Kevin McCarthy blamed violent video games for mass shootings over the weekend, and Donald Trump did the same at Monday’s press conference singling out “the gruesome video games that are now commonplace” to blame for creating “a culture that celebrates violence.”

This is a bit rich coming from a man who ran on a promise to “bomb the shit out of ’em” and has repeatedly floated the idea of pardons for accused war criminals.

It also flies in the face of the basic reality that the United States has a much higher murder rate than any other rich country, even though video games are widely available in Europe and Japan.

Indeed, America’s overall crime rate is only a bit a above average but our homicide rate is sky-high because assaults featuring guns are much more likely to turn lethal than assaults committed with knives, bludgeons, or fists.

The issue is guns.

But since violent video games do strike lots of people (myself included) as kind of instinctively repugnant, it’s natural for people to wonder if video games aren’t contributing to the problem. So it’s critical to understand that according to the best research available, a quasi-experimental study by Scott Cunningham, Benjamin Engelstätter, and Michael R. Ward, it’s just genuinely not the case that video games lead to violent crime. If anything, it’s the opposite: Time spent playing video games reduces the amount of time that young men can get into mischief.

The study: Popular new game releases lead to less crime

The basic study method is fairly simple: Compare “the volume of sales of violent video games in a week among the top 50 best-selling video games from 2005-2008 — and relate it to a marker for violent behaviors — weekly aggregate violent crime incidents from the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS).”

They use time-series modeling and also instrumental variable modeling, and either way you slice it, when a very popular violent video game comes out, violent crime goes down, not up.

The researchers believe the method is what criminal justice scholars call “incapacitation” — if you are sitting on your couch playing video games you are, by definition, not out on the street making trouble. When it comes to ways to spend time that mainstream society finds uncontroversially wholesome, this mechanism is widely accepted. If you have teenagers doing summer jobs, attending after-school classes, or participating in recreational sports leagues, that keeps them off the streets and out of trouble. It happens to be the case that video games are a more stigmatized pastime than playing sports, but the basic mechanism is exactly the same. If you’re busy gaming, you’re not committing crimes.

Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna used a similar methodology in an earlier paper to study violent movies and found the same thing.

Because the audience for violent movies skews toward younger men, and younger men are also much more likely to commit violent crimes, when popular violent movies come out crime goes down, not up. An earlier paper by Ward also showed that areas where there are more video game stores have less crime and fewer deaths.

That said, the paper with Cunningham and Engelstätter does indicate a potentially constructive role for regulation to play.

Nonviolent games are better than violent ones

Ward’s original paper simply shows that wide availability of video games in general reduces crime. Similarly, the basic causal mechanism of the newer paper doesn’t say anything in particular about the virtue of violent video games — it’s just that playing games reduces crime.

An earlier strand of lab-based psychological research tends to indicate that violent video games do increase aggression levels.

So the incapacitation impact could be masking some kind of more crime-conducive impact on players’ psychology. Under the circumstances, to the extent to which you can nudge game makers and players away from violent titles toward nonviolent ones, you might be doing good. You just wouldn’t want to crush the overall popularity of video games as an enterprise, since gaming time will be swapped out for crime as well as more innocent pursuits.

But fundamentally, while this research is interesting and worth thinking about, it really can’t be said enough that the homicide rate in the United States is well out of line with what you see in peer countries on a scale that totally dwarfs any possible gaming-related effects.

Widespread gun ownership is something that a lot of Americans believe in, but it’s also something that has very profound costs. If you want to make the case that those costs are worth bearing, that’s one thing. But positing that some other kind of regulation — of video games or movies or whatever else — will solve the problem is not just deluded but quite possibly harmful and counterproductive.