University shut down over video game threat
I will kill the whole school
A TEEN in Baltimore managed to shut down his University while playing a game of Call of Duty.
Allieu Shaw, a 19 year old student from Gaithersburg, was playing the game on the Xbox network and was heard to utter the phrase "I will shoot up the whole campus" on voice chat. He also said how he was going to do it.
Kaipo Damurand from Oregan heard him say the phrase and called the coppers.
Police contacted Microsoft to find the location of the machine and shut down the campus. Apparently 40 police swooped on the University to look for the crazed killer. Shaw was not hard to find.
Much to the coppers' surprise when they searched his room they did not find any guns, or pipe bombs or any weapons of mass destruction. His myspace page didn't contain any loner rants and in fact Shaw seems to get on quite well with people. Nor has he got the slightest criminal record.
However saying something on the Xbox network is considered a crime so heinous in Baltimore that Shaw faces a year in prison and a $10,000 fine for disrupting the university. He has also been suspended from studies while an investigation is carried out.
Frostburg State University has admitted that the threat was 'not credible' but has not said why it suspended Shaw.
More here.
Comments
When will people learn?
Video games, violent movies, etc... don't turn people into killers unless they were unstable in the first place and if thats the case odds are something would have set them off eventually anyway.Seriously if people like Jack Thompson had their way there would be no video games or graphic violence in media but what would they do then, try to sue Disney because Peter Pan has sword fighting in it?
That would be a sad sad world to live in and thats the one people like that want so i ask the intelligent people of the world, please don't let this happen.
Also shouldn't it be the Kaipo Damurand kid that's facing prison time and fines because he was really the one who disrupted the school.
Not Baltimore
The incident took place in Frostburg, a small town in the hills of western Maryland, at the opposite end of the state from Baltimore.Not even close to Baltimore
Frostburg is a college town in the middle of the mountains and woods. It is at least 100 miles away from any city.I'm not sure what they freaked out over. Up until the early 90's you could deer hunt from your dorm room window at Frostburg. That's how far out in the woods that place is.
Who's disturbed
Surely it is the paranoid authorities or MS who deserve the fine and punishment for disrupting the university?Or does common sense not get a look in?
It's Oregon
Pronounced organ. No it doesn't make sense, not much in this state does, much like this Damurand character.But what if?
But what if he really had been going to do it? Saying something like that is as stupid as saying you have a bomb in the airport. If anyone hears something like that they have a duty to report it, you never know what anyones capable of and school shootings have been a trend lately. Next time the kid should just use the normal cursing and blaming it on his remote when hes getting POwned.Cops hate to be wrong
American cops have large swollen egos so when they arrive at a scheme, guns drawn and pointed at whom ever they please and then it turns out to be an innocent mistake they get mad. They will then make up anything to still bust you so their trip from the donut kettle was not in vain."Shaw faces a year in prison and a $10,000 fine for disrupting the university"
I mean come on, this is one reason the USA has more people sitting in jail per capita of population than any other country in the world. We are the police state, ah I mean prison state.
Regulas
Private prisons
Where are private prisons, there is a lobby for injailing more people. Justice must not be a business to work OK.Yeah, but...
I understand what you guys are saying, and I totally agree (about the video games and bad music turning people violent, blah, blah, blah = stupidty)HOWEVER, I don't care who you are you can't go around saying arbitrary rubbish and not taking responsibility for it.
It's like prank calling 911, pulling a fire alarm, phoning in a "bomb threat" to get out of work/class, or something equally stupid. IF you intend to say stuff like that, prepare that people MIGHT to take you seriously (because if ignored, we've also seen what happens), and thus the SWAT team busting in might be surprising, but not unwholly unexpected (never mind possibly deserved.)
BTW it is NOT pronounced F-ing 'Organ' its pronounced: "Or-e-gan". (short 'e')
Would not be news in Baltimore
Frostburg, where this took place, is in the hills about 150 miles from Baltimore. Baltimore has about 300 murders a year and the mere threat of a shooting would hardly raise any eyebrows here.Oregon
Sorry DEVGRU, but you're obviously an east-coaster. I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and not a soul up there calls it Or-e-gan including the people that live there. It's pronounced Or-gun or /ˈɔrəgən/ if you prefer, not /ˈɔrəˌgɑn/. Look it up. It's about time you right coasters start saying it correctly.I would have thought...
I don't knowwhy everyone has to sit on either the "lock him up" fence or the "this is absurd and the cops should never have bothered" fence, especially since none of you actually know what he said. If it was a brief, flippant remark made when he was losing, then invading the university with 40 armed police was a daft thing to do. However, if he spent most of the game telling everyone present in meticulous details about what guns he was going to use, what routes he'd take, and who he was going to kill - hell, I'd phone the police too.As a general rule, though, I would have thought it unwise to take on face value the word of a young man who claims he's going to do the same thing in real life that he's currently engaged in on-screen.
Let's be serious
While it's absolutely advisable that police makes security check also in cases like this, once cleared the misunderstanding and considering also the context, it's absolutely crazy and not right that they charge him of anything.And I don't think his behaviour is comparable to a phone prank, it wasn't him that gave the alarm.
In doubt, both the citizen who gave the alarm and the police who made the checks are right, but this doesn't mean that the student was so terribly wrong.
Police does every day, for the sake of people's security, checks that don't make them find anything wrong: should they fine or charge the innocent checked because they were innocent?