Jack Thompson blames Bill Gates for shootings

Attorney and activist Jack Thompson yesterday wrote a letter to Bill Gates blaming him for the Virginia Tech shootings. Thompson claims that Cho Seung Hui was trained to enjoy violent killing by playing Counterstrike, which he claims Microsoft developed.

Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill.

While this letter has gotten around pretty quickly already, few of the reports mention the most glaring problem with the accusation: Microsoft didn’t develop Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike is an add-on for Half-Life, developed and sold by Valve Software. While Valve was founded right in the city I’m living in, and is headquartered just minutes from Microsoft, their only remote connection is that the game was eventually released for the Xbox platform in addition to the PC.

Aside from the confused Thompson laying blame on the chairman of the wrong company, does he really think a game like Counter-Strike can be the root cause of Cho’s violent behavior? Perhaps the fact that he was a bullied outcast in school might’ve contributed to his decision to murder students at his own university. Perhaps the manifesto and DVD he mailed to NBC between shootings, with images of him holding a gun to his own head and a knife to his own throat, might indicate some psychological issues that go deeper than a video game can induce? Cho was clearly a psycopath, and psycopaths aren’t created by video games.