conscience with both their wallets and their ballots, and be prepared to sacrifice materialistic prestige and social popularity in favor of knowing they made the right decision and did the best they could. Corporations and government need to become more modest and come back to realizing that they exist because of and for the People, not the other way around. It seems that every day the opposite of this is actually happening, and, ultimately, people will exist miserably in a rusty machine of regulation and consumption and live in complete fear of their creditors and their own government.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
25 charges of public mischief.
24 charges of attempted murder.
1 charge of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
1 charge of murder one (since they clearly planned it).
The statement that they were inspired by GTA is irrelevant. In the 16th century, some Catholic nuns started to walk around with heavy pelvic thrusting all the time. They claimed it was because Satan had visited their convent and ravaged them in both holes with his evil, barbed, bifurcated penis. Did Satan really do that? No, not any more than GTA is responsible for this.
An action is not the same as an idea -- it takes a diseased mind to put an idea like, "it's fun to kill people" into practice.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I hope when I finally do something stupid and evil that there is something popular that I can blame it on.
Ehh...
Doom made me do it...
GTA made me do it...
Satan speaking through my dog made me do it...
Further proof that there should only be one punishment for violent crime; an industrial meat grinder.
A 40 year old man was arrested in Chicago this morning:
"He started acting weird" mentioned his coworkers, Timothy Arcade 40 year old, went and bought a bunch of aspirins and throw them in the floor across all the cubicles, then he proceeded to eat them while making a "snacka" "snacka" sound effect, several coworkers and security officers tried to stop him, but he elluded them succesfully, in his way he also grabbed some cherries that were in the middle of the office for no apparent reason.
When the police finally arrived and arrested the man, he stated he was just trying to emulate pacman after hearing this the policeman let the poor man go and went to burn down namco's office on chicago.
Later that afternoon , the police had to arrest Timothy again, after eating a large Pill in one of the corner cubicles he actually attemped to eat the coworkers that were chasing him.
In other news some other 40 year old, was arrested yesterday for soliciting but he was let go when he confessed he was just emulating Leisure suit larry. The police is looking for sierra's offices to burn them down.
VideoGames: the best way get you off the hook... always!
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
I'm currently a free man! And I owe it to this kind of defense! I was one of the first to download that Postal 2 demo... and stabing people in the face with a shovel, covering them in gas, then lighting them on fire was the most fun I've had in years! I had been doing that for like an hour a day... every day. Well, when there was a power outage and I couldn't get my daily dose of stabity death, I took my shovel and gas and headed into the next subdivision.
Long story short, I'm free because I was "insane" and needed "help". And blaming the game helped me stay out of prison for 3 counts of murder.
For anyone who is still pending litigation and wants to go full-on for the insanity plead, fire your lawyer and defend yourself... go for the chewbacca defense. It adds a special bit of believeability.
...can a pair of stupid kids play a game, get a gun, and start shooting people... ...and have people immediately jump on the fact that they played a game instead of HAVING A FUCKING GUN!
I see my shadow changing, stretching up and over me...
Everybody knows in GTA3 you can only fire uzi's out your car window, and unless you are doing a job, you can't pick up anyone else.
Amateurs.(Vice City was in the past, doesn't count)