Dear Mr. Gates:

On Monday, April 16, at 3:10 pm, I was a guest, as I often have been in the past, on the Fox News Channel. News anchor Bill Hemmer asked me to profile the Virginia Tech rampage killer. I did so, noting that until that day the worst school massacre in world history was at the hands of Robert Steinhaeuser, who literally trained on the Microsoft on-line, hyper-violent shooter game, Counterstrike. I mentioned your company’s game by name. I explained that the rehearsal for such a massacre is key to being able to pull it off, as efficiently as Cho, whose name we didn’t even know at the time. Cho and Steinhaeuser were able to do what they did the first time because it was not the first time. This is why the military uses this same virtual reality simulation to train soldiers to want to kill and how to kill calmly, as the witnesses of Cho said he did. The letter ends thusly:

Mr. Gates, pull the plug on Counterstrike today, or do we need more dead to convince you? "Virginia Tech" was the 9-11 of school shootings, and it appears Microsoft is in the middle of it, in more ways than one.

Regards, Jack Thompson

First of all, notice how the first thing he mentions is how he was on TV; if you think this guy gets off on attention, just wait. The interesting thing about Jack's letter is that its entire point is to blame Microsoft chairman Bill Gates for Counter-Strike and how much death it's caused. This is interesting because, of course, Microsoft has nothing to do with Counter-Strike! The game is developed by Valve and published by Vivendi. The Washington Post writer forgot to fact check before publishing, and Jack Thompson composed this entire ooh-look-at-me letter to Microsoft without first making sure that Microsoft actually has any kind of connection to the game in question.

Soon after this, Thompson sent another open letter to the Virginia Police Department Chief. You can read the whole letter here, but here are the important bits:

Dear Chief Flinchum:

I went on the Fox News Channel Monday and even identified the game, Counterstrike, obsessively played by Cho, which was also used by Robert Steinhaeuser to author what is now the second worst school shooting in world history in Erfurt, Germany, which he also concluded by killing himself. These are not coincidences; these are patterns.

Once again, he starts off by mentioning that he was on Fox News. He also says that Cho "obsessively played" Counter-Strike, which is completely unfounded.

Thompson also implores the Virginia Police Chief, "If your Department really wants to get to the bottom of this, you need to talk to me now."
While the Virginia Police Department tries to pick up the pieces of this tragedy, deal with potential copy-cat killers, and try to investigate Cho's threat and motives, Jack Thompson wants to waste their time with his God-like delusions of authority. He wants to show them the truth, that it all boils down to "murder simulators." Jack Thompson should be ashamed of himself.

Never mind that, according to a search warrant (pdf) filed by the Virginia State Police, Cho Seung-Hui had no video games in his school dorm. Never mind also that when MSNBC's Chris Matthews interviewed one of Cho's suite-mates, he said that he never once saw Cho playing any video games.

Jack Thompson doesn't mind, because he still maintains that Cho trained on Counter-Strike. He even went on Hardball with Chris Matthews and tried to spout his theories again. Matthews wasn't having any of it, as you can see in this video from Kotaku.

MATTHEWS: How does the game prepare or drill him in the execution of 32 people?

THOMPSON: It drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them. It gets you to kill with your heart rate lower…

MATTHEWS: I know it is a theory. And it is a theory in this case. When was the most recent testimony, and when is it applied to, that he was involved with “Counter-Strike,” the video game, that Cho was?

THOMPSON: Cho? His high school friends. And, typically, when…

MATTHEWS: OK. Well, he is a fourth-year student at Virginia Tech...

As I said before, in the wake of a tragedy like this we are all looking for answers. We want to know how a person could do something so horrendous, we want to have some kind of rationalization for an irrational act. This is a natural reaction and is part of coping. I doubt we'll ever know what exactly was going on inside Cho's mind in the time before the shootings, and honestly I don't think we ever should.

But what Jack Thompson is doing isn't helping anybody. He doesn't want to explain Cho's motivations, he just wants to rationalize his own personal vendetta against the gaming industry. Thirty-two people have died senselessly, and instead of helping the afflicted or promoting counseling for depressed teenagers, Thompson just wants to spew his hatred.

Any time anybody under the age of thirty does anything violent, Thompson is on TV ready to blame the games. What has he ever accomplished, though? In my tenure as a games journalist I've seen Thompson call all gamers pot-heads, threaten to sue Wikipedia, sue the Florida bar, prey upon the families of countless family members of violence victims to increase his exposure, offer $10,000 to charity and then refuse to pay, and claim that the Beltway Sniper trained on Halo just for starters, but this is by far the worst.

If there was any evidence to support the fact that the Virginia Tech shooter played Counter-Strike, or even played any video game, I could accept Thompson's crusading as a mis-interpretation of facts. But, for the lack of such evidence, Thompson just pretends that there is evidence. Just to clarify, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that Cho Seung-Hai has played any video games in the last 5 years, but Jack Thompson maintains that that Counter-Strike is the cause.

Jack Thompson is delusional. He is an immature, hallow, self-centered little man who will leave no corpse unexploited to further his cause. America has experienced the worst shooting in history. This is a time for encouragement, for empowerment, and for reflection. This is definitely not a time for hatred, but hatred is all Thompson is capable of. He has an unrelenting, unmitigated hatred for video games and all people who play them and he is willing to exploit even a national tragedy to spread his hateful message.

There is no way to argue that video games had anything to do with this shooting. But, just for the sake of prosperity, could they?

To be perfectly honest, in my lifetime of playing video games I have probably killed over a billion imaginary people, robots, monsters, vampires, and zombies. I can recognize most widely-produced pistols, rifles, assault rifles, and machine guns by sight now, thanks primarily to their use in video games. I know military and counter-terrorism movement strategies, techniques, and equipment; again, mostly because of video games. As far as I know, however, I haven't killed any real people. I've never committed a felony, I've never threatened anybody with violence, and in the few situations when I've been around real weapons I've behaved as responsibly as I could imagine would be possible. Most of my friends are in the same situation.

The connecting fibers between school shooters is not that they play video games, it's that they play video games and shoot people. A person who plays video games and then goes on a shooting rampage can no more blame the games for the rampage than he could the brand of toothpaste he used that morning.

If video games did not exist, those who crave violence would simply find it elsewhere. It's important to remember that violence is not a recent phenomenon, while video games are. People have been killing each other since the dawn of man, not because they learned how to in books or cave paintings, but because there is something wrong with them.

I too would love to find a single thing to blame the violence at Virginia Tech on. If there was a single thing we could point out as the cause and lock up, ban, or outlaw, I'd love it. If somebody could suitably convince me that banning video games on a global scale would prevent any more violence of the scale of what we saw on Monday, I would gladly throw all my games into the trash. Anybody can see that it would be impossible to come to such a conclusion, however. There will always be crazy people in this world. There will also always be old people who don't understand the media of the young. Cho Seung-Hui was no more driven to murder by video games than he was by rap music, rock and roll, or baggy pants.