In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech murders, fingers were prematurely pointed at the video game industry.
It's almost as if activists can't wait for the next tragedy so they can pounce. Fingers lie in wait, eager to point blame at the unthinkable violence we saw last week in Virginia.
Just hours after Seung-Hui Cho unleashed more than 100 rounds at students at Virginia Tech, activist and anti-game lawyer Jack Thompson's finger was pointing straight at the video game industry.
"To be able to pull this off, with this high body count, Bill, one has to have rehearsed it in able to do it," the anti-game lawyer told Fox News.
"According to eyewitnesses, there was a flat affect on his face, as if he were playing a video game," he later told NBC news.
"He wasn't downloading music," "He was playing this game." Thompson said, referring to a game called Counter Strike.
Yet, ironically,even after Dr. Phil blamed video games on "Larry King Live" (and we all know Dr. Phil knows *everything*) not one ounce of evidence ever surfaced that Cho was even into video games.
Cho's suite mate, Karan Grewal, confirms that fact, telling MSNBC,
"I never saw him play video games on his computer," he said, adding that Cho was a fan of wrestling and game shows.
"Most of the times ... he had a Word document open and he just kept on typing away."
But after searching Cho's room at Virginia Tech, there were no signs of video games to be seen... only evidence of poetry and playwriting. The Washington Post had wrongly reported that Cho had been playing violent video games, a fact that was later removed from the story.
Unfortunately, the second a tragedy of this magnitude strikes, the media's got Thomspon on speed-dial. Most news anchors aren't experts on video games, so they let Thompson speak his mind without interruption.
But an MSNBC reporter knew his facts and took a different approach, challenging Thompson and pointing out that no evidence had been found "that Cho had ever so much as picked up a joystick at Virginia Tech."
"You are projecting other cases onto this case," Matthews told Thompson, who continued to insist that Counter-Strike was responsible for the killings.
A similar instance happened after the Columbine murderers were said to have used a video game, Doom, to create their own "library levels" as a rehearsal for the horrible acts they carried out. Just after that massacre, I had a chance to speak with Doom's creator and Ion Storm founder Jon Romero at the E3 industry trade show in Los Angeles. Romero was understandably upset by the sudden scandal his game and company were facing. The media was relentless, seeking him out for every ounce of response they could get. But was it fair to place such blame on any first-person shooter, any game title, any record album or any movie?
So it begs the question...are some anti-violence activists just as trigger happy as criminals themselves? And is it really fair to target one group or industry for the largest massacres in US history?
