There is little justification for this story, and less justification for some of the comments I’ve found below it. Counterstrike players know that you can create custom maps for multiplayer action, and so it’s not surprising that occasionally (if not frequently) people make maps that are modeled after places near them. A student in Texas made a map after his school. The result: he was arrested and expelled.

Richard Chen, president of the Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League and a acquaintance of the boy’s family, said he is a talented student who enjoys computer games and learned how to create maps (also sometimes known as “mods”), which provide new environments in which games may be played.

The map the boy designed mimicked Clements High School. And, sources said, it was uploaded either to the boy’s home computer or to a computer server where he and his friends could access and play on it. Two parents apparently learned from their children about the existence of the game, and complained to FBISD administrators, who investigated.

“They arrested him,” Chen said of FBISD police, “and also went to the house to search.” The Lin family consented to the search, and a hammer was found in the boy’s room, which he used to fix his bed, because it wasn’t in good shape, Chen said. He indicated police seized the hammer as a potential weapon.

“They decided he was a terroristic threat,” said one source close to the district’s investigation.

This is just plain infuriating, almost as much so as the claim that the Asian community “faces new pressures” thanks to the Virginia Tech killings. That makes my blood boil, because I never heard anyone say that white men faced new pressures after the Oklahoma City Bombing or Columbine. Seems it doesn’t count as problematic for an ethnicity unless that group is inherently “foreign”.

Consider the lovely comments as well.

4 joeschmo - Apr 30, 01:11 pm

we live in a very different world after 9-11.. I know that the Asian community wants their children to be safe and secure in school just like all other ethnic parents whether white, brown, black, green purple… I dont care what race the child who downloaded the material was,, the other children in the school has to be safe.. Im not for violation of rights as Im not for this city becoming a nightmare like in W Va.. We hav lost some rights,, its tru,,, but we live in a different world now.. A world where your neighbor could be a terorist of a sex offender… If your child gets killed or assaulted ,, would nt you have wanted every lead, threat, suspicion to be followed up on… ????

There are plenty like this. If I hear “we’re in a different world after 9/11″ one more time I’m going to vomit. The world is not different. We are making it different. Al Qaeda has been trying to attack for decades, on 9/11 they snuck through however they did. People are going to die, murders are going to happen. We live in a country with 300 million people, roughly .0000001% were killed in Virginia Tech. Pull out two of those zeros for the fatality count of September 11th.

A world where your neighbor could be a terrorist or a sex offender. This makes my blood boil. This is exactly what terrorists want. To destabilize our nation so we’re looking with suspicion at everyone around us. They don’t even need to attack again if everyone is spying on their neighbors and assuming there are terrorists everywhere, launching full-scale investigations and arresting people because of something as asinine as a map in a video game.

I can’t write any more on the subject, it’s making me too angry and I can’t type as quickly as I talk.

I’m sorry I’ve been away everyone. The past few weeks have been awful for me in terms of keeping up with the site. I promise I’ll update you all on what’s going on soon. Regardless, here’s a fun little stat for you all to enjoy: nearly half of all terrorist attacks worldwide are in Iraq, and nearly two-thirds of terrorism related deaths occur there.

Of the 14,338 reported terrorist attacks worldwide last year, 45 percent took place in Iraq, and 65 percent of the global fatalities stemming from terrorism occurred in Iraq. In 2005, Iraq accounted for 30 percent of the worldwide terrorist attacks.

The figures, compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and released with the annual State Department Country Reports on Terrorism, showed that the number of incidents in Iraq rose 91 percent, from 3,468 in 2005 to 6,630 in 2006.

This must be the surge. Or maybe the problem is that the liberal media and the left-wing vultures are ruining morale, which is why about four years after combat operations ended things are getting worse and worse almost by the day. Iraq is the center of the “War on Terror” and we have the Bush administration to thank for it.

The president hopped on television to talk about why he vetoed the war spending bill, and the House failed to drum up enough support to overturn it. He doesn’t want this war to end. Even my angriest and most vocal conservative friends, a few of which were across the pond actually in the damn thing, are clamoring for a withdrawal.

The president needs to understand that Iraq will never stand up on its own as long as a date is never set. He keeps telling us American support is not open-ended while simultaneously telling us that we can’t set a date. These two ideas clash head-on and no one seems to be picking up on it. He’s not going to let this war end while he’s president, I think that’s a given at this point. The end of the “war” will show that it was a failed idea. The war was a lost cause from top to bottom, and I’m pretty sure he knew it at the time but hoped it would work out anyway. You know, on faith.

I wonder if, when Iraq crumbles into chaos, the president will recall his claim that God himself said he should invade. More specifically, I wonder if he’ll ask whether God betrayed him, he betrayed God, or if he really is crazy. I suppose the most likely scenario is he’ll think he did all he could, and the Defeatocrats ruined it all.