Video-Game Violence Is Now a Partisan Issue

Updated at 1:48 p.m. on August 5, 2019.

In the two decades since Columbine, video games have taken a lot of the blame for mass shootings. The evidence has never supported this conclusion, and researchers have become only more certain that media don’t cause violence, or even aggression. Nevertheless, the idea persists. Just hours after a horrifying shooting—including the one that left 22 people dead in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday—someone will blame video games.

But in the past two years, something has changed. Games have shifted from a broad cultural enemy—a gory medium that all types of people might hold responsible for social disgrace—to a political tool. Video-game violence was once a bipartisan worry. Now it’s a largely Republican talking point, deployed for tactical political gain to great effect.

[Read: Why video games don’t correlate to gun violence]

Before the 2000s, research on the effects of video-game violence on players amounted to a couple dozen studies, tops, estimates Christopher J. Ferguson, a Stetson University psychologist whose work disproves causal connections between video games and violent acts. At that time, the “violent” video games chosen for study were far more rudimentary than today’s games. They included titles such as Zaxxon and Pac-Man—arcade and computer games that