Movie Addicts. Celeb Dishers. Gamers. We're All Here.

So I was looking forward fervently to catching that lunatic Jack Thompson on Glenn Beck’s show last night. I thought it would be great to watch Beck tear apart the man who has no concern for personal responsibility of parents and individual gamers, the man who’s facing disbarment hearings down Florida way, the man whose mastery of anecdotal evidence, flawed studies, and making mountains from molehills.

So imagine my disappointment–my heart-breaking collapse!–as I heard Glenn say “I know what eighty percent of people who hear this are saying right now, ‘Oh no, here’s another crazy conservative on TV screaming about the dangers of video games’”. Indeed, Mister Personal Responsibility himself, the man who was willing to take his mantra of Personal Responsibility so far that he’d sooner see mortgage-holders who can’t meet their monthly payments thrown out in the street than see the government step in and help, apparently thinks that you’re too stupid to know the difference between the fantasy of Grand Theft Auto IV and the reality of life.

Aided and abetted by two different sources–whatsamatter, Glenn? Didn’t want to take the chance of your ridiculous viewpoint getting derailed by actual fact?–one from the Parents Television Council and of course likely-soon-to-be-disbarred attorney Jack Thompson, Beck proceeding to rail against pop culture for a surprisingly brief time.

Of course, in that time, the anti-game nutter crowd got all its standard sound bites out there. For instance, Glenn had a real winner where he describes how the introduction of television was in the same year as a spike in homicide rates. Which is especially ironic as Glenn himself is, you know, ON TELEVISION, and I don’t think we’ll see him resign his TELEVISION show in protest as being part of the problem.

Thompson, meanwhile, had his usual madness in line, including his anecdotal evidence about “dozens” of killer kids–an especially huge blunder given that Beck himself described how the game would have sales of millions of units.

For people like Glenn Beck who clearly don’t understand BASIC MATH, let me proffer the following math problem that shows conclusively that Thompson’s “dozens” of killer kids, even if true, would be statistically meaningless anyway.

144 (one dozen dozen killer kids) / 70, 000, 000 (expected sales of GTA 4) = .00000020571 percent chance a buyer of GTA IV becomes one of Thompson’s killers.

It took scientific notation to give me that percentage, folks. The chances of any person buying Grand Theft Auto and then becoming a mass murderer is something like two millionths of a percent in favor. And just for comparison:

Odds of winning Powerball: 80 million to one
Odds of dying in an airplane crash: 7 million to one
Odds of killing someone after buying Grand Theft Auto IV: 2 million to one
Odds of being hit by lightning: 600,000 to one
Odds of perishing in a California earthquake: 600,000 to one

You are more than three times more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to kill someone after buying Grand Theft Auto IV.

Just some final words for Glenn Beck: It’s poor form to have nothing but people who agree with you as guests during a segment, it’s just a bad idea to have widely discredit and regular court case losers like Thompson for allies because it drags down your own viewpoint, and from a man so devoted to personal responsibility, blaming pop culture for the world’s ills just does not become you.

Save This or Tell Your Friends!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Categories: Video games //