In the minutes before opening fire in El Paso, launching an attack that left 22 people dead and many wounded, the alleged gunman is believed to have published a four-page manifesto in which he railed against immigrants in white supremacist language.
A different detail caught the eye of Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor. “He talks about living out his super soldier fantasy on Call of Duty,” he told Fox News.
President Trump picked up the theme as he addressed the nation on Monday, promising to take action against what he described as “gruesome and grisly” video games.
“It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence,” he said. “We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately.”
But the focus on video games was immediately criticized by political opponents, who accused the president of trying to deflect calls for gun control.
Hillary Clinton tweeted, “People suffer from mental illness in every other country on earth; people play video games in virtually every other country on earth. The difference is the guns.”
The attacks brought fresh scrutiny of research into links between mass atrocities and video games, and whether tighter regulations might prevent murders.
The White House failed to respond to requests for further details on its policy proposals. Even so, the president’s comments sent games’ publishers into a stock market skid. The share price of Electronic Arts dropped 4%, Zynga fell 5%, while Activision, which publishes the Call of Duty series, saw its value plunge more than 6% Tuesday.
Similar questions have arisen in the wake of previous shootings, going all the way back to the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. The two teenage gunmen were reported to be obsessed with the first-person shooter game Doom.
The same claims were repeated last year after the Parkland, Florida attack when the killer, reportedly another Call of Duty fan, was described as being “prepared to pick off students like it’s a video game.”
A string of similar connections has built a powerful image of adolescent gunmen whose grasp of reality has been undermined by hours in front of pixel-rich images of graphic violence.
This time around, Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner, was among those to point out that mass shootings may be more than just an issue of guns. “It is not healthy to have these games teaching kids that, you know, this dispassionate notion that you can shoot somebody and just, you know, sort of blow their brains out,” he told CNN.
The view is backed by the American Psychological Association. Its 2015 review of existing studies concluded, “The link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and best established.”
But the American Psychological Association said more research is needed before it is possible to say that games were a cause of criminal violence, which is influenced by multiple factors.
In some of the most recent research, a team in Oxford, England, found no correlation between playing video games and aggressive behavior in teenagers. Instead, confirmation bias had a role in pushing observers to conclusions when shooters later turned out to be fond of computer games.
“The idea that violent video games drive real-world aggression is a popular one, but it hasn’t tested very well over time,” said Professor Andrew Przybylski, director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, at the time.
The question has been tested at the Supreme Court, where justices concluded video games were protected by the First Amendment. In 2011, they ruled that blocking the sales of violent video games to children was unconstitutional and dismissed the evidence of a risk.
“Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively,” the ruling stated.
Chris Ferguson, professor of psychology at Stetson University, said he was stunned to hear the president return to the theme despite what he said was a consensus among researchers that there was no link.
“We’ve been through this,” he said. “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
If anything, he added, violent crime among young people had declined during the video game boom. Instead, he said that blaming new technologies, from the radio to the internet, for social ills was a common strategy deployed by all sides.
“There’s an audience for this,” he said. “It’s older people who vote more than young people. They suck up this narrative, which is useful for politicians … until the old people die and the politicians move on to whatever the new technology is.”
At a time when the debate over gun control is so febrile, it offers a distraction.
“It makes politicians look like they are doing something when they are not, and allows them to move the conversation on from things they don’t want to talk about,” he said.
Tackling computer games come with fewer political costs, said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, than trying to tackle family breakdowns, abuse at home, and easy access to weapons, along with the politically charged issue of clamping down on social media platforms such as 8chan — the message board used by the alleged gunman to post his manifesto.
“The problem with politicians is that they offer solutions that are not actually going to fix the problem,” he said.
