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Jack Thompson Served With Order to Show Cause
cli_rules! writes "DailyTech has reported that Jack Thompson has been ordered to explain himself. 'Therefore, it is ordered that you shall show cause on or before March 5, 2008, why this Court should not find that you have abused the legal system process and impose upon you a sanction for abusing the legal system, including, but not limited to directing the Clerk of this Court to reject for filing any future pleadings, petitions, motions, letters, documents, or other filings submitted to this Court by you unless signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than yourself.'"
Where is the itsabouttime tag?
Jack Thompson sues court for defaming him!
I really hope the legal system totally tags this guy. If I didn't already know he was a staunch conservative Christian, I would have thought he was a scientologist, just because of how sue-happy he is.
My favorite thing about Jack is the non-sequiter logic he always trots out. "Somebody A murdered someone B, Someone A played this violent video game. Therefore video games are resposible for someone B's death." Only Stephen Colbert comes up with greater syllogisms. (Although he knows he's at least being funny when he makes his). I especially love that he never brings up the 99.9999999% of normal people who play violent video games and DON'T kill people, but that's not sellacious and newsworthy (unless you're The Onion).
Oh well. I can't wait for some psychological journal to critically bash the stupid article that he parrots all the time about how video games cause violence, and replace it with realistic information like people who are already really disturbed tend to GRAVITATE towards violent video games, rather than make them disturbed. A man can dream...
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
I've said it here before and I'll say it again.
This article's existence on slashdot is depressing. Why? Because giving the even a second of any of our days to cover this over-hyped, attention-mongering fossil is beyond the common sense and rationale we, as human beings capable of accessing the vast wells of knowledge known as the internet, should be capable of having. In the end we are all attention mongers to some extent I guess...
Then again, I just wasted at least 20 seconds on this post.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Is that once he's disbarred, he'll blame the gaming community, and still go on Fox News being the world's biggest douche, and have plenty of ignorant people around to believe that the gaming community did this to him. Just because he won't be a lawyer anymore won't stop him from being a massacre chaser and ranting like a madman on TV.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
That's... rather insane. No wonder they're pissed off at him now.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Christ. I hate when people say things that make sense, but only because they don't really know the logistics.
Courts are basically immune from suit. You don't like what they say, you appeal it, if you can.
And because I don't feel likereplying to the other questions in the thread separately:
An OTSC isn't proof that "The *COURTS* have found that he's bringing baseless lawsuits. They did this because *OTHER LAWYERS* complained about him" as someone says later in this case. It's a standard device, drafted by a lawyer saying that they're right and the other person is wrong and thus, if he wants to prove he's wrong he's got to serve a pleading defending himself. Then the lawyer who drafted the OTSC only has to find one judge somewhere in Florida to say "ok, I guess you've shown that he might be filing crap pleadings now we need to hear from him" to sign it, and it's good to go.
Jumping to the conclusion that the "Court" has determined he's bringing baseless lawsuits because of this OTSC is about as intelligent as saying that the "Court" has determined video games are harmful to minors because a complaint has been filed alleging as much.
I hope he got written legal permission to use each and every one of those images. Also, I call Godwin on the swastikas surrounding the Florida Bar logo. Srsly, is this guy twelve years old or what?
And Britain? They have something like 5% of the guns, something ridiculously low -- but still around 60% of the murder rate.
Correlation is not causation. More guns is not more death.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Or at least I think it's in our favor that he exists. The gaming community is lucky to have as its biggest opponent a raving lunatic. If there were someone calm, reasonable, and sensible, someone who could get along with others, build coalitions, and speak convincingly, the gaming industry would be in much more danger of facing stifling, free-speech curbing legislation. Jack Thompson is the gamer's standard refrain for pointing out that the anti-video-game movement is a crusade lead by nuts. Perhaps more importantly, Lieberman and any other "think of the children" politicians with an anti-free-speech history who might have gotten together to regulate video game content probably don't bother trying to build coalitions to get anything done because of the inevitable presence of Jack Thompson on any such committee.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Now how does their gun ownership rate compare? If their murder rate is 25%, but they have, say, 5% of the gun ownership -- Then that pretty much points to people finding other ways to kill people, even if their guns are taken away.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank, reported the following statistics:[91]
* New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46% and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.
* In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures, and its murder rate tripled from a low of 2.4 per 100,000 in 1968 to 7.2 by 1977.
* In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134% while the national murder rate has dropped 2%.
In addition:
* Over 50% of American households own guns, despite government statistics showing the number is approximately 35%, because guns not listed on any government roll were not counted during the gathering of data. [92]
* Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb of 75,000 residents, became the largest town to ban handgun ownership in September 1982 but experienced no decline in violent crime.[citation needed]
* Among the 15 states with the highest homicide rates, 10 have restrictive or very restrictive gun laws. [93]
* Twenty percent of U.S. homicides occur in four cities with just 6% of the population--New York, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C.--and each has (or, in the case of Detroit, had until 2001) a virtual prohibition on private handguns.[citation needed]
* UK banned private ownership of most handguns in 1997, previously held by an estimated 57,000 people--0.1% of the population. [94] Since 1998, the number of people injured by firearms in England and Wales has more than doubled, despite a massive increase in the number of police personnel.[95] In 2005-06, of 5,001 such injuries, 3,474 (69%) were defined as "slight," and a further 965 (19%) involved the "firearm" being used as a blunt instrument. Twenty-four percent of injuries were caused with air weapons, and 32% with "imitation firearms" (including BB guns and soft air weapons).[96] Since 1998, the number of fatal shootings has varied between 49 and 97, and was 50 in 2005.
* Australia forced the surrender of nearly 650,000 personal firearms in 1997. A study published in 2001 [97] shows a 47% decrease of firearms related deaths, but also reveals an overall rise in non-firearm related violent crime.
* Violent crime accelerated in Jamaica after handguns were banned. [98]
Of course, most importantly is -- it doesn't matter if a million people murder a million other people with guns. Taking away MY rights based on the action of others is as unfair as a teacher sending a whole class to detention because 1 person chewed gum (been there, done that). Revolution is a basic human right, and only possible with a handgun. As they say -- freedom isn't free. Freedom comes with a price. You'd rather be in a locked cage, protected by the government... Much like an indoor cat. In the real world, bad guys have guns -- no matter what the ban. And using their actions to justify taking away MY right to protect MY life and MY family is plain wrong. Statistics don't truly matter.
Besides, just look at automobile deaths! Maybe they should take away your license, becuase 40,000 people die in car accidents every year? After all, driving is a privilege, not a constitutional right. But somehow, I suspect you would not like that course of action. Yet to many of us, being able to protect our life is FAR more important than being able to go to work.
(and don't get me started on the domestic violence red herring -- I'm guessing men killed their spouses at greater than or equal rates before guns were around, and the real correlation to spousal murders is probably societal awareness of the equality of women; if a man thinks a woman is less than him, he will find a way to kill her, gun or not.)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The right to armed bears was originally so that The Populace could physically overthrow an ludicrously irrelevant and generally unsuitable government. But these days they people are happy with ludicrous in their government, and happy with extremely poor decisions from "the top".
Armed Bears in the US today is all about a bunch of blokes who have a severe lack of self-esteem and general insecurity about their manliness. and nothing else
Yes there *are* (some, rare) genuine exceptions to the above generalization, but as I said, they're rare.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Guns per capita is a potentially misleading statistic.
So long as ownership is "clumpier" in the US, there can be a higher percentage of gun OWNERS in Canada, with a lower per CAPITA ownership.
Given the number of Americans I know on various forums with 30+ firearms (not joking in the slightest here), it's something that can't be disregarded.
Well he was talking about gun 'ownership', if you look at the wikipedia numbers there are 90 guns for 100 residents, so obviously the US gun owners have more guns on average than a gun owner anywhere else in the world. I live in CA myself and I know very few people that actually have a gun, still too many to my own taste, but I don't deny their right to own one. So it's still plausible that more people in Canada *own* guns than in the US, the owners in Canada just don't stockpile them under the kids bed like you see on Cops (the tv show) once in a while.
If you look at the numbers you gave us US has 3.3 times more gun per inhabitant than Canada yet the US has 7.9 more murders by firearms. From this I would say that the US gun owners are at least twice as trigger happy than the Canadian gun owners.
Crime is so bad in the UK because of lack of effective government policy.
Countries like Switzerland and to a lesser extent Canada are proof you can have fairly high levels of gun ownership, but not have US style crime levels. It's also true that the UK is apparent proof that you can have very strict gun controls and fairly low levels of gun ownership but still have serious violent crime problems.
That doesn't mean that making guns harder to own in the US (particularly through the enforcement of proper background checks, mandatory training courses, certification for different weapon types and strict licensing laws) couldn't save hundreds - maybe even thousands - of lives every year.
Perhaps, like driving lessons, (opt-in) gun control classes should form part of the high school curriculum. I'm not suggesting giving kids access to guns, even in a training facility (in the same way that sex education classes don't involve practicing sex), but providing some grounding so that from an early age kids likely to own or be around guns have proper understanding of appropriate behavior around weapons and so that proper gun control - and the consequences of misuse - can be ingrained.