The reality is that there is no evidence linking violent games to mass shootings. We tend to return to this particular element, and it's interesting to see how quickly people like to latch on to this noncorrelation as if it were truly meaningful. The notion that mass homicides are linked to violent media was debunked as far back as 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service, which found that school shooters didn't consume high levels of violent media. But as a society we tend to focus on video games because it's easy to do so.
Yeah, and what about older adults who go on shooting sprees?
Curiously, no one seems interested in investigating the effects of media popular among the elderly. Our attention to video games in the cases of some shootings but not others is what psychologists call confirmation bias, and it creates the illusion of a correlation where there is none. It's worth asking ourselves why we keep returning to video games despite the lack of evidence to support its link to violence.
People around the world play the same violent video games and watch the same violent Hollywood movies and TV shows, but they don't commit as many gun murders either in absolute terms, or per capita. Conservatives complain about the so-called lib'rul media, but seriously, what kind of media bias is it when there is no factual or statistical basis to prove the connection between gun murders and violent entertainment, yet it keeps on getting reported as fact?
What I find especially galling is that die-hard gun rights supporters seem quite ready to restrict the 1st Amendment by limiting what people can watch or play in order to protect the 2nd Amendment from any restrictions. They like to pay lip service to freedom of expression -- "There is no 1st Amendment without the 2nd" -- but it seems they are quite willing to do without the 1st to keep the 2nd, if that's what it comes down to.
Americans are nuts about firearms, period. No intellectual or moral contortion is too twisted for them to justify their unlimited access to deadly firearms that have no other purpose than to kill many people in seconds.
By Christopher J. Ferguson
February 20, 2013 | CNN
