Can this game teach you to be better shooter? Absolutely not. Can it teach you good fundamentals of shooting? Most likely not. Will it teach you the differences in round capacity from one fire arm to another? Sure.

The details and specs of the weapons depicted in this game may be accurate--but a shooting video game can't teach you how to handle a firearm any more than a golf video game can teach you how to swing a club.

Here's why:

In this game you can switch back and forth through a selection of real life weapons but there are differences that can't be portrayed in a game--the featured Beretta and Sig Saur are both 9mm, but the Sig is heavier and louder, even though it's firing the same ammunition. How would that effect your accuracy at an indoor range? Would it be the same outside?

As the earlier parallel implies, shooting is a lot like swinging a golf club. You can be taught the basics, but you need to keep practicing to develop the "feel" of it in order to improve.

You need to shoot for real to see what you need to do become more accurate. If you're hitting consistently low on your target, you're anticipating the recoil of the weapon and over-compensating--the solution is not to simply aim higher, it's to relax your wrist as you fire. Hitting too high? The opposite is true, the weapon is too loose in your hand and it is jumping up as you fire.

These are things that you will never be able to get from a video game and it is arguable whether or not it could be portrayed to any effect even in a virtual reality simulation. The laser-based simu-weapons in these sims are actually TOO accurate—being almost exclusively indoors and not taking into consideration imperfections in live-firing like “bullet-drop.”

In accordance, the rifle is probably the most over-simplified firearm portrayed in video games. You sit there and read the cross-wind and range on the display, then eye up your shot and fire. What is never mentioned is that if you were out in the field and trying to make a long-range shot, you have to estimate the wind conditions and range-to-target YOURSELF. There's no handy-dandy palm pilot that you point at the target and it beams 100% info back to while offering to load the weapon and pull the trigger for you at the same time.

With that said, making the statement that this could encourage or teach kids to kill people could not be further from the truth. For the average, mentally stable person, shooting at a human being is extremely difficult even under high stress situations. I personally am a decent shot with a handgun, not to mention that I'm as desensitized to video/media/gaming violence as the next guy that came of age in 90s. If I had to shoot at a person with a medium caliber handgun (9mm, .40, .3, I estimate that at anything other than close-range, my accuracy would fall below 40%--my ability to deliver a kill shot (head or heart) would probably be around 10%.

I would also say that's above average for someone with no military training or combat experience. If you're talking about someone who HAS both of those things, it is doubtful that a video game will have an affect on them one way or the other.

The worst thing this will do to a young player is give them an appreciation of shooting as being more difficult than movies depict and inspire an interest in target shooting, while accurately depicting the rules and conduct of a responsibly-run shooting range. Would you rather have your kid playing this game, or a game where he's gunning down drug dealers vigilante-style?

Damn! this comment is better than my damn article! I thought to myself at the time I should've had one of my gun owning friends to weigh-in on this.

Joe, can we persuade you to right a letter to Jack Thompson and explain the above? By the way, awesome response.