Scottish Police Blame Throat Slashing on Gears of War

[jrobson68]

I love how they sling aligations like that around all willy-nilly without proof. I fully agree that underage kids shouldn't be playing games that are rated Mature, but to say that they inspire violence is the same straw-man argument as saying guns kill people. Well if that's true, then I guess hammers build houses and cars drive people to where they need to go.

The reporting officer was of the opinion that the violent videogames played online by the accused may have been a factor in his conduct,

The quote should go on to say "And he has absolutely no evidence to back up that opinion."

The problem is, plebs, particularly right wing plebs who read the daily mail, will assume it was down to video games, no ifs or buts about it, despite studies from a fuck load of sources almost conclusively disproving the link.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Someone should inform Scottish Police that throat slashing was around before television and people did it for less reasons I imagine.

Yeah, but to be fair most of the violent crime in Scotland is drug related and at only 13 years of age this kid has probably been clean for five years.

 

[RJ 17]

The quote should go on to say "And he has absolutely no evidence to back up that opinion."

I'm sorry, what evidence would he need to back up the opinion that in his estimation violent video games may have been a factor?

None if it was just one jackass expressing his opinion which didn't really matter on the case. But seeing as how they're taking said opinion as fact without any evidence to support it, we run into a bit of a problem, as expressed perfectly by robson here:

I love how they sling aligations like that around all willy-nilly without proof. I fully agree that underage kids shouldn't be playing games that are rated Mature, but to say that they inspire violence is the same straw-man argument as saying guns kill people. Well if that's true, then I guess hammers build houses and cars drive people to where they need to go.

The reporting officer was of the opinion that the violent videogames played online by the accused may have been a factor in his conduct,

The quote should go on to say "And he has absolutely no evidence to back up that opinion."

The problem is, plebs, particularly right wing plebs who read the daily mail, will assume it was down to video games, no ifs or buts about it, despite studies from a fuck load of sources almost conclusively disproving the link.

My point exactly.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

Another disgusting case where parenting issues, insanity and even underage sex are sidelined in favor of blaming video games.
Now, I completely agree that minors should not be playing R rated video games, though that's the parents job, not the game industry's (though making it easier for parents to realize that consoles can do the work for you would be a step up). I mean, how fucking hard is it to pick up a game box and notice the ESRB rating?! "Hmm, maybe my 13 year old should not be playing this R18 game, because that label MAY be here FOR A REASON." For the love of god, even if you don't give two shits about video games, you must watch movies, right? They have age ratings too!

"Online gaming may be outside [the] parents' knowledge. We need to look again at what we can do to stop this."

Bullshit. You are mistaking the vast, near limitless internet for a single CD. If my kids are playing Super Mario, I know it's not going to start shooting up porn the moment they start the online mode. If they play Gears of War, I know it's going to be violent and gritty regardless of whether they're playing it online or offline. Chat messaging aside, a game does NOT just leap up the age rating scale the moment you start playing online.

I can even understand claims that video games may make an already psychotic person even more deranged (you can't deny violence is glorified or at least amplified a lot in games), but this is just a whole new level of ridiculous. I'm sorry, it's not the video games to blame, it's a mixture of the fact that the kid is a complete amoral loony, and that the parents just do not give a fuck about him.

But i fail to see how his parents are at fault . He's 13 , they are no longer following him around wherever he goes . I don't know about you , but when i was 13 , my parents weren't exacly breathing down my neck everytime i wanted to go somewhere . And teenagers lie all the time about where they are and who they're with . So if this kid wants to go out and have sex , he will regardless of what his parents say/think .

Also , we got 16 , hell 20 year olds having unprotected sex and getting pregnant , is it really surprising that a 13 year old kid didn't use protection?

I really, really hope you are trolling. By that logic we shouldn't be surprised when eight year olds start having sex in the near future. Plus, the law states that you're allowed to have sex when you reach the age of 16 (at least it does in NZ), plus you technically aren't a kid at 16 (and sure as hell not at 20, what the fuck?), so yes, it IS surprising.

If you are not willing to spend time with your children, show at least some interest in what they like doing and care about keeping tabs what they are doing and where they are going, YOU SHOULD NOT BE HAVING CHILDREN. You are basically saying that parents have zero responsibility over their children, which is just plain wrong in so many, many ways. I don't need to 'breath down my kid's neck' to know what their hobbies are and the dangers of said hobby, or teach them how babies are born and why they really, really don't want one when they are just kids themselves. I'm sorry, but suggesting that because I'm not able to keep surveillance on my kids 24/7, I don't have to bother with the bare basics of parenting at all, is just simply ludicrous.

Yes, teenagers lie, and they lie a lot, but I'd like to think I may just notice it if my teenagers bring a baby into the house.

 

[Jamash]

To be fair, I think they aren't actually wrong.

"The reporting officer was of the opinion that the violent videogames played online by the accused may have been a factor in his conduct,"

This is a far cry away from "video games did it" but that they MAY, and let me reiterate MAY have been a FACTOR, that is a PART of his conduct. I see nothing that would deem this actually incorrect. If this person has a kid at 13, they're clearly impulsive and they clearly don't think things through.

I think it's not so much the violent nature of the game itself, but the competitive nature of the online game and the antagonistic argument that followed.

I think this still would have happened if they'd been playing a non-violent competitive game like FIFA and one player's defeat devolved into a heated argument with insults and goading.

A lot of people who spend a lot of time playing competitive online games like to win at any cost and hate to lose, but some people take bad sportsmanship too far.

Citing the violent nature of the game instead of the fierce competition is, in my opinion, ignoring (or not even seeing) the real issue in favour of the low hanging fruit that is videogame violence.

The are lots of cases of people reacting violently to a loss or bad decision against them in a competitive environment (e.g. sports matches, competition in business and work and even Road Rage where the competition is only in one person's head), but because most competitive videogames are violent in nature, when it happens over a videogame the violence is often blamed instead of the intense competition and bad sportsmanship.

 

[nexus]

I don't have time for this shit anymore.

He has a kid? K.

So there really is a conspiracy to destroy the concept of family, and blame everything on unrelated things. Absent family, class warfare turmoil, struggling to stay middle-class and hoping tomorrow isn't the day you lose everything....

Nah, video games.

 

[BlackFlyme]

Please! Do they even have chainsaws in Scotland?

Ha, to trim their beards, maybe! I thought everyone knew that if a Scotsman wants to fell a tree, they just gave it a swift kick and a cold grimace.

Dragon Heart:
Which coincidentally stars a rather famous Scotsman

Mel Gibson?

[small]notsureifjoking[/small]
Pretty sure it was William Shatner. I know for sure it wasn't Sean Connery, I didn't see him anywhere in the movie.


OT: This is just disgusting, it's bad enough that he tried to kill someone he was friends with, but doing it over some name-calling?

 

[Kayevcee]

13 year-old Clydebank resident with his own wean, stabs another boy over some name-calling? Aye, sounds about right.

Sad but true, and not just in Clydebank. "Provocation by respiration" is a common if ineffective legal defense here in the west of Scotland.

Yeah, but to be fair most of the violent crime in Scotland is drug related and at only 13 years of age this kid has probably been clean for five years.

Hey man, that's not cool. I'm not saying it's not true, but there's no need to draw attention to it

-Nick

 

[Mr Companion]

I would feel more persuaded if the kid used a chainsaw to do it. Also I am most dubious about the 13 year old boy having a child, the Daily Mail is a rag covered in nonsense.

 

[lunavixen]

two things.

1. the fact that he's 13 and has a child of his own proves that his parents are absent and inneffective, and with the xbox's parental controls, they could have prevented his exposure. although i dont blame the game at all.

2. he slashed the kid's throat deep enough to expose the windpipe and he didn't die? that's pretty hardcore. i usually think of throat-slashing as a death sentence. he's gonna have a badass scar.

slashing the windpipe itself is not necessarily a death sentence, if the assailant missed the jugular vein and carotid artery, it's quite possible to survive. That being said, the victim is damned lucky.

As for the original post

snip

the tracheotomy is actually fairly common in real life, it's primarily used for patients on ventilators or those who have severe damage the the nose, mouth and upper throat, my dad had one after his car accident in 1995.

snip

Sean Connery voiced Draco in Dragonheart

 

[SonOfVoorhees]

Sounds about right, i mean slitting a persons throat seems so original that i doubt you would have done it without a game giving you that idea. I mean i never shot anyone till i got the idea from GTA because no one would ever think of using a gun to shoot a person. Yes, im being sarcastic.

Why do they blame generic attacks on games? If some one killed someone in the same way as in the movie Seven, then you can say that there was a link. There was an influence. The deaths in Seven are fairly unique and thus can blame that killer watching that movie. But, something as simple as a throat slit, millions of people have died in that way. If you have a knife, the neck is an obvious target to aim for.

I guess the problem with these stories are is that they blame the game, they take away all sense of responsibility and accountability of the child who did it. Yes he way going to attack that kid regardless, just that he could of went for the through cos he saw that it was the best place to go for. We all learn from what we see, adverts, games and newspapers, its all stored in our head and that information can come out when we need it.

 

[mooncalf]

I know that there *has* to be some connection, however small, between violent videogames and violent behaviour, whether it greases the wheels or puts ideas in people's heads. But I don't think it is truly biased to think that for something like this to happen there must really be something wrong with the person to begin with. A base lack of empathy that is either natural in an adolescent (we do say they shouldn't play these sorts of games as a rule.) or representative of the small incidence (what was the magic number? 2-3%?) of psychopathy in a given population.

 

[likalaruku]

::Reads article:: Exactly WHERE does it say this kid has his own kid?

 

[rapidoud]

two things.

1. the fact that he's 13 and has a child of his own proves that his parents are absent and inneffective, and with the xbox's parental controls, they could have prevented his exposure. although i dont blame the game at all.

2. he slashed the kid's throat deep enough to expose the windpipe and he didn't die? that's pretty hardcore. i usually think of throat-slashing as a death sentence. he's gonna have a badass scar.

The point is they only interacted through the game.

It'd be like 2 people meeting over facebook and the police blaming facebook as without it they never would've met.

 

[thehorror2]

While I think the parents are to blame here, I can't help but maybe agree to:

"The reporting officer was of the opinion that the violent videogames played online by the accused may have been a factor in his conduct,"

They may have been a factor. Not so much a cause, or even teaching him how to do it. However, stating that it may have had something to do with it in some way, I can't really say he's wrong or right. I do agree that it also may have not helped anything...

I think the game was a factor, in the same way that a cell phone would have been a "factor" if they had been texting insults at each other. The game was the medium the provoking insults were communicated through, nothing more.

 

[Trueflame]

As always, there just has to be a reason, it has to be video games, or culture, or society, or whatever else happens to be the thing to beat that week.

This is f*cked up, but video games didn't cause this. The kid that did this was obviously already disturbed, and even if he was specifically trying to act out Gears of War, that just means that if he hadn't played that game something different would have set him off instead. We can't make all of society utterly peaceful, violence free, and safe. That can only happen in a padded room in a mental institution. So this is the story of a kid who is either mentally unstable or a psychopath, and who just happened to play video games.

The simple fact is that as time goes on, more and more violent crime will be blamed on video games, simply because a greater and greater percentage of the population will have become gamers. As always, correlation does not imply causation, as the most basic of statistics courses would teach. But of course politicians, police, and reporters are unfamiliar with such things.

 

[Erttheking]

Man, video games really are the whipping boy when anything goes wrong huh?

 

[martyrdrebel27]

two things.

1. the fact that he's 13 and has a child of his own proves that his parents are absent and inneffective, and with the xbox's parental controls, they could have prevented his exposure. although i dont blame the game at all.

2. he slashed the kid's throat deep enough to expose the windpipe and he didn't die? that's pretty hardcore. i usually think of throat-slashing as a death sentence. he's gonna have a badass scar.

The point is they only interacted through the game.

It'd be like 2 people meeting over facebook and the police blaming facebook as without it they never would've met.

i think you meant to quote someone else. i agree with your point entirely, and didnt argue otherwise.