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Robbers Scared by GTA
HellSpam writes "Some robbers tried to burglarize a poor old lady and her 3 grandsons. Her grandsons happened to be playing Grand Theft Auto:San Andreas, and the sounds of the police from the game scared them away! From the article: "The police in the game were saying, 'Stop, we have you surrounded. This is the police.' The burglar, unknowingly, thought this was the actual police and panicked ... being apprehended by PlayStation." Now, no more saying games are bad for you..."
This was back in March according to the article so GTA:SA wasnt out yet! (must have been a previous one) The story is in the news because they just got sentenced to around 5 years each - kind of like a darwin award they're gonna get the piss taken out of them in jail.
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This is an amusing story, but how do we know this happened? Did the crook get caught and confess this? Or is this just some joke people are taking as fact?
From the article: "Back in March, Sandy Wilson was taking care of her three grandsons when a group of men attempted to burglarize her home, pointing a gun at the kids.".
So back in March, it couldn't have been GTA:SA
because,
Americans need to feel like they're different from the rest of the world.
Yeah, you beat me to the chase.
I recall the line was in both of the previous games, so really it could have been GTA3 or vice city.
*or* if you wanted to take the newspaper literally, it might have actually been GTA for playstation.
+5, Truth
Please, stop making words up, it's worse than boswollox
Of course burglarize is a word. Before you criticize someone's grammar maybe you should read a dictionary.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
This is just a case of Americans deciding that everything is "ized" because it sounds trendy. It is what my Grandma would refer to as "Estuary English". You won't find such abuses of the English language in the OED.
his Prize for being so dumb is prison and lets hope he enjoys that prize for many many years to come.
and for all the uk press i.e BBC you say GTA is bad for children fuckin tell that to these kids pareants.
I Predict A Riot
The right of self-defenc(s)e (just being PC) is being eroded in most countries as an artifact of an encroaching police state. I've been saying this for decades: if citizens have no legal right to defend themselves, the government will next conclude that they have no need of anything that would help them defend themselves. Like guns. Is the government (any government) really so concerned that we might accidentally pop a burglar? Do they really care if we accidentally shoot ourselves in the {insert body part here}? Do they really care how many shooting victems show up on the 5 o'clock news? Sure, individual lawmakers may be, but government as a whole has other ideas.
... but I'll say this. After four+ years of George Bush at lot of folks that used to dismiss such views as paranoid are giving them a second look. A lot of anti-gun types make such a big deal about how the "right to bear arms" really isn't a right to bear arms, etc. etc., continually trying to reinterpret the Founders' intentions. But their intention was pellucidly clear: the right was given to us as a deterrent (and last-ditch defense) against an abusive government. It can happen here, folks, and a lot of people that fought so hard to eliminate guns from our society may one day wish they had one. A gun, that is.
The unrelenting anti-gun bias is just a smokescreen, whose sole intent is to convince us to allow yet another part of the Constitution to effectively die. What they are afraid of is an armed, independent population that would cheerfully shoot any government official that oversteps his bounds. And why would they care about that? My guess: they're planning on overstepping their bounds.
Oh I know, tinfoil hat stuff
Let me add, just to eliminate any confusion, that I'm not a member of the NRA nor have I ever owned any firearm more powerful than a BB gun. But I want the right to acquire one if I feel sufficiently threatened (by anyone or anything.) That's what the Founding Fathers wanted, and so far as I'm aware there's been no Constitutional Amendment that says otherwise. The recent history of the United States, in particular, has been one of steadily increasing government power, going hand-in-hand with this simpleminded idea that if we could just ban all guns, life would be so much better. Unfortunately, that goes against the history of such things, and really places more trust in our government that it currently deserves.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I usually wouldn't do this, but since:
... being apprehended by Playstation."
1) The article is only 4 paragraphs long, and
2) At the time of my reply, this moron has been modded to +3 Insightful,
Galveston County Asst DA Michael Elliott explained, "The police in the game were staying, 'Stop, we have you surrounded. This is the police.' The burglar, unknowingly, thought this was the actual police and panicked
and also
Police arrested the four men. Samuel Woodrow received a five-year prison sentence this week. Ronnie Farris is serving four years. Lucas Griffin got probation. And Zachary Brandenburg's trial is in January.
It's one thing for a -1 post to say things like "wah, wah, wah, what are you talking about, this is stupid, i bet it's a hoax" but when people are burning real modpoints, it's just a travesty. Travesty I tell ya.
The story is a funny little urban anecdote, but that's it. Burglers get scared off by a lot of things - and they usually don't rob houses while there are people in them so any sign of life can often scare them off.
If this is news then I'm now waiting for a sensationalist story about a startled burgler or even a policeman on a routine call hearing the audio of some game character making a threat or seeing a high resolution gun pointed at him on a big screen and returning fire, hitting a kid.
I've always been kind of curious about this. From what I understand, one of the chief justifications for individuals to own firearms is to protect themselves against gross abuse of power by the government or military.
So... do Americans just not trust their government?
I guess it's a bit naive to just trust figures of authority at their word, but if it's really a government by, for, and of the people, the theory is that they ought to be at least somewhat trustworthy, right?
It just seems a little weird to me to have a population that feels the need to keep the government on their toes through threat of military revolution. Is it really the land of the free when everyone's afraid that the government will resort to military dictatorship?
if citizens have no legal right to defend themselves...
How does not being able to kill somebody for taking your television consitute not being able to legally defend yourself?
Is the government (any government) really so concerned that we might accidentally pop a burglar?
It's the job of government to keep society running smoothly. Vigilante killings undermine that.
The unrelenting anti-gun bias is just a smokescreen, whose sole intent is to convince us to allow yet another part of the Constitution to effectively die. What they are afraid of is an armed, independent population that would cheerfully shoot any government official that oversteps his bounds.
Quite frankly, I'd be scared of somebody cheerfully shooting anybody for overstepping their bounds, and I've got nothing to do with the government. What kind of psychopath are you?
But I want the right to acquire one if I feel sufficiently threatened (by anyone or anything.)
What does a gun achieve that less-lethal weapons don't? Apart from the person you don't like ending up dead instead of injured? People wanting to defend themselves, I have no problem with. People wanting to kill others for some kind of revenge, I do have a problem with.
People always complain about the extreme of laws but never seem to have the intelligence to ask why these laws are there.
The laws in question deal with two things. So called self-defence and playing your own judge.
There was time when property owners (the upper class/royalty) had plenty of rights. Steal or even just be on the land of the local landlord and you could be killed by his guards. Punishments was whatever the local lord saw fit to deal out.
This has changed. Now it is up to the police and court system to punish crimes.
Do criminals have rights? Well the problem is who defines who is a criminal? Is a peasant catching a deer to feed his family a criminal? Well yes and off with their head.
Nowadays we prefer the courtsystem to decide guilt and punishment. Sometimes this results in "unjust" decisions but what every intelligent person has to ask themselve is what would the alternative result in. Would you allow force to protect a car from being broken into?
My car is parked on parking lot and you standing next to it causes the alarm to go off. Luckily I got my gun and under your jobbo rule I blow him away. Oops turned out you just bumped my car with your elbow while opening your own. Oh well. At least your family has the right to shoot people who trespass on your grave eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Actually, whilst some changes in American English were in fact deliberate (and mostly due to Webster and his peers), quite a lot of the differences are simply due to changes to the language that happened in the UK not being propogated to the USA.
I would guess that this is one of the latter cases - as it appears that burglarize is an old word that has been obsoleted by burgle in the UK (and Australia and New Zealand).
Quite a lot of how Americans speak is not an "abuse" of English - it's just a result of the separation in a time when the fastest way to communicate between the two countries was a few weeks on a boat.
I suggest you do some reading on the topic - I'd recommend "The Adventure of English" by Melvyn Bragg, and "Mother Tongue" by Bill Bryson.
Advanced users are users too!
And a plagiarist plages, right?
The US government has already overstepped their constitutional bounds, and all our guns didn't stop it.
If the American people cared, the US government never would have overstepped its constitutional bounds, and we wouldn't have needed to use guns in order to stop it. And if the American people don't care, all the guns in the world won't make a difference.
The Founding Fathers wrote a good constitution, and a great bill of rights. They ensured that we'd be able to speak out and vote to control the government, and that the rights of minorities would be protected as well. There's only one thing they couldn't do. They couldn't insure that we Americans actually care. If we don't care, none of our rights and none of our restrictions on government will make a difference.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
How does not being able to kill somebody for taking your television consitute not being able to legally defend yourself?
Maybe on your planet nobody ever does any harm to the occupants of the home they break into, but that's not what it's like here on earth. Between burglars who would rather kill you than get caught, angry ex-spouses/lovers, and the average rapist, there are plenty of situations in which you would want to have an effective means of self-defense. Non-lethal weapons just don't cut it. They are not as reliable or effective as guns, and they don't have the simple ability to scare the hell out of someone so that you don't have to actually use them. Guns do that.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I suppose they might have been spooked by the thought of more people in the house. But it seems unlikely. On the other hand, the whole incident was very unlikely to happen.