(Newswire.net— February 21, 2018) —
The shooter that killed 17 and wounded a dozen more students at Parkland’s high school, Nikolas Cruz, allegedly played violent video games for 15 hours straight.
“It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day,” is what Cruz’s neighbor told Miami Herald.
Amid the Majory Stoneman Douglas High School attack, videogame critics once again pointed to violent video games as a possible cause for the shooting. According to the critics, games numb teenagers to the point that they can’t differentiate fiction from reality.
According to Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, the “nation’s cultural fabric” has been ripped and violent video games are to blame. Gov. Bevin also blamed TV shows and music which “celebrate the culture of death.”
Other voices can be heard blaming videogames for inciting violence among teenagers and some researchers have cited desensitization to violence as the causing factor of aggression that derives from violent videogames. However, the results showed no apparent relationship between videogames and violent behavior.
“All we can really say for sure is that there does not appear to be a link at this time between violent video games and school shootings,” said Villanova University psychologist and researcher Patrick Markey.
Debunking allegations that there is a correlation between videogames and violence Markey stressed that “if there is a link, it goes in the opposite direction.”
Few studies indeed showed that playing violent videogames makes players temporarily more aggressive, but not to the point that they would actually grab a gun and shoot random people.
Other research has shown that countries that spend the most per-capita on video games have lower gun-related murder rates than the USA, which has a gun-related murder rate of about 20 times larger than the average statistics for virtually every other nation.
Other nations, however, have strict gun and rifle sales laws and no country in the world has a cult of weaponry so developed as in the US. Blaming videogames for violent behavior of teenagers instead of the fact that there is a variety of weapons available to them, including rapid fire assault machineguns is the peak of hypocrisy, according to gun control advocates.
In the wake of the Florida school shooting, President Donald Trump has signed a memo directing the Justice Department to outlaw bump stock devices on guns. The device enables more rapid but less accurate firing of the weapon. Such a device has been found in the shooter’s apartment.