In the wake of multiple mass shootings in a 24-hour period, President Donald Trump blamed a familiar culprit: violent video games. In doing so, Trump - and a chorus of increasingly strange bedfellows, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and presidential hopeful Joe Biden - joins a decades-long effort to pin acts of violence on interactive media, even as research shows only tenuous connections between virtual and real-life violence.
Since their inception, video games have served as a source of moral panic and a convenient scapegoat for acts of spectacular violence. But placing the blame on video games only allows us to avoid reckoning with the deeper roots of violence and grappling with a broken culture.