No Video Games Do Not Cause Gun Violence

The Media is blaming video games for something they actually are partially responsible for, and the GOP is using video games as a scape goat considering their hateful rhetoric has been mentioned by multiple shooters over for the past year.

The original “culprit” they blamed in the 90’s. So scary.

Our findings consistently suggest that media coverage systematically causes future mass shootings. These findings are consistent when accounting for weekday- and month-fixed effects, time trends, as well as characteristics of preceding mass shootings. A range of robustness checks support these conclusions. Using our benchmark estimation, a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that 58 percent of all mass shootings between January 1, 2013 and June 23, 2016 are explainable by news coverage. In terms of timeframes, news coverage seems to systematically raise the number of mass shootings in the following four to ten days and the effect reverts back to statistical insignificance after approximately 12 days.

The shooter didn’t mention video games in his manifesto, just a bunch of GOP talking points.

There is no correlation between video games and violence.

Peddling violence for profit is what the politicains and news media do, not what video game companies do.

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Media critique and memes. Writing about rhetoric and society. MA in Communication They/He

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Aaron J. Alford

Media critique and memes. Writing about rhetoric and society. MA in Communication They/He