After yet another mass shooting in America, yet again a certain group of people are keen to blame this horrific violence on video games. Why hasn’t the debate around this matured?

Another week, and another mass shooting in America – the sort of senseless loss of life that is becoming an all too common story filling the pages of the US media. In the wake of any horrendous act of societal violence, it’s completely natural that people would want to try and find the root cause: that single, identifiable thing that, if the shooter hadn’t been exposed to it, would have meant that the tragedy du jour would have never happened. For anyone who lives beyond the bubble of the American obsession with guns, the answer is painfully obvious. But in a society where lawmakers are politically and financially motivated to find another scapegoat, the ire of politicians and invariably falls onto a different sort of industry: video games.

To that end, it was completely unsurprising to see the likes of Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy quickly denounce video games as a driver for mass shootings in the wake of the events in El Paso and Dayton this week. “But the idea of these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others – I’ve always felt that is a problem for future generations and others,” said House minority leader McCarthy in a segment on Fox News last Sunday. (McCarthy, according to OpenSecrets.org, has received over $100,000 in funds from the gun rights lobby over the years).

The trouble is, there just isn’t any scientific evidence to support the link between playing violent video games and mass shootings. It doesn’t exist. In fact, we tend to see the opposite – various studies have shown that following the release of popular violent games, murder and violent crimes rates tend to drop. In line with this, the best research evidence that we currently have suggests that the more general association between playing violent video games and aggression is a weak one at best, and probably nothing to worth worrying about. You don’t even really need to look to the scientific literature to see that violent video game play and mass shootings aren’t linked in any meaningful sense. These sorts of games are played by billions of people across the world every day of the year; if they really were the root cause of mass shootings, we wouldn’t see such events restricted to the only country in the world which has relatively unfettered access to guns.

Why are we still here though? After more than twenty years of video games being linked to mass acts of violence, we’re still having the same old conversations and arguments, with the same, tired points being made on both sides of the aisle. Part of the problem is clearly the inability for US lawmakers to make any sort of meaningful headway in terms of gun control. But there are other reasons we’re still stuck in this loop.

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