Thompson was talking to OUT-LAW Radio
and said that he believed that teenager Alvaro Castillo was
influenced by the games he played.
"This youth Alvaro Castillo you can go on the internet and see
portions of his video which is a suicide note," said Thompson.
"He's killed his father and he goes to his school and shoots up his
school and he's talking at length about the violent entertainment
he's been obsessed with since he was eight years of age and I now
find from speaking with a family friend that some of the
entertainment was violent video games."
"It’s yet another example, you can add this to Columbine,
Paducah, Jonesboro Arkansas, Wellsboro, I could go on for half an
hour giving you the names of schools that sound like battlefields
in World War II. We have reality being infected with virtual
reality."
Thompson is a veteran campaigner against violence in video games
and their sale to young people. He told OUT-LAW that he wants the
US to mirror the approach taken in the UK.
"In the UK, you embody in your laws the notion that there is
certain adult entertainment that shouldn't be sold to kids," he
said. "No-one is trying to ban it outright, but as it stands now,
regardless of the rating that the game may get, anyone of any age
will be able to buy it and that is just very dangerous. America has
become the land of the free and the home of the utterly
depraved."
Previous attempts by US states to ban the sale of games to
minors have been overturned in the courts, which have found that
the games are protected as free speech. Thompson is now suing Take
Two games using a different kind of law. He is suing the company
over its upcoming controversial title Bully, which is set in
schools.
"In Florida you have what is called a nuisance statute which
says that a private citizen can get an injunction to shut down any
commercial activity that is dangerous to the public, so I think
that the statute is appropriate to apply to this game. So I
filed the lawsuit to prevent the sale of the game to school age
kids, because this is where the real danger is."
Thompson rejects the argument that the problem is with the ready
availability of guns, rather than the availability of computer
games. " We've got more guns than people over here," he said. "I
would prefer nobody have any guns, but now that the guns are out
there, the genie is sort of out of the bottle. Nobody has come up
with a way to get the guns from the bad guys as well as the good
guys, so that if you pass a law that said everybody has to turn in
their guns and we'll melt them down and make a statue of Charlton
Heston out of it or something, the bad guys, the criminals would
still hold on to their guns and us good guys who are law abiding
would be giving them up."
"I live in Miami, I'm not giving up my gun because if somebody
comes in my house I want to be able to kill him," he said.
"Unfortunately when you have a country that is awash in guns, you
have got to do something about the stimuli to use those guns."
