by Unity

In a story you may not have picked up on over the weekend, Police in the Swedish city of Malmo have confirmed that an as yet unnamed 38 year old man has been arrested in connection with a series of gun attacks on people with ethnic minority backgrounds.

Prior to the arrest, local police had suspected that more than a dozen unsolved shootings over the last year, in which one person died and eight more were wounded, may have been the work of lone gunman. The man arrested at the weekend has now been charged with one count of murder and seven attempted murders.

Make of that story what you will, but what has piqued my interest here is not the story itself but an Early Day Motion (EDM 907) put down a couple of weeks ago by Labour MP, Keith Vaz, in relation to these shootings.



That this House notes with concern that the recent race shootings in Malmo, Sweden have been associated with the violent video game Counter-Strike; further notes that the internet-based, first-person shooting game that pits a counter-terrorist team against terrorists was previously banned in Brazil and in 2007 was associated with US College Campus massacres; recognises the potential impact of violent video games on those under 18 years; and calls on the Government to ensure the purchase of video games by those under 18 yearsis controlled and that parents are provided with clear information on the violent content of certain games.

WTF?

So how do we get from racist nutjob shooting at the local migrant population to a three-year old video game?

Surprisingly enough, not via the usual suspects, the Daily Mail and Daily Express. On this occasion it appears to have been The Times that decided to have a bit of dabble in stirring up a faux moral panic by quoting the opinions of a Mr Ahmad al-Mughrabi in its coverage of the story…

I am sure that this is down to some crazy kid who plays that sniping game Counterstrike all day. I don’t believe in the lone Nazi theory

So who is our mysterious Mr al-Mughrabi? Is he a police officer? A city official? A representative of the Swedish Justice Ministry?

No, as far as anyone has managed to ascertain, to date, he’s just some bloke that The Times picked off the street at random and that’s all the evidence that Keith Vaz needs to put down an EDM and start banging on about violent video games, yet again.

As for the rest of Vaz’ ‘evidence’, sales of Counterstrike were, indeed, banned by a Brazilian judge in January 2008 on the grounds that, in the judge’s sole opinion, the game…

“bring[s] imminent stimulus to the subversion of the social order, attempting against the democratic and rightful state and against the public safety”

At the same hearing, the judge also banned the sale of the fantasy role-playing game Everquest following, one assumes, several reports of car-jackings in Sao Paulo in which the perpetrators were identified as a couple of halfling rogues and tame beholder.

Needless to say, a regional federal court lifted both banning orders in June 2009.

And the campus shootings?

Both the Virginia Tech (April 2007) and Northern Illinois University attacks were alleged to have been linked to Counterstrike but, on both occasions, the allegation originated came by way of a Florida lawyer and anti-obscenity campaigner, Jack Thompson, who even went so far as to ‘predict’ that the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech attack, Seung-Hui Cho, had been ‘trained to kill’ in the game before the shooter had been identified.

Neither investigation, unsurprisingly, found any evidence to link either the shooting to the game. Cho had never owned or even played Counterstrike and the ‘best’ that anyone game up with in the case of the NIU shooter, Steven Kazmierczak, were a couple of unverified newspaper reports in which Kazmeikczak’s dormmates claimed that he used to play the game. Cho and Kazmeikczak were, however, found to have had an extensive history of psychiatric illness, including periods during which they had been admitted to institutions as in-patients.

Thompson, on the other hand, has now been permanantly disbarred by the Florida Supreme Court for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants in a judgement that also described his filings as “repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court”, the latter being an observation one could easily apply to Keith Vaz’s ‘campaign’ against video games.