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Kids Kill, Victim Sues Game Maker
qbproger writes "Sadly, two kids decided to go outside and start shooting cars. They were mimicing a video game they had been playing, Grand Theft Auto. I think it's about time parents started paying attention to the rating on video games." The family of one of the victims has decided to file suit against Take Two Interactive, presumably deciding that blame should be assigned to whoever has the deepest pockets instead of to those who actually did something wrong.
That totally sucks as an insanity defense, and I'm calling these kids on it. "It's-a Mario Kart, you honour!" as a plea? Now a that's a spicy-a meatball. (fr1st)
How many of these cases have to be thrown out before people figure out they're not going to win?
Well, there's a name I didn't expect to see in a news story about frivolous lawsuits.
Jack "2 Live Crew, Cop Killer, Dear Policeman I Am God, EverQuest Killed My Son" Thompson, Florida's leading disgrace to the legal profession.
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On the other side of the coin, the victim might not be concerned about deep pockets. Instead, the victim is most likely in deep pain and may be under the impression the stopping the game company from making such games might also stop this pain from happening again.
Just on a personal note, I am not opposed to violent video games; I play them. I believe teenagers are more impressionable than adults, and we should be careful about their level of violence ingested.
it's not the fault of the parents that left guns around where little kids could get their hands on them. or for not teaching them to not shoot at cars. no way, that's too easy of an explination.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
This is another example of people not being responsible for thier own actions.
The game did it.
What happened?
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
I created my own player in Madden 2003 in which I placed myself on the New England Patriots.
Well when I showed up for training camp earlier this year they kept telling me to get the hell off the field. They wouldn't believe me that I really was on the team.
I'm seriously considering suing the makers of Madden for making me believe I really was on the team because they, of course, are at fault in this situation.
> who? who?
I'd be more concerned with where they got the guns.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Any kids that went out and did stuff like that had problems before they ever got ahold of GTA.
The coolest voice ever.
1: being irresonsible and leaving unlocked weapons around.
2: not teaching the kids gun safety
3: not knowing what the kids were up to
You never know, it might actually work! The next step would be, imagine this, that parents would actually be responsible for their childs actions!!
It is so obvious that Jack Thompson jumped all over this. As I mentioned when this happened, whenever there is any juvenile violence that is remotely associtated with vidoegames, Jack Thomson is there to blame videogames and remove any possibility of personal responsibility.
This is the guy who said that the DC snipers were gamers and got nearly every mainstream media outlet to beleive it. This is also the guy who sent a 13 year old (possibly his son, I don't remember exactly) into Best Buy to guy M rated games. He has very good PR and is very good at getting media coverage beacuse he gives the media the kind of hysteria laden sound bites they love. This guy has an agenda and he needs to be watched out for.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Are Parents the Gatekeepers?
How is this even a question? Yes.
Please allow me to quote Gabe from Penny Arcade:
"Like some kind of pornographic archeologist your 10 year old boy is probably rummaging through a stack of poorly hidden playboys from the 1970's at his best friends house right now. You cannot watch your kids all the time and you cannot ensure they will never see a boob or a gun before they are ready. What you can do is make sure that what they see and do in your house is appropriate and rely on some good old fashioned parenting skills to make sure that a quick glimpse of some blood in a videogame doesn't send them into a violent rage that ends with a school full of dead kids."
The coolest voice ever.
From Carter, C. J., "U.S. Leads Richest Nations In Gun Deaths", Associated Press, Friday, April 17, 1998:
(selected figures for) gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in 1994:
United States 14.24;
Northern Ireland 6.63;
Canada 4.31;
Israel 2.91;
Australia 2.65;
England and Wales 0.41;
Japan 0.05
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Just pay attention to your kids.
Psychotics aren't born in a day.
I'm reminded of a line out of a Batman comic that I have in which a paramedic tells Batman not to feel bad after a maniac shoots several people because he (Batman) couldn't have known. Batman's response is something to the effect of:
"I don't. I didn't shoot anyone."
I think that applies here fairly well. Noone at Take Two shot anyone (at least not in relation to this case), and it wasn't their job to watch and raise every fucking 90 IQ kid out there who plays their game when the parents don't screen their kids' purchases. A more apt lawsuit might be filed against the parents for criminal negligence and the fact that they let their mentally ill, retarded children anywhere near guns...
Actually, my apologies to all the mentally retarded people out there, I shouldn't have grouped you with people as ridiculously stupid as those kids...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Think about playing GTA. What happens the first time you try to play the game?
Chances are you end up with the boys in blue on your butt and you're being beaten to a bloody pulp. Nothing misleading there.
They should select a group of jurors with no experience playing the GTA games and have them each try playing the game -- the trial will last about 90 minutes before being thrown out.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
Hi,
I happened to have seen Bowling for Columbine yesterday. In it the solution, provided by a very funny black entertainer. Make bullets $5000 a piece.
Bert
Who appreciates a lot of what Michael Moore makes.
PC manufacturers are guilty of perpetuating monopoly abuse by M$ until they include a partition with Linux pre-installed
Some guy named Kazaa.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
Yeah, but we're talking about kids here. Who was supposed to be watching them when they grabbed the guns? And who was watching the guns?
The gun owner has a responsibility to keep them locked up. Right?
wbs.
Huh?
As a parent, I watch what my 10 year old son plays online (mainly looking up game FAQs) and plays on the console.
We do NOT let him play any games with guns. He plays racing games, goofy Mario type games and the like. We also teach him that people using guns on others is a very bad thing. We are trying to instill in him that guns are weapons for the sole purpose of harming and killing other things.
We're trying to teach him to be nice. To try to be a good person. To know right from wrong. What happened to being a nice person? Why is everyone so cynical now adays?
Are we perfect parents? No. Will what we're trying to teach him stick? I don't know...but we're trying, we really really are. It's hard to do with the media overblowing violence and crime most of the time.
When something like this happens, everyone points fingers and blames everyone else. But I feel there is no one thing to blame. There are many different factors at work here. Bad parents? Violent Videogames? Violent media and music? War starting presidents? Evil dictators? Religion? Environment? Bullies? School?
There are no answers, only choices.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I have observed this enough times to dub it Sarah Brady Syndrome:
- Something horrible happens to someone close to you.
- You decide that Something Must Be Done <tm> to prevent anyone else from suffering the same fate.
- After considering, and rejecting, the idea of using the existing laws that punish the person who actually caused the problem (especially if that person is the putative 'victim' himself, as in the case of cigarette smoking or McDonald's food), you settle on:
- Suing someone other than the perpetrator, under the theory that they aided and abetted the perpetrator by manufacturing one of the tools used, or wrote a book/movie/TV program/video game that 'inspired' the criminal act
- Lobbying your legislators for new criminal remedies against these enablers.
- Both.
I am heartened by the fact that the latest lawsuit against McDonald's (apparently for forcing kids to eat so much of their food as to have fat asses) was rejected with prejudice by the judge, but recent history is filled with too many examples that go the other way.We not only have the Brady Bill, but countless other laws named for a victim, and almost without exception, they're bad laws - unnecessary and counterproductive, because they punish people other than the actual perpetrators, which teaches the next round of dumb kids that it isn't their fault when they shoot up their high school, killing scores of people and giving Michael Moore a chance to make another preachy movie (and Katz an excuse to compile a book).
I expect someone to go paint a tunnel on the side of a concrete wall, run their car into it at 60 mph and their family sue Warner Brothers for making Road Runner cartoons give them the idea.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Let me see if I understand the situation. These kids "got bored" and decided to go shoot up trucks on the highway. Now, are we supposed to believe that the kids were too stupid to come up with the idea on their own? Or that they were too stupid to recognize that just because violence on a screen can be entertaining, it doesn't necessarily mean that the same violence is entertaining in real life?
Personally, I hate the entire GTA series. I think the glorification of violence is a bad idea, and that the game makers show a lack of social conscience. But I respect their right to make the games. Further, I believe that if we were to hold game makers responsible for the effects of their games on the people who buy them, it would have a profund chilling effect on free speech. That is unacceptable.
You know it and I know it: these kids were severely disturbed long before they ever got their hands on GTA. Hundreds of millions of people play video games, why aren't at least a few million of us out there emulating them? Because the vast, vast majority of us have too firm a grip on reality. We also share an ability to empathize with others and accept that their feelings are important. These kids, somewhere along the line, lost that ability.
Even if we accept that there is a small subset of humanity who--for whatever psycho/neuro/sociological reason--can be affected by video games in this way, that is not sufficient reason to stop creating the games. It doesn't make sense any more than it makes sense to stop making peanut butter just because a few of us are violently allergic to peanuts. The focus should be on finding these broken people and trying to fix them, because making the world safe for them is impossible.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The lead kid was 16 years old. Think about that, he would have been a sophomore or junior in high school. If he still can't tell the difference between right and wrong or video game and reality, society has much bigger problems than simulated violence. Even his freind at 14 years should have known better. I'll admitt GTA3 is a captivating game, but it can't just make someone shut down their thought processes. It's obvious those processes weren't there to begin with.
If I were one of his victims, I would sue his parents for leaving an unsecured gun around a mentally disabled child.
Mario has been prosecuted before for vandalism in Isle Delfino, as well as illegal drug prescriptions in Dr. Mario.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
What if instead of deciding to shooting at passing traffic, they were inspired to jump in a car and begin to run over pedestrians? Would you then be concerned with where they got the car? Guns do not kill, - people do.
The argument that GTA2, or any media, is to blame for one's actions is absurd. What should be explored is why these kids are feeble minded imbeciles. What is next - not allowing kids to read history (full of murder, rape, and violence) because we fear it might cause them kill? If you are simple minded enough to be persuaded by a video game to shoot someone in the head - you are either insane or a moron.
Maybe we could avoid a few of these cases if we included LOGIC somewhere in our public school's curriculum.
We all know games are what makes people kill. It's a proven historical fact. After all, it is well documented that Stalin used to play chess. We certainly cannot allow such murder-simulators to taint our children. I for one believe congress should ban any and all games on the market. I believe they should start with checkers and move their way up.
Why can't parents ever acknowledge that their kids were incredibly stupid and that they really shouldn't have had any sort of acess to firearms. Let's look at this...
"I didn't want to hurt anyone," Joshua wrote.
Now, I'm not saying that these kids are kind of slow, but one would expect when you live in Tenesee where your parents let you wander over to the highway with some rifles, your parents would have taught you at the very least that when you shoot people with guns, they get hurt. I'm very certain that when these kids parents took them out Coon hunting or whatever brain dead sport people keep these useless pieces of trash around for (those would be guns) they explained very clearly that the buisness end of the gun should not be turned on other people and that when it was loaded and sighted, pulling the trigger would cause massive trauma to whatever was in front of the business end of the gun.
I'm sorry, but video games companies should start suing these kids and their parents for slander, because the other 500 million of us that played Grand Theft Auto have never shot anyone, and just becuase some retard, with a minimal understanding of causal relationships decides that blasting away with a gun is a good idea, doesn't mean that a game is involved. These people have been disconnected from reality for a good long while and it's time that we lock them away in quiet houses for crazy people where they belong.
To summarize, when you give a moron a gun, bad things happen. It is sincerely time to take people into account for their actions ("Hey kids you killed someone, wounded another, and cuased a deal of property damage, I'm thinking about letting you off on probation") it frustrates me to no end that this is the kind of society that we live in.
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The second ammendment allows for the right of a well regulated militia to bear arms in defense of our nation.
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You know what I just thought of, the core of the problem is that most people who own firearms (unless they're really messed up in the head) own guns for sport hunting. I think that the real root of this problem is that these people have introduced the idea of a gun as a source of entertainment far before video games.
50 years ago most boys aged 15-25 were fighting in a war with real guns and killing real people. How many of them came back and started shooting at people?
Points well taken. And sorry about the penis crack..
.44 magnum auto-mag gained popularity before the Dirty Harry movie that featured the auto-mag) where you shoot metal silos of rams, deer etc etc. The sport now is mainly with the Thompson-arms single shot rifle caliber pistols.
But I stated in another post: Olympic trap and skeet shooting. Ok...one thing that takes a gun. A shotgun...But this is also a simulation of birds flying up while hunting. That is how skeet shooting got started...for practice in dove and pheasent hunting.
I was born and raised on a farm in rural Virginia and many times me and my brother and Father went hunting for deer/squire/rabbit not for sport, but to actually put food on our table. Was also a memeber of the NRA. And believe it or not, but in the early 80's I was also a gun dealer and pistolsmith.
Yes, there are sports I call "practice sports" such as silo competition (where the
But my main point is that most of these "sports" are simply practice for hunting. Target practice is practice of shooting a target so when a "real" target comes into a situation that you need to shoot it, you're better prepared to shoot it. True, not much death there, but these are mainly pratice for dealing death if that need should arise.
I changed I guess. In your view, they have a useage and we are given a right to have them. But in my view now, just having a right to have them doesn't mean I HAVE to have them. As far as defending my property, I have no defense. If someone wants to break into my house and murder me and my family, then they will have our dead bodies. Bodies that were going to die within the next 100 years anyway. They can kill me and I will die...but I will not take another life again.
There was this little bald guy that kicked the entire British empire out of his poor country...and never lifted a gun or sword or any weapon to do it.
Now, if teaching my child to be kind and gentle (or in your words fear) is screwing him up...then I guess I'm screwing him up.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
What is the misfire that children are experiencing that we, as children, didn't experience.
Never during my youth did I ever attempt to faithfully mimic any of my forms of entertainment in a dangerous way. I have never known a friend, a friend of a friend or even a dumbass kid who ever pulled stupid emulation tricks that ridiculously ended in some "willful" violent act.
This does not include accidents that were painfully stupid, of course... I remember hearing about a kid screwing around with a shotgun... eeeew.... not a pretty scar.... even then I thought to myself "what a dumbass!"
WHY did I have such a stark sense of reality that kids today seem to be missing? After all, that is the REAL problem here. It's not games we/they play. It's not the crap we/they watch on TV. A majority of kids actually do understand the difference between reality and fantasy or else we'd have a plague of mutant kids shooting up schools, writing Microsoft worms and virii, teenagers getting pregnant, dogs and cats sleeping together, mass hysteria!
Now I have sons and I let them play Mortal Kombat when everyone else says "No! They'll become evil mutant killer kids! It'll warp their impressionable little minds!" Sure enough, they began to emulate the games they played. The difference between my kids and the "odd" kids who don't understand reality? My sons somehow KNEW they should "pull their punches." They somehow KNEW that you can't and shouldn't attempt to rip a person's head off by the spine dripping blood all over my freshly cleaned carpet.
Clearly it's not the games. It's the influence the parents have over their children. Somehow people got some WEIRD ideas about raising kids. Here's a few of them: (in no specific order of significance)
1. Parents own their kids and no one can or will take them away! It's a socialist crime against nature to even try.
Here's a reality: NO! You don't! They are your responsibility. They are not your thing. They are not your hobby. They are not for your convenience and they aren't "cheap household labor." They are little versions of you and they embody all of your dreams and hopes. They can avoid making all the mistakes in life you made and you can have a vicarious second chance not to screw your life up as you did before. Most importantly, your self-elected job is to teach these little PEOPLE. So teach them!
2. No rational person goes about causing distruction. The only reason it could happen is a sheer lack of respect for other people, property and ultimately themselves.
This goes back to TEACHING YOUR DAMNED KIDS!!! I was taught. My kids are taught. Most of the kids my brothers have are taught. The only "trouble" I have seen from any of them were the STEP-KIDS of one of my brothers... he clearly has problems with reality and problems with respecting other people and property. Strangely, he has a "very good mother." She's one of those over-reactive, sheltering soccer-moms who is "ultra careful" and censoring.
Teach your kids to respect and understand reality. Don't do what my mother did -- preventing me from using a fork to eat with for fear I might hurt myself. Give your kids a frikken KNIFE and teach them how to use it properly and maybe even show them that when used improperly, injury can occur. That's how to teach respect for your environment and how to deal with and live within the realm of reality. Teach them to shoot guns properly; How to clean and maintain them; to be good at hitting the target and to understand that they are dangerous and deadly in the wrong hands and that there are serious consequences to misusing these tools.
TEACH THE KIDS!!! You're not "too busy."
And for those who aren't taught... for those who raise defective kids... HOLD THEM 100% responsible. It's a frikken tragedy that their failure as a parent would actually have repercussions on themselves... but this is kind of like conventional corporate mentality... they can do bad things because they kn