Don’t Ban Guns, Ban Video Games

What did the Parkland school shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter, one of the Columbine shooters, the Buffalo shooter and the Uvalde shooter, all have in common?

They were all immersed and likely addicted to video games.

“He was definitely into video games – shooter games,” a classmate observed about the grocery-store mass murderer in Buffalo.

Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz reportedly had a video game obsession. His neighbor told the Miami Herald he would play for up to 15 hours a day.

Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza also enjoyed shooter games.

Numerous times prior to the Columbine shooting in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been banned from playing video games, leading them to exhibit violent and irrational behavior; but with their outstanding academic performance and lack of signs of emotional disturbance, the families didn’t delve deeper into that behavior.

Harris has been said to have been addicted to the game Doom, a science fiction / horror first-person shooter video game. Those who played Doom over the Internet with Harris say that he created a game level based on Columbine High School’s floor plan. His design was nearly an exact replica.

In 2012, James Holmes entered a theater in Aurora, Colorado and killed twelve people in cold blood, wounding seventy more. James Holmes was reportedly obsessed with video games.

In 2007, when 16-year-old Daniel Petric’s parents banned Daniel from playing the video game Halo 3 after he became so obsessed with it that he would play up to 18 hours a day, Daniel decided to “get even.” He shot both his parents, killing his mother and critically wounding his father.

Many have observed that while gun laws in the 1970’s and 1980’s were pretty loose, there were not nearly as many mass shootings as there are these days.

The Wall Street Journal said, “Firearm laws were few and weak before the 1970s. Yet only in recent decades have young men entered schools and supermarkets for the purpose of killing the innocent. That a teenager could look at a nine-year-old, aim a gun, and pull the trigger signals some larger social and cultural breakdown.”

While video games don’t tell the entire story, they certainly would explain a lot. Sure, millions of people can play video games and not shoot people. However if someone is already unhealthy and unstable, it is possible that video games are the trigger that puts them over the edge. Even Donald Trump in 2012 tweeted that “video game violence” is “creating monsters.”

The military uses video games for training. It has been encouraging soldiers to partake in the thrill of violent games as a way to continue combat training, even when not on active duty.

An Iraq War veteran described “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” and “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” as “the ultimate first-person shooter experiences ever” and “intensive and highly realistic approaches to tactical combat. The choice of attacking with stealth or unleashing an all-out frontal assault full of mayhem is yours. It’s violent, it’s chaotic, it’s beautiful.”

Video game playing is up 14% over its already-high levels in 2020. Binge gaming has also increased by 13% since 2020. A third of gamers say that they sometimes play for five hours in a row, which further desensitizes them to the depravity of killing someone.

Anecdotally, we have noticed that even healthy children tend to become extremely edgy and intense following a long video game session.

Now the obvious question is, why don’t other countries where people play the same video games also have a disproportionate number of mass shootings?

The answer may be simple. The countries that come close to the US in terms of video game obsession are Asian countries such as China, Japan and South Korea. Those countries have an extremely different culture, where people are very disciplined and follow the law. It is not possible to compare a country where people are conditioned to behave like robots and follow authority in lock-step, with the United States where the culture encourages people to behave as they want and defy authority.

Are video games the solution to the puzzle of mass shootings? It’s impossible to know for sure, however there is ample evidence of a link, and in order for politicians to tackle this horrific crisis, it’s worthwhile to invest in serious research on the subject.