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Australian Counter Strike Shooters
jaronc writes "News.com.au are reporting an Australian court has been told that two men dressed as characters from 'Counter Strike' shot and killed a man during a Sydney home invasion in 2002. Let the blaming begin......"
Too black and white. I do believe in the concept of personal accountability, but I also believe that the media is partially responsible for shaping our behaviour. They contribute to our personal knowledge (through both information and misinformation) and that affects how we react to events and other people.
it was good luck that they dressed as counter-strikers, it will be much easier to prove they were "extremely" premeditated in their crime. counter-strike should get credit for help nailing these kooks not blamed for corrupting an already crazed couple of human beings.
For the most part it is. Shootings don't happen very often outside of the realm of organized crime. The average citizen goes their whole life without seeing a gun.
It is very, very hard to keep things out of Australia - just like keeping drugs out of America, there is just too much unmonitored coastline to watch. A friend of my former Sydney employer is retired and sails around the world for fun - in January this year he sailed from Fiji directly into Circular Quay (past the Opera House) without being stopped by any form of authority. He could have brought in guns, bombs, drugs, you name it.
In parts of Sydney and Melbourne it is trivially easy to find black market guns... you just have to ask certain people. A Steyr of the sort used in Counterstrike and by the Australian army will set you back about AU$10,000 (US$7500).
The Flemington Markets (where the victim worked) have always attracted a criminal element, as silly as it sounds more than a few of the produce stall vendors there have a connection to organised crime (note that in this city "organised" crime is way down the ladder in severity from the American Mob.)
I live in out in the midst of all this, and have seen first hand the way these guys operate. Make eye contact and they will literally go berserker on you. I watched three carloads of these guys stomp the living shit out of a scrawny 19 or 20 year old guy because he told them to "fuck off" after they threw fireworks at his girlfriend. I've seen brawls outside my apartment that could be called small riots and I've been attacked myself after one of these macho dickheads sexually assaulted my girlfriend in front of me. One new years eve I was in a crowd at Darling Harbor counting down at midnight, right on the stroke of midnight a gang of these guys linked arms, charged the crowd and just started wailing on anyone they could catch. Minutes later they'd fled. It's not politically correct to identify a gang by it's ethnicity but a large degree of their behavior arises out of environmental factors, especially their treatment of women and their gang-culture of machismo-on-steroids violence. Drive by shootings are a new phenomenon in this country and nearly all of them in this city are internecine warfare between rival groups of Lebanese and Arab young men, typically over the drug trade. In 1998 a police station was shot up with a fully automatic weapon.
Which brings me to my point that if they were dressed in paramilitary gear it was probably more to do with that than any exposure to Counterstrike. This wasn't some random assault by kids "corrupted" by some computer game, it was more than likely a gang reprisal where the assailants were known to the victim.
The rise of Lebanese gangs in Sydney
Sydney police besieged in their own station by Lebanese gang
Serial gang rapes in Sydney
Bilal Skaf, the leader of the rapists converted to radical Islam in jail and has openly avowed his support of Al Qaeda and sent death threats to the judge and witnesses at his trial.
Lets not let facts get in the way of feeling good about ourselves.
There is a slight problem - gun related crime has INCREASED in Australia since the "tough new gun laws" were introduced.
I think you are ignoring some facts yourself.
That was half-life, not counterstrike.
Buh, the sporting goods store in town has a used AR-15 for $389.99, comes with a trigger lock, case, and two 30-round mags. Pretty good deal. Course, I decided I'd spend $349.99 on the HK G3 clone; 7.62 is much manlier than a wussy lil 5.56 :D
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Yes, it's the problem of correlation verses causation . If you found in a survey that 90% of all serial killers chew gum, you may have found a correlation. However, this does not necessarily mean you can use causation to say that gum-chewers are more likely to become serial killers.
For the statistically inclined, the relationship is exellently explained by the wikipedia entry. Basically the theory goes that there may be some hidden or lurking variable that was not tested.
So in this case it could be that some violent criminals play CS, and many who play CS are violent. There may be some other factor involved though. I could even conjecture that perhaps crazy people do violent things a lot, and sometimes this includes video games.
Hmm. Nah, maybe it's the gum thing.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Dunno about now, but when i was still living in louisianna (almost 15 years ago), you sure the hell COULD buy a 9mm handgun in any pawnshop for 50$ :)
There's an online Hartman Value Profile test/calculator at:
http://www.qis.net/~jschmitz/hvp/test1.html