Cop Blames Videogames For Sandy Hook Massacre

[Lunar Templar]

This may very well be one of the stupidest things I've seen.

I can't even begin to fathom the idiocy behind this.

And even worse, people are going to believe this shit. Fucking hell.

1) love the avatar, Yu made the funny bits of the game a riot in the animation

2) pretty much everything this guy said :/

catchpa:good grief

indeed catchpa, indeed

 

[David VanDusen]

I long for the good old days, back in the 60s, when no one EVER killed anyone (for no good reason).
I wonder what video Games Jack the Ripper played?

Caine killed Able over Pacman high-scores. God played a lot of Ecco the Dolphin, thus the flood.

 

[Ickabod]

I'm still going to blame the guns that fired the bullets, and the nut job holding said gun.

Can you imagine the carnage that would have taken place had he walked in there holding a copy of Call of Duty? Those dvd's can be sharp if thrown hard enough.

 

[MPerce]

"Tabloid". It's right there in the column. This likely wasn't a police officer, just a "journalist" working for a trash rag pulling crap out of his ass and printing it on a page. Anonymous sources for tabloids DO NOT EXIST. Nothing to see here, move along.

This times a bazillion.

And if people read this in a tabloid and instantly believe it, I'm not gonna feel too bad about it. We never had much of a chance convincing those kind of people to listen to logic in the first place.

 

[Birdfalcon]

Eh guy is a hick cop in a small new england town....and people are really suprised he would say something this stupid. What did suprise me is that he didn't blame the devil possessing him and that he needed god.

 

[Ne1butme]

I wanted to use my CoD skills on the rifle range, but i couldn't find the x button on the weapon. Also, i couldn't enable the auto-aim.

 

[Frezzato]

"They believe he learned the principles of this - the tactical reload - from his game...When the strap broke on his first weapon (the AR-15), he went to his handgun at the end. Classic police training. Or something you learn playing kill games."

Which game exactly? Mass Effect? I haven't run across a single game where you're taught about the forward assist, magazine release, or misfeed/double-feeds. All of that was more than likely covered in the damn OWNER'S MANUAL.

 

[ASnogarD]

Slow news week , Andy ?

You could try combing the british tabloids for some more sensationalistic crap for next week... I am sure someone will find a rabid rat that was used in experiments that involved been subjected to lets plays of video games for hours on end.
The Sun can usually pull out a few doozies for you...

 

[Frankster]

That's bogus.

By killing himself he actually lost a point for suicide, you don't get any points lost for being killed by another.
What a Noob.

Disclaimer: Not making light of the killing themselves, rather the statement made by the officer.

 

[LysanderNemoinis]

Oh, it couldn't be that he picked a school because schools are "gun-free zones" where law-abiding adults aren't allowed to carry their guns by law (see: least resistance). Because crazy people and criminals always follow the law.

 

[RJ 17]

One thing I'd like to ask any of these people over 30 that point at games and say "SEE! THEY CAUSE VIOLENCE!!!" is quite simply "How many videogames have you played? On what do you base this expert analysis of yours? What differentiates you saying "videogames are the cause" from someone saying "clearly aliens contacted him and told him to do it"?"

Because that's about as much sense as this makes. People with absolutely no experience in a given matter making "I know what I'm talking about" judgements on that matter have absolutely no credibility. I'm not going to approach NASA and say that clearly black holes are entry ways into heaven and hell, that's why no living thing can enter them. Why? Because I'm not an astrophysicist, I'd have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

How do you know that Lanza wasn't just a huge fan of the movie The Frighteners in which a serial killer comes back from the dead specifically so he can continue the killing streak he started while alive? That features a guy obsessed with killing the most people specifically so he can hold the record of it.

And "He didn't want the cops to get any points"? Are you fucking serious? By that logic he wouldn't have killed himself either because that would have taken away from his score. The way to keep your score and not let the opponents get any more points is by ending the round...in this case: throwing down the weapons, laying down with his hands on his head, and surrendering. More likely he chose an elementary school because he was a coward, and a coward wouldn't want to be put on trial. Or, and this is my personal belief, he might have been suicidal from the start and didn't want to leave this world without taking some with him.

It's proof positive that you don't need to be on the internet to state your opinion as unobjectifiable fact. Could it have been games? Sure. Could have also been the fact that he was bat-shit crazy, hated his mother and everything she stood for (I believe I read somewhere that his rampage started in the classroom where his mother should have been teaching, but who knows what's true with this story), and wanted to exhibit the delusional freedom that his mother had always denied him. Could be he just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, his mother made him waffles instead of pancakes, and he just up and decided that everyone had to die because of that. Could be because his father beat the crap out of him when he was a child and therefor he had little regard for the lives of anyone around him. Could be that he had dreams of being famous and saw the guy that shot up the theatre in Aurora get famous on the news for what he did and decided he wanted to emulate that.

I think that every article printed with such tripe as "videogames caused this horrible tragedy!" should come with a line added in "We would like to remind our readers/viewers that correlation does not prove causation."

Honestly, I just wonder why the explination of "He was a fucking LOON!" doesn't work anymore...no, CLEARLY it's not the fault of the person that walked through the school shooting everyone. No, something MADE him do that.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Connecticut State Police, world renowned for their highly educated police officers... how could his statement be anything but truth.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

I'm willing to bet this interview was bullshit just trying to stir up page views

 

[RJ 17]

I fill up my glass of coke when it's half empty, I call it Advanced Tactical Refilling, or if my glass breaks, I just use another, I call it Tactical Advanced Glass Switching.

Clearly those are highly advanced techniques that would be impossible to think of without VERY high-end police training or playing hours of Dinner Dash.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Spoiler: My face before reading the article

My face before reading the article

Spoiler: My reaction After reading the article

My reaction After reading the article

I...I just....Let's break this down bit by bit, shall we?

saying a large spreadsheet containing detailed information about past mass murders that was found at the perpetrator's home is actually a "score sheet."

"This was the work of a videogamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list. They believe that he picked an elementary school because he felt it was a point of least resistance, where he could rack up the greatest number of kills.

So...What about the media that MAKES this an attention seeking contest by giving these shooters tons of attention? Are we going to call them accomplices? Are we gonna blame them at all? No?

"In the code of a gamer, even a deranged gamer like this little bastard, if somebody else kills you, they get your points. They believe that's why he killed himself."

?_? EH? I've NEVER seen a game do that. Especially not the games they're implying caused this tragedy.

Actually, on most games, if you kill yourself, you LOSE points, whereas you don't lose points if someone else kills you. By his logic, he should NOT have killed himself at all!

It's safer to assume that he offed himself because he wanted to go out in a "blaze of glory" and not be put on trial and deemed to be a pathetic lunatic.

The officer said Lanza learned some of the techniques he used in his attack from videogames, including the "tactical reload" - reloading before your current clip empties - and switching to a handgun when the strap broke on his AR-15 rifle. "Classic police training," he said. "Or something you learn playing kill games."

Wat.

Ok, this is "tactical reloading" in a game:
"Ok, there's no combat going on, better reload, even if I have a 90% full clip"

This is "tactical reloading" IRL:
"Ok, there's no combat going on...Is my ammo almost empty? If not, I should NOT prematurely reload. Otherwise I'll waste an entire clip's worth of ammo".

If he followed the videogame version, then he'd basically screw himself over. reloading the second there's a lull in the shooting, regardless of ammo left over is a DUMB move to make.

And switching weapons when his rifle became useless/hard to use? That's gamer-think? HUH? You'd think ANYONE would realize that their weapon is broken so they should switch to their backup. You don't have to be a gamer to think that. You just have to not be brainless.

An anonymous, second-hand account printed in tabloid may have a certain dubiousness to it, but the Daily News is the fourth-most-read newspaper in the U.S., and what people read, they tend to believe, especially when it comes from authority figures - even if it's just anonymous cops. And videogames are an easy target, which is what makes even wildly nonsensical claims about things like a "gamer code" so troublesome.

So it's NOT in a tabloid? It's in a mainstream paper? Oh dear......Great. Keep Misinforming and scaring the rest of the populace for a few extra views/purchases, would you?

"These guns, one of them an AR-15, in the hands of a violent, insane gamer. It was like porn to a rapist," the unnamed officer claimed. "They feed on it until they go out and say, enough of the video screen. Now I'm actually going to be a hunter."

...I...I'm not even gonna go there.

I play lots of violent games. I don't want to hurt anyone and I don't like real guns. I played them as a teen when I was in high school being bullied to the point of breakdown. And did I hurt anyone? NO!

So he's blaming videogames as the sole cause of the tragedy, ignoring the fact that he was actually TRAINED in using guns at a firing range? He's an idiot. I'm sorry.

What kind of idiot........*sigh* And since he's a cop, he'll be taken seriously. Perfect. -_-

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get my body tattooed with a red dragon made of toxic ink, so that tonight I can ninja a bunch of people and string up their corpses from lightposts to scare others guys so I can then pounce on them from my perch on the ceiling and then come home and kill myself when I'm done my mission because that's what a game I'm playing is telling me to do.

...Right after I'm done smacking the snowbank in front of my house with the flat end of my shovel really quick in order to break it into conveniently storable blocks that I'll drop into a chest in the basement for use later.

Haha. Nice try, Lanza, but everyone knows you can't beat a viking's high-score when it comes to mass-murder.

Spoiler

Oh...Oh........>_<

I...jeez. I don't know how to respond to that.

On one hand, that's TERRIBLE and you should feel terrible. On the other hand, I'm trying not to be morbidly amused.

 

[K_Dub]

Wrong, dumb, and silly. Next subject please.

 

[Occams_Razor]

I...I honestly can't conjure up any rage about this anymore. I'm just tired of this argument. It feels as if we've been fighting back against a brick wall.

 

[omega 616]

Who are they going to interview next? Mr. Krazy bollox muhgee? Old Man smithers?

All these "news" articles seem to basically be "look we found another person saying games make serial killers"... It's boring as fuck at this point. Just about everyone of these people who have spoken out against games have been an older generation, talking out of there arse! Maybe the only exception is that guy who was asked how he felt about his books being a game.

Well done escapist writers though, writing the same story differently so many times is a real skill!