An nameless reader shares a report: On the painful event of a mass capturing within the US, it has develop into customary for some politician or pundit to level an accusatory finger at video video games. In late Could, after two such assaults — in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, it was Texas Senator Ted Cruz. These tragedies, he mentioned in a speech at a Nationwide Rifle Affiliation conference, had been a mirror of our tradition, and particularly, the place our tradition is failing. Along with “damaged households” and “declining church attendance,” he mentioned, “desensitizing the act of homicide in video video games” has contributed to the epidemic of mass shootings.
What shocked me wasn’t what Cruz mentioned. It was how little traction it obtained within the mainstream media. A Fox Information host requested his visitor, Arizona State College legal justice professor Bernard Zapor, whether or not violent video video games’ heightened realism contributed to a rise in mass homicides. Zapor dodged, as an alternative citing the dissolution of group bonds. Most protection of Cruz’s feedback (and Fox’s interview) had been within the service of invalidating the query itself: Many years of analysis have proven no connection between enjoying violent video video games and committing violent acts. For greater than 20 years years, the concept that video video games like Doom one way or the other spurred these heinous shootings held sway in fashionable tradition. Within the ’90s, “There was actually no pushback,” mentioned Chris Ferguson, Stetson College’s co-chair of psychology, who has studied violent video video games’ affect on players for about 20 years.
