Republican officials point to video games after El Paso mass shooting
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Republican officials point to video games after El Paso mass shooting
Kadia Tubman, Yahoo News 17 hours ago
After a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, left 20 people dead, Republican officials partially blamed the attacks of terror on violent video games.
“How long are we going to let, for example, and ignore at the federal level particularly, where they can do something about the video game industry,” Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick said Sunday on “Fox & Friends,” condemning the attack as “evil.”
The shooting occurred Saturday morning, when a gunman identified as Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old from Allen, Texas, opened fire at a packed Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso with an assault rifle, killing 20 people and wounding dozens. Officials on Sunday declared the attack an act of “domestic terrorism."
Another mass shooting occurred early Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, and left 10 people dead, including the suspected gunman. Details are still emerging about both attacks.
A hate-filled “manifesto ,” as police called it, published online before the El Paso shooting, has been linked to Crusius. Although El Paso police authorities have not confirmed if the shooter wrote the 2,300-word anti-immigrant tirade, the police chief there said they are examining it as “a nexus to potential hate crime.”
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. (Photo: Loren Elliott/Getty Images)
On “Fox & Friends,” Patrick noted the document’s apparent reference to the video game “Call of Duty.” (From the document: “Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfill your super soldier COD fantasy. Attack low security targets.”)
“In this manifesto that we believe is from the shooter … he talks about living out his super soldier fantasy on ‘Call of Duty,’” Patrick said.
“We’ve always had guns. We’ve always had evil. But what’s changed where we see this rash of shooting?” he continued, calling violent video games “the common denominator.”
“I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill,” he said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also pointed to violent video games Sunday and said they “may be a place where we could find this ahead of time.”
“The idea of these video games, they dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others,” he said in a Fox News interview. “When you look at these photos of how [the El Paso shooting] took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.”
Similarly, to address gun violence in the U.S. after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, then-President Barack Obama in 2013 urged Congress to support a bill that would give the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention a budget of $10 million to conduct a study on “the effects violent video games have on young minds.”
After the Parkland, Fla., school shooting last year, President Trump met with several video game executives and Republican lawmakers in a private White House meeting to “explore new restrictions on the video game industry, arguing that violent games might have contributed to mass shootings,” the Washington Post reported at the time.
But a study conducted earlier this year by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found no relationship between aggressive behavior in teenagers and the amount of time spent playing violent video games. And nations that consume just as much, if not more, video games than the U.S. experience far lower murder rates .
Other than video games, Patrick also cited “the violence of just bullying people on social media every day” and took issue with the lack of prayers in school.
“Tomorrow we won’t let our kids even pray in our schools,” he said. “We have to look at ourselves as a nation. There are many factors that go into these shootings, many factors. And it’s not a time to politicize, it’s a time to look deep inside of who we are as a country where we no longer salute our flag or throw water on law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidates condemned the El Paso attack as white nationalist terrorism and linked it to Trump’s rhetoric. The so-called manifesto expressed concerns about “losing Texas and a few other states with heavy Hispanic population to the Democrats,” and declared the attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Trump has repeatedly decried migrant caravans from Central America as an “ invasion .”
The four-page screed appeared to draw on the ideology of the “ Great Replacement ,” a theory that dark-skinned people are becoming a majority in Europe, the United States and other white majority countries.
For his part, Trump tweeted that the shooting in El Paso was " an act of cowardice ," saying, “I know that I stand with everyone in this Country to condemn today’s hateful act. There are no reasons or excuses that will ever justify killing innocent people.”
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More bullshit from republicans as usual.
Video games have a long history of being blamed as the cause for stuff like this - but study after study has not found that to be the case. Before video games it was heavy metal music, before that rock & roll music. Even comic books have been blamed.
So... You have some guy sitting on ammo crates in his mom's basement. He's spent all morning trolling 8 chan and newstalkers, complaining about the Mexicans taking all his white girls and his potential job once his unemployment benefits run out. He's tired of trolling now so how about a little grand theft auto? Oh wait... America is so great now and we don't have video games anymore. Dang! He'll just have to play with his gun now. If he gets all the Mexicans maybe a white girl will notice him.
The Moral? Video games save lives.
Just excuses and a deflection away from the real problems. Anything to blame so these hypocrites don't have to work to solve anything while taking a taxpayer salary.
If idiots buy their BS, then they can go on taking lobbyists money and cover up, excuse, or ignore the issues. Cowards every last one of them.
Well, something has changed.
If exposure to a statue of Robert E. Lee causes such mental agitation that it must be removed then its not a stretch to think that video games can cause mental agitation, too. One side's argument is just as chickenshit as the other.
If Democrats have to accept restrictions on video games to get gun control, what's wrong with that? Do Democrats want gun control or not? The pragmatic response to 'video games contribute' is yes. Include restrictions on video games in the gun control legislation and get on with it.
Democrats and Republicans don't give damn. Everyone knows it. They politicize everything just to win elections; not because they give a damn.
Ask yourself why you would build a statue to honor an enemy of the United States? How would you feel about a statue of Osama bin Laden being built with your tax dollars?
You do understand that the 2 things are not related, at all......don't you?
Apparently you do not listen at all then. Democrats call for action after all these mass shootings, Republicans repeat the same tired line of "this is not a good time to discuss it".
And another case of projecting.
I used to think that the confederate statues were no big deal and that we shouldn't forget our history, even the worst parts of it. But then I read an article that said that there are no statues of Hitler or anything commemorating the Third Reich. If anybody shouldn't want to forget their history, I would think it would be the German people.
But they do have the Holocaust memorials as reminders.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - Santayana
Big difference between learning about it in schools, museums, etc, and building statues and honored memorials for them. Our enemies should never be honored, but they should be remembered and learned from.
If you are immersed in violent video games all the time, I think you may start to normalize violence in your mind.
Whether that actually leads to action by such people is unknown.
My belief though is that violent video games are a detriment to society.
One sees far more violence in movies, TV, news, etc than in video games. But no one complains about those things. Video games is not the problem.
"So, okay. The Attorney General says there's too much violence on TV, and that should stop. Even if you took out all the violent shows, you could still see the news. So until mankind is peaceful enough not to have violence on the news, there's no point in taking it out of shows that need it for entertainment value."
Cher from Clueless
I don't think that young woman gets enough credit for her intelligence
It is one of my fav movies.
Yep...I now run up to a car, pull the person out and drive away erratically. Then I stop and jump out, beat up someone and take what little cash they have. Then I pick up a prostitute and my car jumps up and down while my money drains out, so I throw her out. Then I speed along and get into several accidents and notice that there are several stars on me. Start to get chased by the cops. Stop and have a shootout with a couple then notice they have a helicopter. Speed around getting in more accidents until I find a paint shop, spend some money and the car is painted in several seconds. Then I leave and the cops don't recognize me and I am free to do it all over again...
Don't get me started on my proficiency with a grappling hook, but that is a different story.
Here's more republican blame:
Southwest Ohio politician blames shootings on 'drag queen advocates' and open borders
Anything can be an influence, but you still have to make the decision to act on your own, weighing it against knowledge of what's right and what's wrong and the will to do right.
If video games had this power, a hundred million gamers would be out murdering people. But they're not, so it doesn't.
Like serious gamers would peel their butts out of their chairs for anything other than Hot Pockets.
I think this Governor thinks he is living in the 1980's.
Japanese play far more video games than any country on the planet....no mass shootings.
What else ya got trumpy?
I believe that video games are more of an outlet, even an addiction to some, but not a motivator for all that we have seen since Columbine. It is not the video games, or movies. It is a culture of devaluing human beings that are a different color or different religion.
One teeny, tiny problem with this line of argument. Every other advanced nation has the exact same video games, but absolutely no other advanced nation has our gun violence and mass murder problem. On this issue there really is only ONE difference between us and everyone else.