But what does that mean to gamers?

In reality, it shouldn't mean a thing. Crimes and the things that cause people to commit them are far too complex to compare to other statistics, like unemployment or demographics. But that doesn't stop pundits, newspapers and politicians from doing just that every year.

Occasionally, a wacko will also try to roll out annual video game sales and draw some sort of correlation between the increase in video game purchases and the crime rate, be it juvenile arrests or violent crimes committed. It is, of course, utter nonsense. But it's also an interesting jumping off point for discussion and debate... intelligent discussion and debate.

One word of warning, the numbers shown here, all pulled from NPD and the FBI, are meant to only show changes over time. They should not be used to compare totals because I had to re-fame the "per thousands" on them to get all of the numbers (which range from the thousands to the billions) to show up on one chart.

Now have at it... nicely.

A Texas man, described in television reports as a gamer and out-of-work computer whiz who redesigns video games, received an early morning call from the FBI and Nuclear Regulatory Commission after word got out that he was trying to build a small nuclear reactor in his house.

The feds were alerted after the man blogged that he had some uranium and that the background radiation in his home had doubled.

The man is an out-of-work computer whiz who redesigns video games. He said he started studying physics around the eighth grade. He said he is a science buff who is fascinated by nuclear reactions and radiation.

"These things are in your tap water, you know, in the dirt," he said. "You could hold a Geiger counter up to a banana and get a count off of it."

He said he has always been curious about how things work and likes to do his own experiments.

The man decided to create a small-scale nuclear reaction in the same room he plays his video games as his latest experiment.

"People do it in universities all the time," he said. "It's just not usual that somebody does it outside of a university."

After a brief inspection of his contraption the feds left the man alone, taking his experiment at his parent's request.

Rockwall Man Tries To Build Nuclear Reactor In Home [NBC 5, via Game Politics]

A hacker has knocked GayGamer.net, the only news gathering gay-gaming site, offline with a series of denial of service attacks after flooding the site with threatening emails and hate speech, the site's owner said Sunday.

Flynn De Marco, the site's owner and Kotaku weekend editor, said small waves of denial of service attacks started Wednesday morning, causing occasional timeouts on the site. By Friday the site, working with their host, was able to block the IPs where the DOS attacks seemed to be coming from. Then Friday evening someone began flooding the site's forums and chat room with hate speech, including some death threats, and over-sized images meant to bog down the site, De Marco said. The flood of messages and images all originated from the same IP in Philidelphia, he added.

The site deleted the offensive messages, but the continued DOS attacks lead to the site's host taking GayGamer down until the attacks could be permanently blocked. De Marco hopes to get the site operational by Monday, but is having problems getting a straight answer from their host, GoDaddy.Com.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigations a hate crime, also known as a bias crime, is a criminal offense committed against a person, property, or society that is motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity/national origin.

Its sad to see that even in the virtual worlds of gaming and game coverage people decide that the only way they can express themselves is by attacking others. Hit the jump to read GayGamer's official statement on the outage.

Hello, faithful readers: As you might have noticed, we have had some connection issues in the last few days and now the site is completely down. I'm sad to say that we have been the target of homophobic hackers. Thankfully, they didn't get to our database so all of our stuff is still in tact. At this point we are jut waiting for our service provider to ensure everything is good before putting the server back online. Hopefully, this will be resolved by the end of this weekend, so please keep checking back. You can't keep a good gay gamer down, so we'll be back before you know it, serving up all the sassy game content you can handle. Cheers, Fruit Brute

Apparently we've unhinged Jack.

After Kotaku dissected Jack Thompson's latest appearance on national television trying to connect the tragedy at Virginia Tech with video games, the attorney started emailing us... again.

First Jack tried to tie us to allegations that a 14-year-old made a threat against the University of California Berkley campus by emailing one of the sergeants of the campus police. After speaking with the sergeant actually handling the investigation (not the one Jack emailed) I was told that there was nothing to worry about.

Next Jack asked us to remove our analysis of his misstatements on national television and when we politely declined he faxed the FBI in Colorado:

Dear FBI:

This web site at the below url is targeting me:

http://kotaku.com/gaming/virginia-tech/breaking-idiot-thompson-blames-va-shooting-on-games-252702.php

I ask that something be done by the FBI to stop this or prosecute it:

Kyle81 says: Actually the VT shootings are now the biggest mass shooting in US history with 31 dead, not just school shooting. Jack should be shot for taking the opportunity to leech off a tragedy to push his own agenda 04/16/07 03:25 PM

Regards, Jack Thompson

I quickly got on the phone with my friends at the agency (they were among the agencies I covered for five years as a police reporter in Denver) and found out that they hadn't yet processed the fax. I was also told that it was unlikely they would handle such an investigation, if one was even needed, but that the local police might look into it.

Finally, I asked about the fed's policy on pursuing charges for filing a false report... but I'll get to that later. Brian Crecente

Update To be clear, while we fully support freedom of speech we're not such big fans of pointless threats. So stop making them. If nothing else that make gamers look like a bunch of immature hot heads.

An Ohio school was locked down yesterday after a middle school student told a California teen over Xbox Live that he was planning to bring a 9mm pistol to school, according to the Pickaway County Sheriff's department.

The high school lockdown came after the middle school student was arrested for the threat about his school.

"Our suspicion is that the incident trickled over to the high school," said Teays Valley Superintendent Jeff Sheets.

He added that they have talked to every student and spent hours investigating the rumor along with the Pickaway County Sheriff's Office.

The 13-year-old involved in the original, Xbox Live, threat was arrestes and charged with inducing a public panic. Deputies served a search warrant at his house but were unable to find the 9mm, they did seize a firearm and an Xbox 360. Brian Crecente

School District Takes Precautions After Threat [10TV, via Joystiq]

The FBI conducted multiple raids across the country today, closing down Lineage II pirating site L2Extreme, NCsoft said.

L2E was providing an estimated 50,000 gamers with unauthorized access to Lineage II, costing NCsoft million of dollars a year, the company said in a press release.

"Operations like this essentially are defrauding customers by stealing from companies like NCsoft," said Matt Esber, NCsoft North America general counsel. "In the end those losses impact our customer support, product development, operational areas and ultimately they impact our player communities, most of which are trying to play games legitimately. This group in particular was downloading our version of the Lineage II software from our servers, costing us close to a million dollars in realized bandwidth costs during the period it was operational.

"We've taken this action because we strongly believe in defending the intellectual property rights that we've worked so hard to create. We're extremely pleased that the FBI has worked with us so diligently to bring this particular case to its current state and we want our customers to understand that we will continue to fight similar operations in the future in order to maintain the integrity of all NCsoft games."

THe investigation into L2Extreme is ongoing in various cities from California to Virginia Brian Crecente

L2Extreme

Terra Nova says that the FBI is being called into Linden Labs' Second Life to help purge the griefers from the game. It's been a rough week to be a griefer. First WoW bans a modest town's worth of people, now Second Life has the FBI sniffing out griefers.

The Solution to Griefing is...the FBI? [Terra Nova]
Second Life Turns Attacker in to FBI [News.com]
WoW Bands 18,000 Accounts