People have been trying to pin violence on video games ever since the pong-inspired massacre of 1972, but one stat will disprove that argument pretty soundly, even if it’s coming from noted logician Donald Trump.
President Trump met with video game industry representatives Thursday, after saying last month violent video games may play a role in mass shootings. The president met with parents like Melissa Henson.
“The kind of messages and images that they are putting in their minds, I think they’re nightly dress rehearsals for huge acts of violence,” she said.
But psychologist Patrick Markey’s research shows 80 percent of mass shooters did not show an interest in violent video games.
“It seems like something that should make us safer so it’s a totally understandable reaction,” Markey said. “The problem is just the science, the data, does not back up that they actually have an effect.”
That won’t keep some money-hungry lawyer from suing video game companies of course:
Other critics point to the appearance of specific weapons in video games, like a Remington assault rifle pictured in popular game “Call of Duty.” Images of the rifle come from a lawsuit by Sandy Hook parents, who are suing Remington, saying the company bears responsibility for the killings of the 26 children at the school by shooter Adam Lanza in 2012.
“He was within this younger male demographic that Remington was trying to sell guns to,” said attorney Josh Koskoff. “What we are seeing here is what I describe as a ‘chickens coming home to roost’ scenario, where you saturate, you sell so recklessly so many of these weapons to this high-risk demographic.”
I sincerely doubt that video games have anything to do with violence – there are studies that show that they may even defuse violence because men get all their aggression out on a television. Now, there might be OTHER reasons to oppose grown men playing games for ten hours a day, but that has nothing to do with violence, which, statistically, has also been decreasing in the last few decades.