Video games are everywhere nowadays. Invading your living rooms, storming your phones, even taking the blame for society’s ills. “These video games dehumanize individuals.” Like after the recent wave of shootings when American politicians shared thoughts, prayers and concerns about video games. “This was a maybe a video game to this evil demon. He wanted to be a super soldier for his Call of Duty game.” Even the president urged us to stop the glorification of violence in our society, including “the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.” Let’s debunk this whole “video games causes violence” red herring once and for all. I’m Charle Goldberg. I’ve been reporting on video games for eight years. I’ve been a lifelong video game player. I have amassed nearly two million subscribers on my gaming YouTube channel. And, well, I play a lot of video games. The violent ones, the shooter ones more specifically. I also love LEGOs. I’m a father. I know I’m just one gamer, but I’m not a threat to society and neither are the millions of other people who play video games. Let’s take a look at the world of evidence. American video game sales per person are on similar levels to countries like South Korea, Japan, or Germany. But our rate of violent gun deaths is 10 to 100 times higher than any of those countries’. Even within America, there is zero empirical evidence that video games are linked to mass shootings. Decades of research from the American Psychological Association have shown there’s no link between playing violent video games and participating in violent crime. This all looks nominal. No link, no evidence. Now, it’s true that some research shows a relationship between video games and aggression, but aggression is also linked to lots of things, including organized sports. Now, maybe you’re thinking, what about Columbine. Didn’t the two shooters in that also play the violent video game Doom? And yes, they did, but violent criminals also watch movies, they read books and digest the news, real or fake. As one A.P.A. expert put it, “The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive.” In fact, in 2017 an A.P.A. committee issued a statement discouraging politicians and journalists from trying to connect video games and shootings precisely because they feared the rhetoric would distract us from addressing issues that we know contribute to real-world violence. So why, against the objections of science and ethics, do politicians still insist on deflecting our attention? Because it’s easy. It works. And it’s time tested. In 1915, the Supreme Court supported censorship of movies because they could “cause evil.” Film didn’t become a form of protected speech until the ’50s, just when politicians turned their energies to a new scapegoat — comic books. Now fast-forward to the paranoias about heavy metal in the 1960s, Dungeons and Dragons in the ’80s, hip-hop in the ’90s. “Here we go again.” Solutions are hard and we like simple answers to complicated questions. And it doesn’t take much to get disgruntled parents frustrated by their kids’ screen time and Fortnite addiction to believe that video games are evil. The fact that politicians are so removed from video game culture is another reason we should ignore their deflections. Would you listen to a book critic who’s never read a book? “Shut your pie hole.” And just like books, video games are actually an art form protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court made that clear in 2011 when Justice Scalia reminded us that violence is not novel to gaming. It’s as old as the plots of Cinderella and Snow White. Gamers don’t really have an issue deciphering fantasy from the real world. But politicians seem to have lost themselves in a politically convenient fiction. Just when we need them to focus on the crisis of our reality.