As a brief recap: In 2004 three teen boys befriended Rex Baum, a homeless man, at his camp in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and drank beer with him. Before long they were brutally attacking him and ended up killing him. They were caught and sentenced, aided by their bragging about the act around town.

This action was blamed on video games.

I’m hardly a big supporter of video games and I’ll not be an apologists here for them but I do feel scapegoats are a lovely thing to have rather than face the cold reality. Kids made choices and the choice in question was to kill. The Playstation wasn’t there to prompt them.

At penny-arcade.com the step mother of one of the boys allegedly wrote in to respond to a posting there two days previously. The original post is here, as the third item on the page, and the step mother’s response is contained within the second item on this page. Apparently the boy was not just a monster in the making–he was already well past the evil stage.

On the upside: attacks against homeless people may be officially declared a hate crime in California. Currently this is only the case in Maine.

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