Republicans Are Blaming Gun Violence On Video Games (Again)

Time may have passed, but Republicans like Donald Trump, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a state representative from Ohio, and the stable geniuses at Fox & Friends are still locked in the mindset of 1993's congressional hearings about violence in video games. Too cowardly to actually take on gun lobbying, gun manufacturers, gun retailers, and their own voter base, they just keep falling back on the old earth-shatteringly stupid trope of blaming games for violence instead of the actual causes of mass shootings, like the overabundance of and easy access to high-powered weaponry with high-capacity magazines.

You might remember that after the Parkland shooting, Trump hastily threw together a meeting with developers to tackle game violence head-on. The meeting, as we all know, wound up solving all of our problems, and there hasn't been a mass shooting since.

The problem is, study after study after study (and we have enough links to go on like this for a long time) has shown that this is untrue. Video games do not make people to violent. They just don't. Never have, likely never will. Video games are a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry, yet mass shootings are a uniquely American epidemic. If games cause violence, why aren't you seeing this kind of madness anywhere else? By this point, we know for sure that it's a full-on lie, and that anyone pushing that lie is making it abundantly obvious that they're trying to deflect blame from either themselves or others whom they're trying to protect.

Even if you don't buy the idea that fewer guns equals less gun violence, then at the very least, you have to admit that there is a specific group of people that keep falling back on the same easily disproved and profoundly stupid belief that Fortnite and Doom make someone shoot up a Walmart. And you should start asking yourself what their motivations are for pushing the same nakedly bogus claim again and again and again.

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