Possible 8yrs in prison for video game comment

Ah, Facebook. 1984 the website and millions of people willingly sign onto it regardless, because it's currently trendy. This sort of thing really does depreciate your faith in humanity. Not to mention those in this thread saying "serves him right," as if an annoying kid on the internet deserves to be imprisoned. A slap on the wrist by his parents or school? I could understand, though it would still be amoral. But this is horrendous.

I can understand the concern, we have had people make comments just like this and then days later go out and actually commit murder both in the States and even here in the UK, the authorities are perhaps acting a little too dramatically but if they did nothing and he killed days later who would we blame? There is no clear cut answer to this, we either assume any comments made online with "lol" after it are jokes and let everyone do as they please, or we take the threats seriously and potentially stop a massacre happening.

Each of these events really needs to be handled on a case by case basis, get the kid evaluated, if he checks out he will be so terrified of making comments like that again that he will have learned his lesson. If you stick him in jail and there is nothing currently wrong with him he is going to come out changed and probably not for the best and to great cost for taxpayers everywhere. We do need to take these threats seriously, we do need to put aside the emotional responses from their parents and actually look at the kid and see if he is a real threat, if he is dangerous then we may have prevented many others from losing their lives but that is something we need to be 100% certain of before we lock him away.

The only thing that kid is guilty of is not being funny. Arresting him is a joke and very concerning.

That's some crazy shit. Ruining a kid's life over just a fucking sarcastic comment. I've seen people online that said shit worse then what he said.

Amurica is turning into George Orwell's 1984.

No way this kid should get any jail time at all. Such an overreaction.

I see I can continue to have no faith in humanity. Good job.

This somehow makes it worse, he wasn't aware of school shootings that have happened yet he is thinking about them enough to talk about doing it on the internet? I'd say that makes it more of a legitimate concern; though more likely complete bullshit that anyone is that oblivious.

I just went to the university library and fetched that book, in the killer afternoon heat. This is the 10th time I've heard/read such a reference as yours and I've had it! I wanna know what makes this book so cray.

Reading mode, /on

Overreaction maybe but in the times we live in now nothing can be overlooked anymore.

How many attacks have their been where after the event people say "I never thought he would do it, I thought he was joking." The person just said he was messed up in the head. He did not mention kids, school or shooting/killing anyone. Why was his joke even tailored with those specific words? With the recent killings in schools saying you're going to shoot kids is not something you want to joke about ever...

The problem with our generation is they live in a fantasy world where anything you say is okay if you put lol or jk at the end. There's a lot of truth in humor and lol and jk doesn't make it acceptable.

While I doubt he'll get anymore jail time I'm happy to see that someone reported it just to be on the safe side.

@jouseldelka: I won't discourage you from reading 1984 (it's worth a read) but when you're done, check out Brave New world by Aldous Huxley. America right now is more in between these two extremes. 1984 is about a totalitarian government that monitors its people constantly and arrests and tortures them for even thinking the wrong thing (thought crime). Brave New World is similar, but it's about a society built around eugenics and behavior conditioning where the people have drugged themselves into a state of eternal happiness and care about little more than entertainment, sex and consumerism.

People like to talk about both of these books as predictions of the future, but both were intended by their authors as satire of--or at the least commentary on--British society at the times the books were written.