Teen Hires Hitman Instead Of Playing It
Sorry Toots, your Xbox bully punching his mom just got soundly trounced by little Cory Ryder from Maryland who allegedly got so upset that his parents confiscated his PlayStation that he actually went out and tried to hire a hitman. Now, as it turns out, the kid was already a handful and a half, so when his mom overheard him plotting, she took the threats seriously and called the cops. So the hitman the 16-year-old Cory met with was actually an undercover cop sent to trap him and arrest him. Mom is naturally upset at seeing her little baby boy turning into some kind of a monster, saying, "I don't know what this kid will do, because it's not my son. That can't be my little boy sitting there."
Sure, this sounds like the typical "videogames cause kids to go psycho and live them out in reality" kind of nonsense, but really, it's kind of not. Sure, reading the kid's rap sheet, he sounds like a typical hooligan, but it's not as if he actually tried to murder his own parents. He tried to hire someone else to do it. Does it still count as videogame-inspired violence if the kid doesn't want to get his own hands dirty? In all seriousness, though, this story is really only tangentially related to games because confiscating the PlayStation was only one of the numerous punishments the parents tried, and probably not even the one that finally set the kid off. Of course, the media just loves to jump on anything violent that's even remotely related to games. At least we know better.
Mother's sting catches son, Cory Ryder, 'hiring hitman to kill her' [Times Online]
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 5 November 2007
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: hitman, juvenile, nuts, playstation, violence
Uh... That article only mentions the Playstation in passing in one sentence. I do agree that the media often jumps to conclusions of video games causing violence. But this is one case where it didn't. Perhaps you're being a bit too quick to jump to conclusions of media bias.
With someone's moms saying something like: "I don't know what this kid will do, because it's not my son. That can't be my little boy sitting there." you just don't need any video game console to blame. The answer is very obvious.
I wouldn't be so sure Richie there was a story in England about a boy killing another boy and just because 1 of them had a copy of Manhunt in his room it was blamed for causing the who thing.
It was later revealed, after the media campaigned about how this game had turn a boy into a killer, that the VICTIM and not the killer had the game in his house.