President Donald Trump has partly directed blame toward violent video games for two mass shootings that left 31 people dead over the weekend, saying that the “glorification of violence” must stop.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Aug. 5, Trump denounced the mass slayings, hate crimes, and white supremacy as he addressed the nation about the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which occurred within 13 hours of each other.
“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” Trump said. “This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.”
“We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately. Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life. That’s what we have to do,” he added.
This is not the first time Trump has raised concerns about the relationship between violent video games and the likelihood of individuals to commit violent acts.
Following the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting that left 17 people dead, Trump held a roundtable discussion with several video game industry leaders and lawmakers in order to find possible solutions to combat violence in schools.
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, shared similar sentiments, condemning the incidents over the weekend as “evil.”
Responding to McCarthy, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) disputed his claim and instead placed the blame of the shootings on white supremacy.
Nexus Between Video Games, Gun Violence
Trump’s recent comments have added fuel to the debate over possible links between gun violence and video games. The president and other critics have long believed that violence in movies and video games can play a role in “shaping young people’s thoughts” and want industry leaders to address the issue.In one review of more than 1,000 studies, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association declared in a summary of their findings that evidence points “overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children.
Professor Jay Hull, from Dartmouth College’s Psychological and Brain Sciences department, told The Epoch Times that his team’s analysis of 24 studies, which tracked more than 17,000 people for periods of three months to as long as four years, found an association between playing violent video games and increases in physical aggression over time. The research, which was co-authored by two other researchers and published in October 2018, studied people in samples with the average age varying from 9 to 19 years old.
“We feel like we have pretty solid ground to say that, yeah, these kinds of games are associated with increased aggression,” he said.
“Longitudinal studies measure something at one point in time and then check at a different point in time later on to see the changes in aggression and to see if game playing at time one is predictive of the amount of change over time that you see,” he added. ”This is not simply a correlation. It’s not simply saying: Oh, there’s a correlation between them. It’s evidence that, in fact, change over time in aggression, is associated with playing these games.”
In another study, published in March, a University of Buffalo professor found that exposure to video games itself may not create aggressive behavior but may trigger violent acts in people who already have a predisposition toward violence.
