Attorney Warns Gates: Microsoft May Be Liable for 'Counterstrike' in Va. Tech Murders

( This is a news development which has broken since the issuance of the LPAC report on the background to the Virginia Tech shooting. )

April 18 (EIRNS)--Attorney Jack Thompson, who has represented families of shooting victims in the 1997 Peducah, Kentucky high school shootings, against makers of violent video games, has sent a letter to Microsoft's Chairman Bill Gates demanding that he halt sales of the game known as "Counterstrike".

"Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable for the harm done at Virginia Tech," Thompson wrote. "Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the [Washington] Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill. You knew five years ago that your on-line game, Counterstrike, so clearly figured in the massacre by a student in Erfurt, that the event and the game impacted the race for Chancellor in Germany at the time!

"Yet, here you are, five years after 'Erfurt,' still marketing Counterstrike, having done nothing to disable the server(s) for this mass murder simulator, and it looks like 'Virginia Tech' is a consequence....

"Mr. Gates, pull the plug on Counterstrike today, or do we need more dead to convince you? Virginia Tech was the 9-11 of school shootings, and it appears Microsoft is in the middle of it, in more ways than one."

According to EIRNS's preliminary investigations, the Counterstrike game, which is marketed through Microsoft's Xbox video-game unit, was developed by former Microsoft employees who set up the "Valve" company to produce video games.

Counter-strike graphically displays heads being shot apart, bodies being blown up, all with realistic simulation of blood gushing throughout. A statement on Microsoft's web-site praises "Valve" as an "award-winning" company and further states: "Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Team Fortress, account for over 18 million retail units sold worldwide, and over 88 percent of the PC online action market." In fact, video games sales, which are over $10 billion annually, now surpass the sales of Hollywood movies.

The Glock semi-automatic pistol, used by the Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung Hui, is the weapon "issued" to players acting as terrorists or counterterrorists in the Counterstrike game, and used by them throughout. Cho's teenage acquaintances described him to the Washington Post as addicted to violent videogames, particularly Counterstrike.