Games Seized Following Murder

GamePolitics reports that M-rated games have been taken as evidence a case involving the death of a 55-year old man in Louisiana. The connection? Jack Thompson says: "Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hitman or a videogamer." GP goes on to point out the lunacy of this claim. From the site: "Funny, that. A quick Google search on 'shot in the face' turns up 921,000 entries."

Comments

Re:Why is that Jack

[Indefinite, Ephemera]

The way Game Politics puts it, the police seized the games as a result of Thompson's input; if that's correct then he's been influencing police activities, which makes matters more newsworthy.

TFA: 'The WFPSO took Thompson's information and used it as a basis to search the home of a 16-year-old suspect in the crime. A police official told the newspaper that deputies seized several M-rated video games from the residence. Captain Spence Dilworth, however, drew no conclusions from his findings.'

Re:Why is that Jack

[MonkeyPaw]

"Seriously though, how is this news? If the police are building any sort of murder case against anyone, they are going to sieze everything remotely related to murder and killing."

That's true.
A friend of mines brother and his best friend stabbed someone to death. The police arrested the pair the next day and mostly cleaned out this kids room (he still lived at home). The police took the bathroom sink in the basement next to his room even though it contained no visible trace of blood.

I guess the police figured they washed up there.

Re:Google stats are meaningless

[Indefinite, Ephemera]

In this case the claim is that there exists no person who shoots someone in the face and is not a hitman and is not a gamer - so what's required to debunk that claim is a counterexample (someone who shoots someone in the face and is neither a hitman nor a gamer), and only one is logically required; presumably the Google numbers are for rhetorical force. ('How can he have overlooked all these easily found counterexamples?')

TFA's paragraph in full: 'Funny, that. A quick Google search on "shot in the face" turns up 921,000 entries. Here's a quick sample just from the past week. We see nary a video game or a hitman among them.'

Forget the Games....

[Anonymous Coward]

I say hang'em, and make it public while at it.
There's no excuse for such a thing, especially after the man let them stay on his property.

Read more here about the actual murder:
http://www.wafb.com/Global/story.asp?S=4972800

OT: the paragraph tag

[geobeck]

The [p] tag works normally if you close the previous paragraph with a [/p] (which has been the preferred way to close a paragraph for several years, although unclosed paragraphs still work for the most part.

Re:Thompson is a Moron.

[aitikin]

IIRC He has been disbarred in Florida, he's lost a number of his fandom, but not nearly enough of it, and there have been studies proving there is no link between videogames and violence, while at the same time there have been studies proving the opposite. As for the hitman...we're working on it.

Re:Google stats are meaningless

[mrferrier]

A Google search for:

"shot in the face"

Returns 759,000 right now. However a search for:

"shot in the face" -game -hitman

Returns 244,000. So the claim that "We see nary a video game or a hitman among them" is suspect.

Better yet:

"shot in the face" -game -movie -hitman -cheney -soldier

Returns just 143,000.

Re:Actually...

[jwiegley]

IANAHM: While I agree a perforated cardiac muscle is nearly 100% fatal I would argue that a direct head shot is equally fatal (possibly more so).

I found this article http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0406web/shock.html about a trauma surgeon's experiences with gunshot victims in several urban areas. Most notable to support my belief are two passages:

"The thing we're looking for when we slash the chest open is a bullet injury to the heart where the bleeding has been only in a modest amount, but it's accumulating inside" the heart, Cornwell explains. "Then he's in cardiac arrest not because he's bled out, like most gunshot victims, but because the motor can't pump anymore."

If you're the surgeon at such a moment, what you do is simple yet sublime. You slash a hole in the human heart. You watch while the stopped-up blood spills out. Then you stick your finger over that slash like it's the proverbial hole in a dike, and you race to an operating room where you sew up the heart you just slashed, only by now it's thumping stronger and steadier with each stitch.

Which leads me to believe that a reasonably large number of cardiac perforations are not fatal. In fact there seems to be a routine, if slightly barbaric, method for restoring the hydraulic functionality of the heart and that the perforation does not, in itself, disable the heart.

"No new medicine or advance in surgical technique will ever save a patient with a direct gunshot wound to the head,"

And that leads me to believe that at least this trauma surgeon views such wounds as more hopeless. (Though his statement doesn't discriminate between the location of entry and exit points which I think might make a difference since a bullet entering the face at certain points has to travel through several layers of bone and much more soft tissue before damaging the central nervous system compared to an entry wound in the back of the head.)

I guess, of course, that my recommendation for hitmen (or hitwomen) for obtaining the greatest chance of success is, given sufficient time and opportunity, to perform both.

Re:Shot in the face

[aadvancedGIR]

From an external point of view, the US doesn't seem to have made the good choice:
*Almost anyone has "self-defense" handweapons so many children are killed by their parents' gun (and the risk of being shot is about 100 times bigger than in my country).
*Any sexual reference is taboo, and then you see all those average drunk student in Cancun doing things that many pornstars here would be ashamed of. Maybe if they had a proper sexual education instead of just puritanism and hardcore...