that's damn sad, tho' a win for antivideogames, 0 for gamers

Good. Justice must be done. If you can't control yourself enough to keep from killing you parents, then you deserve to go to jail. And then you try to blame it on a video game? That's just screwed up. And don't give me that BS about how the "environment" and "religion" of the home forced him to it. I'm 17, in a Mormon home with plenty of rules as well. I am only allowed to play those games with ratings that correspond with my age. I didn't sneak out and buy M-rated games or play them at friends' houses before my time. I patiently waited... and waited... and waited... until I was 17. Then, I finally got to enjoy Half-Life, Oblivion- great games like those. The forbidding of something should not be taken as permission to go and do, as long as it's hidden.

Question: How are you going to kill anyone with a .9mm hand gun? That means the bullets are less than 1 mm in diameter! On a more serious note; I say give him the chair! Playing H3 fir 18 hours a day!?! Are you FKM? That means when he wasn't sleeping he was playing. Did this much gaming not help his state of mind? Maybe. But who forced him to play the game? No one. Is a 17 year old old enough to know not to play that much? Yes. Is a 17 year old old enough to know that if you kill someone they don't come back? Yes. So in f-him & give him the chair! Let's give Darwinism a helping hand!

I will say this, there are more serious issues in our society. We have gangs infested into our society to the point where we can flip on a radio station and listen to there music talking about how they are in a gang and they fly there colors and blah blah. Would you rather have your kid hanging out with the gang members at his school or playing a game? There are so many corrupt officials in office it is pathetic. Lets worry about that instead of these video games? Why is my money being wasted on this shit seriously though? I say we focus on who the crypts and bloods connections are in our goverment to where they can get away with warping our kids minds rather then this crap. We live in a violent society period. We have been waging wars as far back as can be documented and killing inocent people. Kids can see more violence on TV then in a video game and the violence on the news and what not is way more graphical then these games. This kid had obvious mental issues from the start and his lawyer just took advantage of the whole video games warped my mind crap that every one is trying to use right now. Criminals and their respresenters in court will always look for every and any exscuse to get away with what they have done. I think this is all a way for the government to just warp our minds with this crap they are feeding us so we don't focus on other suff that really matters like drugs and gangs in the U.S of A and the officials that are playing into it because of money being tossed at them. That is the end of my rant about this crap. I am sure I will think of other stuff I could have commented on as well that we should be focusing on right now instead of wasting our tax money on this crap.

Eve - You must know just about nothing about guns, I don't know much more, but I do know the size of the bullet won't matter much when traveling through your brain.

With what was done and said it was pre-meditated, he has a problem, was rightfully convicted and should serve a whole lot of time. Altered states of mind from video games are allowed to happen by the gamer, just like any addiction it starts (usually) with the choice of doing something you are NOT addicted to, and then abusing something until you have a problem.

Way to give video games a bad name again.

Actually lightfoot, eve nailed it.. there is no such thing as a "point 9mm" handgun.. it's a full 9mm, as in 1mm smaller than a full centimeter. The story has a typo. .9mm would be smaller than a BB... by a lot.

And yes, this story is sad from all angles.

PS. On further thought, it could have been a pinfire pistol, like those little novelty ones you can look up on YouTube... but I don't think that would have killed anyone.. so it probably was a typo.

I think this kid has serious mental issues. I am not saying religion is bad, many of my friends are religious, and although I consider myself and Atheist, I have always been willing to help out in their communities. But obviously, I think the parents are somewhat to blame here as well. Hear me out before you start flaming.

This kid was banned by his parents to play violent videogames. So what happened? He went out to his friends house and played. Out of sight, he could spend 18 hours playing, no wonder he got addicted. Wouldn't it have been better to allow him to play what he likes, but supervise him?

As I said, the parents are to blame here too. I'm not going to tell you how to raise your kid, but seems to me like shielding a kid from the horrors of halo 3, or any other activity teens enjoy, would probably drive a wedge between him and his friends at school or work. The kid just wanted to fit in.

That tangent aside, I still think the kid was pretty messed up to begin with. Who kills someone else over a videogame?

this kid should have well known what a gun does to a person, that plea was simply retarded. give the lawyer the chair too


unless he was seriously psychopathic, apparently he was 'banned' from violent video games

ill say what i said in that last post with the 6yo kid and the car...
theres alotta controversy about violent games having an bad influence, but they have more of a negative influence on children, and worse, on complete retards....when i was 17, i was damn sure what a gun can do, i know, i was 17 like 2 years ago. AND HALO AIN'T THAT GREAT

I do not beleive for an instant that the video game warped his sense of reality in the slightest. The kid was simply a deranged reject that mother nature, in any other setting, would have taken out of the gene pool long ago. I think the kid needs to be placed in adult prison for life with no chance for parole, and hence, society takes him out of the gene pool, the way things should be.

a judge said that? i think he's just a little convinced by the kid's lawyer that playing the videogame is a part to blame.

logically, it isn't. the images in halo are not photo realistic and so is the game's theme and plot. addiction in games doesn't equate to violence, only addiction to the use of it. he easily could have left the house and play the game all he wants.
what i see here in this case is just plain anger of the kid to his parents. in a one in a million chance, the game disk was found with a loaded gun owned by a minister.

movies are even worse compared to video games.
1997 The Northwood Hollywood Shootout.
can't find anymore article/video regarding this but i think the movie Heat was what the suspects are imitating. not sure.

Wow, this is even more retarded then I thought.

I don't see how you can blame the kid here for everything. If the kid had serious issues with violence, and violent media, then the parent's not only should have known this, but kept him locked up.

How the hell was he at friend's homes for 18 hours on a frequent basis? If you put restrictions on your child you should make sure they aren't going somewhere else to bypass them. If he wasn't mature enough to deal with violent media, why would he be mature enough to restrict himself from it?

He was 17 when this happened. The ESRB said this game was appropriate for someone of his age.

And no one here believes anything 'forced' him to do something. But don't you think it's a parents job to know your kid is mentally unsound? The fact that they didn't know he was this suspetable, and that he was gone 18 hours a day, sounds like some serious negligence.

If they had appropriately dealt with violence, in a mature manner, rather them simply shunning it, he probably wouldn't have been that interested in Halo, might have actually picked up a real game.

The kid needs to go to a mental hospital, and the parents need to be spade and neutered. Killing someone mentally unsound is idiotic, his parent's pretty obviously didn't really care what he was doing.

oops good call on the .9 thing. Even if it was .9 it would kill though )

I just read it as 9mm. Didn't pay anymore attention. Next time just say typo! haha my bad.

Pah..

I am a baptist and I, for one, play halo 3, as do many of my friends... This guy was messed up in the first place, I knew well that even at 5 guns were nothing to be played with. I even played quake at 5! Its all about responsibility, how the heck did this guy spend 18 hours playing at a friends house?!?! Sounds like the family was totally messed up anyway.

9mm? That's the only gun he could find? Should have used the battle rifle, pshh amatuer.

Would have been more exciting if he ended up killing his parents with a plasma grenade, STICK!

I understand keeping a gun in the house may be a safety procaution, but it seems it always has the opposite effect, don't really think its worth it...

It is incredulous how distorted our legal system has become. A 17 year old knowingly steals a locked gun, knowingly fires it at his parents' heads, and then knowingly frames it like a murder/suicide. You would expect that someone capable of such actions would try to blame it on a video game, but to have a bunch of unethical lawyers/judge try and defend this guy based on this ludicrous excuse? "The video game made me do it!!!" What a joke.... maybe you would have a semi-logical argument if in Halo 3 when you shot people in the head, instead of them dying, they thanked you for giving them a wonderful surprise present. The guy is a cold blooded killer and deserves to be punished as such.

Not true, those cases are just the ones that the media parades.

And he was 16 at the time of the incident- he's 17 now, but he wasn't then. The incident was in October 2007.

The Halo link is irrelevant, anyways. How many times have teens done something remarkably stupid for the flimsiest of reasons? He would have done this if it was the car, or forbidden from seeing a girl, or some other nonsensical thing that he 'felt' was owed him.

Trying to pin it on video games is logically absurd, as teens have been finding remarkable excuses for their behavior for centuries.

If the kid had been playing a game like soldier of fortune or the like where can see the outcome of the shooting rather than a silly cartoon-like one, he would have applied the image of grusome death to his parents in his mind before he decided to act. Instead he was thinking about the graceful bloodless drop of a nameless neon green player before just before he respawned again. Of course the kid is to blame, we need to keep the force of deterrent up by punishing him severely.

Its nice to see evolution in action.

I hope the next we hear of this kid is him on his way to serve the rest of his life making my lisence plates and cleaning my roadside.

If video games are to blame then so is TV, movies, radio, books, contact sports, news, internet, religion, wars, and we can keep going on and on until nothing is almost nothing left. We respond to violence, we learn from it, we learn with it... and if we don't catch on how to control the part of ourselves that likes to act out in violence, then this is something that is likely to happen. 18 hours a day of Halo 3 isn't the cause of this kid's problems, it's a symptom of his inability to control his violent tendencies, or anything else for that matter. And to be honest, the gaming probably kept him in check, acting as a pressure release valve for his urges, so when the game was taken away things built up quickly and...boom. I'd go so far to say that if it weren't for Halo (or any other game) for him to latch on to and keep himself occupied with that he would have acted out like this even sooner.

Is he a cold-blooded, premeditated murderer? I don't think so, but he is an addict and he is just as guilty as any drug/alcohol abuser who strikes out against anybody who takes their drugs/alcohol away. I think his case should be or should have been treated exactly like one of those types of situations.

Think about it folk, if you killed someone and got caught, wouldn't you try to use ANY excuse you could to avoid jail?

Of course the first thing I would do is blame video games. I'd use GTA and say that the missions there trained me to kill for fun. I didn't understand that I was "playing" a game.

Any reasonable adult would recognize that as absolute BS. I doubt that the kid expected his excuse to work, but when you're caught and facing prison or death, it's time to grasp at straws.

ahh.. I'm so sick of this blame it on the video game excuse. I've been playing quake/halflife/unreal since I was 17. I watched Japanese violent manga/anime since I was 10 - and believe me, Jap cartoons aren't like the American GI Joes where the bad guy escapes an exploding vehicle. Jap cartoons, u see blood, guts and glory. I'm now 30+ and I am doing fine with a great job and a loving family. If VDO games are to be blamed then every gamer should be on a rampage by now. All we see are these idiots doing the shootings - why never a professional gamer?
There was a kid somewhere in southeast asia who played too much GTA and stole a taxi - stabbed the driver 7 times and went on a rampage driving. His pathetic excuse was: I thought it would be more fun to do it in real life. I'd say give him the chair - or poke him in the eye and ask him if it hurts.
My guess is, these people are the lowest end of our evolutionary scale. Its a waste of precious resource keeping these lot.

Problem is he is a spoiled little brat. I had friends that were spoiled and nothing good came out only bad things. You know whats worse Music, it can brain wash you and when your pissed off and you listen to music that s talks about anger, well thats just going to pump them up. I think games are good, they RELEASE your anger out. WOW this country blows. At least OJ is in jail now. I wish that kid went for Bush LOL.

I say it is the ultimate testament of hypocrisy that in a country so riddled with paranoia that even ministers carry weapons, people dare to blame violence on computer games instead of taking the blame on themselves. Did anyone ever stop to wonder WHY that kid spent 18 hours a day playing video games? Why does everyone always blame electronic entertainment for everything? Whatever happened to CRAZY ?

This kid is just friggin pathetic..... I have been playing these games for over a decade now and I have never harbored the thought of murdering anyone.... using video games as an excuse for violent behaviour is so lame....just their way of doing ballsness and looking for a scapegoat... you killed your parents over a VIDEO GAME!!!! I definitely would not want to be his friend.... I hope he picks up the soap "a la Boondocks" style (Look at me, I'm all squeaky clean)