As the country struggles to find answers for the senseless deaths in two mass shootings over the weekend, at least one politician is pointing the figure of guilt at a usual suspect: video games. “I’ve always felt that it’s a problem for future generations and others,” Senator Kevin McCarthy said during a CNN interview on Sunday. “We’ve watched from studies, shown before, what it does to individuals, and you look at these photos of how it took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.”
Video games don't make kids violent. The research never really panned out, says Christopher Ferguson http://t.co/wCsk5ELG via @TIMEIdeas
— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) August 8, 2012
While Stetson University Professor Christopher Ferguson agrees today’s video games tend to be violent, he says they’re blamed only when it’s convenient to do so. “People tend to look for these cases of young male shooters, but then they ignore cases when a shooter is an older male, like the Las Vegas shooter — who was in his 60s,” he says. “Nobody talked about video games then.” Ferguson says in spite of the spike in mass shootings, violence is generally down in the United States, “and it decreased during the video game era.”
