Recently, the NRA blamed violent video games and other media for school shootings. “Guns don’t kill people," the NRA's Wayne LaPierre said at a news conference. "Video games, the media and Obama’s budget kill people.”

Now, I fall into the opposite camp. I'd argue that violent video games do not in any way cause real world violence. Some games are tasteless and unthinking in their violence, and sometimes that goes too far in my opinion; but even then, I believe this is a shortcoming in the art rather than the harbinger of violent behavior.

On the other hand, violent people or disturbed young people with violent inclinations may gravitate toward violent video games and other violent media. Thus it's really no surprise when a school shooter also played violent video games; likewise it's no surprise that millions of other young people play those same games without ever shooting a gun at all in real life.

Of course, for those who don't play video games this can be a less graspable concept. “The violence in the entertainment culture — particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, et cetera — does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent,” Sen. Joe Lieberman said after the Newtown shootings.

Lieberman, remember, was a strong supporter of several recent wars in which countless real people---both American and foreign---have died. He also supports the continued drone warfare in Afghanistan in which untold innocents, including children, are killed on a regular basis.

But of course, to Mr. Lieberman, it's not our violent foreign policy that causes young people to be violent, it's the video games, the rock and roll, the counter-culture, the comic books. Whatever cultural bogey men we can conjure up at the moment.

Not to be left out of the fray, Donald Trump tweeted “Video game violence & glorification must be stopped — it is creating monsters!” Trump then demanded to see the birth certificates of all the violent video games supposedly made here in the United States.

Studies, of course, will tell you whatever you want to hear. Smart people on both sides of the debate will come armed with all the relevant data points.

“I point the finger unreservedly at the entertainment industry, which has spawned and cultivated gaming that by design is increasingly real, geared to action as the shooter’s point of view, increasingly dehumanizes victims, and increasingly rewards players by how many they kill,” said forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner recently. As chairman of the Forensic Panel, Welner's statement isn't exactly the rambling tweet of a raving prima donna. He's the sort of authority one could appeal to if one wanted rhetorical oomph on their side.

Welner could point to studies like this one (PDF) from Iowa State Professor Craig A. Anderson suggesting "that violent video games increase aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, and aggressive behaviors and decrease empathic feelings and prosocial behaviors.”

Of course, I could point to several other studies contradicting these results; or I could point out that even regardless of the rise in school shootings, violent crime in America has decreased steadily as video game consumption has increased (though our firearm deaths outstrip those of other developed nations by orders of magnitude.)

Furthermore, violent crime in other industrialized nations has not increased as more and more young people play video games. Nor do we see the same type of frequent mass shootings in other wealthy countries as we see in the United States, even though the citizens of those countries consume the exact same violent media and play the same monster-creating games.

Nathan Grayson has a very thoughtful piece on video game violence over at Rock Paper Shotgun suggesting that the trick for both gamers and game-makers is to be more aware of the violence we encounter (or create) in video games.

"I don’t think gaming causes violence," writes Grayson, "but it would be impossible for frequent immersion in violent scenarios – fictional or not – to not have some kind of effect on us. We’re humans. We’re molded by our environment. Between games and movies and TV and commercials and billboards and everything else, Western (and especially American) culture treats violence like it’s perfectly normal. It’s just… there. All the time."

This dovetails a bit with my piece on video games and parenting in which I argue that parents, not the government, have a responsibility to censor the types of games their children encounter and to talk about games and other media with their children (and consume the media their children consume, too!) This is all part of the importance of being aware.

“Parents who care about the matter can readily evaluate the games their children bring home,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote when the Supreme Court deemed California's video game censorship bill unconstitutional. “Filling the remaining modest gap in concerned-parents’ control can hardly be a compelling state interest.”

I rarely agree with Scalia, but as they say, even a stopped clock's right twice a day. And I tend to agree with Grayson quite a bit, but his piece, no matter how thought-provoking, still leaves me feeling ambivalent.

Why, for instance, does Grayson call out American culture especially?

This is what puzzles me most about this conversation. I agree with Nathan---we should be more aware and we should demand better writing from our video games that makes violence more meaningful. But we play the same games as the Brits or the Germans or the Japanese (well, mostly the same games anyways) and yet here we are, always waiting for the next horror story to emerge.

Is it the fact that we have so many guns? Is it because of our aggressive foreign policy? Is it our car culture with our long commutes and atomized suburban lifestyle? Is it our ethos of mindless individualism? Is it our lack of a comprehensive healthcare policy that fails to take mental health issues seriously? Where should we point the finger?

Because the problem with pointing it at violent film and violent video games is that we can control for that on a global scale. And when we do we see that this problem is largely an American one and is largely not an issue with crime. Violent crime has fallen steadily even as mass shootings have increased. Given the number of gamers out there, one would suspect violent crime to increase dramatically along with the increase in gaming.

Awareness is still key. We should demand more from our video games, even if the violence therein is often little more than a frenetic sort of puzzle-solving, and we should demand more from those who make our games in the first place, as well as from gamers whose often overly knee-jerk reaction to this sort of thing only helps to make level-headed conversation impossible.

Somewhere between heat and light there is a balance, whether or not there are any good answers.

(Top image via.)

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