Jack Thompson Round-Up: Slammed on <cite>Hardball</cite>, Settles With Take Two

There are so many stories today about everybody's favorite bag of vinegar and water Jack Thompson that I'm just going to wrap them all up here.

Clip: Jack Thompson Gets Hardballed [Kotaku]
Chris Matthews rips Jack Thompson a new one on Hardball, shutting down his unsubstantiated allegations that the Virginia Tech shooter was into Counter-Strike.

GTA Publisher, Jack Thompson Settle Lawsuit [GamePolitics]
Take Two has dropped their suit against Thompson on the condition that Thompson no longer sue the company to attempt to stop the sale of their games, communicate to Take Two shareholders or anyone doing business with Take Two that the company is engaged in wrongdoing, or communicate with Take Two except through the company's lawyers. So basically, Take Two wins.

"VT" Web Threat Suspect Faces $50,000 Bail [Boston Herald]
And just because I'd rather put it here, continuing coverage of Andrew Rosenblum's Virginia Tech copycat death threat arrest. He's out on bail and will stay under house arrest, with the ankle thing, until trial. Jack Thompson doesn't seem to have picked up on this yet. Let's all be really quiet and hope he does.

Oh, and also, Jack Thompson wrote a letter to the chief of police at Virginia Tech, and CC'ed Wired. You can read it after the jump.

John B. Thompson, Attorney at Law
1172 S. Dixie Hwy.,
Suite 111
Coral Gables, Florida
33146
305-666-4366

April 19, 2007

Chief
Wendell Flinchum
Virginia Tech Police Department
Blacksburg, Virginia
Via
Fax and e-mail

Dear Chief Flinchum:

The news story in yesterday's
Washington Post proves correct my prediction to your Department Monday that Cho, whose identity was not even know to me at the time, would be a video gamer trained to do what he calmly did on a violent shooter video game.

I went on the Fox News Channel Monday and even identified the game, Counterstrike, obsessively played by Cho, which was also used by Robert Steinhaeuser to author what is now the second worst school shooting in world history in Erfurt, Germany, which he also concluded by killing himself. These are not coincidences; these are patterns.

Further corroboration that this is "life imitating art,"� or more accurately "death imitating toxic entertainment"� is what is now coming to light as to Cho's copycatting of a certain violent movie as well. This is generally the case: movie + shooter games = massacre. I have seen it all before in the Paducah school shootings, where I represented the families of the victims of Michael Carneal, a teen gamer who trained on Doom and was inspired by the Hollywood movie The
Basketball Diaries. A Yale psychiatrist said so.

I went on NBC's
Today Show and predicted Columbine one week before it happened, identifying the above two specific move and game entertainment products that Klebold and Harris were also obsessed with. If your Department really wants to get to the bottom of this, you need to talk to me now.

Talk also to my dear friend, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who was singled out by President Clinton as "the one man America should listen to as to why Columbine happened."� Grossman's book, On Killing, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He and I have addressed national television audiences, state and federal governments, and law enforcement officers about the direct causal nexus between what happened on Monday and violent entertainment consumed by young people, who are then consumed by it.

Personal regards,

Jack Thompson