Jack Thompson's Battle

Things sure do change fast. Florida Attorney Jack Thompson is finding that out the hard way. For those of you who don't know him, he is the man who successfully got Howard Stern pulled from an Orlando radio station, got Ice T's Cop Killer album ripped off store shelves, and is a vocal activist against violent video games. What makes this man such a strange entity is that he claims to be a stalwart defender of the first amendment, while at the same time trampling all over it.

He touts as fact that there is a connection between violence in video games and school shootings, even though countless studies have proven only a correlation, not causation. To him, those are one and the same. I could find many instances where correlation and causation don't mesh, and use that to fulfill my baseless agenda. One could say that there is a correlation between people who breath oxygen, and those who commit murder, but you don't see me, or anyone else for that matter, railing against the evils of air.

He would have you believe that if you play a video game with violence, then you are bound to a life of mysogyny, murder, and hate. Yet he himself has expressed his own bigoted views against Islam and homosexuals. He is a contradiction in every sense of the word. Unable to understand that people are intelligent, and that they can tell the difference between fiction and the real world, he has embarked on a lonely journey to eradicate the world of violence in media.

And his methods have backfired. Case in point: Jack Thompson submitted homosexual pornography to the court, which as everyone knows is public record. Now how does a man who claims to be against letting the children see things they should not see, put something in the public record where anyone, no matter the age, can view it? He has also called the judge presiding over his disbarrment case "dumb", made fun of a video gamer who committed suicide, tried multiple times, unsuccessfully, to bring legal action against everyone from Janet Reno (who lightly patted his shoulder, so he filed a police report for battery), to the video game comic Penny Arcade (for donating money to a charity in his name, because he failed to do so after promising he would).

This is not even the worst of it, he has frequently undermined the court, attempted to have it declared unconstitutional because he claimed that it infringed on his rights to free speech and filed a motion that included images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, a baby, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, and a house of cards. In this same motion that was filed, he expressed "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments." No wonder they have trouble comprehending what swastikas, gay porn, and Ed Bradley have to do with anything resembling a legal matter. The court has called his actions "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court."

And now he is whining about being disbarred. In fact, he stormed out of the disbarrment proceedings, throwing a temper tantrum because he was not allowed to read an objection that referenced Hitler, called the Judge dumb, and said the Judge was not legally a Judge among many other crazy rants. What he can not seem to understand is that he is not being disbarred for fighting against violent video games, he is being disbarred for his detestable methods.

I do not agree with his assertions that violent video games turn someone into a psychopath, but I would respect him a lot more if he did not act like one himself. Any video gamer will tell you that kids should not be playing games that are rate "M" for Mature, yet Thompson seems to believe all people who play video games are kids, even if they are older than him. So please, before anyone gives a rational thought to what Mr. Thompson says, think about the fact that everything else he has done has been wrong, and most likely will continue to be.