MORE “COLUMBINES” ON THE WAY; HERE’S WHY
Three separate incidents in schools in Kansas, Alaska, and Washington State in the last several days have served as a grim reminder that “Columbine can happen here.”
ABC News today has an excellent news analysis that explains our schools are not any more resistant to Columbine-type events than they were pre-Columbine. See http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=1883687&page=1. Indeed, in this ABC story, it is noted that school violence is up, not down, contrary to conventional wisdom.
Miami Attorney/Author Jack Thompson is conducting Talk Show interviews with the message: More Columbines are indeed on the way, and he explains one big reason why. Thompson has worked in the past several days with law enforcement in Kansas regarding the intercepted “Columbine event” planned by five students at Riverton High School. The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department took Thompson’s affidavit and secured new search warrants with which they seized violent video games on which some of the perpetrators may have actually trained for the massacre. Kansas officials found commando-style military games that have been linked to other similar Columbine-type events nearly identical to the events planned by these Kansas teens.
After Columbine, the FBI and Secret Service did their own separate “threat assessments” as to why these school mass killings were occurring in the late 1990s. Each found that the one common denominator was the perpetrators’ immersion in violent entertainment, particularly violent murder simulation video games. Thompson represented all of the families of the girls slain in the Paducah school shooting by a 14-year-old gamer. Thompson predicted Columbine on NBC’s Today one week before it happened, even predicting the game—Doom—on which Klebold and Harris trained for their massacre.
Jack Thompson appeared last year on CBS’s 60 Minutes regarding a wrongful death lawsuit against the makers of the Grand Theft Auto cop-killing games for the role they played in the killings of three law enforcement personnel in Alabama. That case is now set for trial in 2007, as the Alabama Supreme Court has swept away a First Amendment defense.
ABOUT JACK THOMPSON…
Pictured on the cover of the book he wrote entitled, “Out of Harm’s Way” (Tyndale House Publishers, Nov. 2005), a book highly critical of Howard Stern, Jack Thompson is a 1976 graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, where he was a classmate of Al Gore.
Jack Thompson is a former “hands-off-business libertarian” and “First Amendment absolutist” who subsequently became convinced that the entertainment industry must be forced into taking responsibility for the brain-altering and deadly results of the violence and indecency it is spewing into millions of homes, families, and minds.
An attorney specializing in litigation against the entertainment industry since 1987, he has been interviewed for hundreds of radio and TV programs about the link between violent video games and teen violence. His legal successes include: securing the first FCC decency fines (1989); securing the first verdict that a sound recording is obscene (2 Live Crew case in 1990); forced Time Warner to pull rapper Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” from store shelves worldwide (1992); and received ACLU’s “Top Ten Censors of the Year Award” (1992).
Recently, Thompson has represented parents of three girls shot at a school in Paducah, Ky., by a 14-year-old video gamer. He also got shock jock Howard Stern kicked off all Clear Channel radio stations and Clear Channel fined $495,000 for illegal indecent broadcasts. He also successfully predicted a “Columbine-type” incident on national television one week before it occurred, and he also predicted that the DC Beltway Sniper triggerman would be “trained on a sniper video game.”
A frequent speaker on college campuses, Thompson lives with his family in south Florida where he is a lay leader in his Presbyterian church.