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Student Arrested For Using Phone App To 'Shoot' Classmates

Posted by Soulskill on from the probably-time-to-shut-down-that-old-quake-server dept.

New submitter Lord_Breetai sends word that a Louisiana high school student has been arrested for using a mobile app to simulate shooting his classmates. The app overlays an FPS-style gun and UI over a real background seen through the device's camera. The student tried it out and then unwisely posted a video of it on YouTube. Another student's parent saw the video and reported it to authorities. Major Wolfe of the local police said, "You can't ignore it. We don't know at what time that game becomes reality. He said it was a result of him being frustrated and tired of being bullied. He said that he had no intentions of hurting anybody. We have to take all threats seriously and we have no way of knowing that without investigating and getting to the bottom of it. With all the school shooting we've had in the United States, it's just not a very good game to be playing at this time." The boy is now facing criminal charges for terrorizing and interference of the operation of a school.

5 of 706 comments (clear)

  1. terrorism? by Lawrence_Bird · · Score: 5, Informative

    who the fuck was harmed? no one. interfering with school ops? when? how?

    The US has become a nation of fucking pussies. Thankfully it seems that a lot of under 25's are rejecting the fucked up views of their parents and grandparents. The late babyboom and near postboom generations have been a disaster in just about every way possible.

  2. Re:Really? by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 5, Informative

    So has the rate of violent crime in schools:

    http://curry.virginia.edu/research/projects/violence-in-schools/school-violence-myths

  3. Re:Wait, wait! by 0111+1110 · · Score: 5, Informative

    At the very least, the posting of the video constitutes a death threat, which demands justice.

    No it does not constitute a death threat. A death threat is, "I'm going to kill you now, AC". A video game is just a video game now matter what the pixels may or may not look like.

    Let me say that again. AC, I am going to murder you sometime very soon. I own a gun. An assault rifle. I am going to kill you with it. This IS going to happen. So you might want to prepare a will or something. Perhaps flee whatever country you live in as well. Just to be safe.

    The only problem is that I have no idea who you are and no way to find out and I don't actually own a gun. Do you see why threats are required to be credible and why the person making the threat is expected to have some realistic means of carrying it out?

    --
    Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
  4. Re:Really? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

    Although I think there were significantly less of these back in the day.

    Assume no longer. Looks like the decade from 1900-1910 had the most shootings, but it seems massacres were rarer.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  5. Re:Really? by rolfwind · · Score: 5, Informative

    When you were a kid the press hadn't sensationalized all the murder sprees at school.

    Although I think there were significantly less of these back in the day.

    http://reason.com/blog/2012/12/17/are-mass-shootings-becoming-more-common

    those who study mass shootings say they are not becoming more common.

    "There is no pattern, there is no increase," says criminologist James Allen Fox of Boston's Northeastern University, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s, spurred by a rash of mass shootings in post offices.

    The random mass shootings that get the most media attention are the rarest, Fox says. Most people who die of bullet wounds knew the identity of their killer....

    Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.