Jack Thompson

Your Turn

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported this about the February 14, 2018, killer of 17 in the Parkland school massacre:

“I’m a bad kid. I want to kill,” Cruz, now 20 years old, ominously told a teacher in middle school."

“I strongly feel that Nikolas is a danger to the students and faculty at this school,” Cruz’s eighth-grade language arts teacher wrote in a behavioral evaluation. “I do not feel that he understands the difference between his violent video games and reality.”

The Miami Herald has reported that Nikolas Cruz played hyperviolent video games "up to 15 hours a day," which eerily is the same number of hours Sandy Hook's killer of 26 souls trained on "Doom," "Call of Duty" and "Grand Theft Auto."

Cruz's own mother, now deceased, attributed his violence to his video games and withdrew them as temporary punishment. In "Call of Duty" you use smoke canisters to hide from your virtual reality targets — something Cruz did in reality. So video games don't just increase the appetite to kill; they train teens to kill efficiently.

The U.S. Department of Education's Federal School Safety Commission, created because of Parkland, issued a final report last month that acknowledges the nexus between Cruz's video game play and the massacre.

In June of this year, the highly regarded World Health Organization formally concluded that Video Game Addiction is a mental disorder that is treatable. What is the medical basis for such a conclusion?

MRI brain scan studies at Indiana and Harvard Universities show that teens process video games in the midbrain, which is the impulsive part of the brain, whereas adults process them in the prefrontal cortex, which intercepts emotion-driven, copycat behaviors.

This neurobiological age-based differential is why the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 struck down the juvenile death penalty.

Here's the fix to help prevent school massacres by teen video game addicts. Just last month the National Institutes of Health reported that digital entertainment alters the structures of young brains.

More than 40 state attorneys general have entered into consent decrees with retailers who agree that selling age-restricted products like alcohol and tobacco to underage kids is "a fraudulent, unfair, and deceptive trade practice." Why? Because the retailers have represented to the public that they do not engage in sales to kids when they did. That's fraud.

Similarly, the entire video game industry assures parents they do not sell Mature-rated video games to anyone under 17. It's a complete lie. The majority of video games 19 years after gamers Klebold and Harris authored Columbine, are sold to individuals whose ages are not verified.

This is fraud by an entire industry, the consequences of which are horrors like Parkland.

All that is necessary for this dangerous fraud to stop is for states and the national government to apply deceptive trade practice laws that are already on the books to video game sales. This approach will be simple, constitutional and effective.

Jack Thompson is a former lawyer who has been an activist against the marketing and sale of adult video games to minors since he represented the parents of three school girls shot and killed by a 13-year-old video gamer in Paducah, Kentucky.