Usually I ignore crazy people. But when someone uses a tragedy like Virginia Tech to stand on their soapbox and start accusing video games of being the cause of violence in this country, it makes me sick. In the past, he claimed that a shooter in a previous instance trained on Grand Theft Auto before committing a school massacre. Does this man ever even look at video games? When he went on his tirade about the game Bully on G4, he admitted to never having even SEEN the game! Is there any rational thought to these blanket statements that he makes, every single time a something like this happens? I’m sorry, I must have missed the “school shooting simulation,” first-person perspective level in GTA3.

You know what? My last sentence was even too vague. I don’t care if there was an Army-approved, super-realistic shooting simulation available. Unless someone is PREDISPOSED to violence of this level, absolutely no amount of video game playing is going to make them kill someone. None. I don’t care how many scientific studies this man thinks there are to back his claims. A normal human being will not turn into a maladjusted killer because they played too much Counterstrike. He also says that the “common denominator” in these school shootings is that the killers “trained” on “mass-murder games.” Oh, teenagers were playing video games? That is shocking, absolutely shocking.

And as a matter of fact, there is no record that Seung-Hui Cho at Virginia Tech even played video games. I’m in no way making light of these recent events at all, I’m just so thoroughly disgusted that this man continues to be invited by the media to spout his ignorant, misleading, and incorrect statements to the world. Mr. Thompson, please take some time to re-evaluate what it is you’re doing, and come up with a better, more productive way to help the American family.

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