In the wake of a shooting that left at least 17 dead on Wednesday in a high school outside Boca Raton, Florida, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin (R) focused on violent video games as part of a “culture of death that is being celebrated” and leading to these kinds of incidents.
“There are video games that, yes, are listed for mature audiences, but kids play them and everybody knows it, and there’s nothing to prevent the child from playing them,” Bevin said in an interview on WHAS’ Leland Conway show Thursday morning. “They celebrate the slaughtering of people. There are games that literally replicate and give people the ability to score points for doing the very same thing that these students are doing inside of schools, where you get extra points for finishing someone off who’s lying there begging for their life.”
“These are quote-unquote video games, and they’re forced down our throats under the guise of protected speech,” Conway continued, seemingly referring to a 2011 Supreme Court decision that prevents content-based restrictions on games. “It’s garbage. It’s the same as pornography. They have desensitized people to the value of human life, to the dignity of women, to the dignity of human decency. We’re reaping what we’ve sown here.”
When Conway asked if Bevin was interested in a ban on these types of games or merely more parental oversight of children’s access, Bevin asked for media producers to take some responsibility for their works. “I think we need to start by having an honest question about what value any of these things add,” he said. “Why do we need a video game, for example, that encourages people to kill people. Whether it’s lyrics, whether it’s TV shows, whether it’s movies, I’m asking the producers of these products, these video games and these movies, ask yourselves what redemptive value, other than shock value, other than the hope you’ll make a couple of bucks off it. At what price? At what price?”
Video games and other cultural products were part of a long list of causes Bevin suggested for the increase in school shootings and the nation’s loss of its “moral compass.” Parents, churches, and schools have all abdicated their responsibility to “hold children to task,” he said, leading kids to “make their own rules without fear of consequences.” He also made brief reference to the prevalence of medications and their harmful side effects as a potential cause.
Bevin recalled that children used to regularly bring guns to school after Christmas when he was a child but said it’s changes to society that have led to those children using those guns in schools today. “We as adults have to stop acting like children ourselves. We need to step up and say that right is right and wrong is wrong.”
This isn’t the first time Bevin has cited video games as a partial cause of school violence. In a Facebook video posted days after a January school shooting in Benton, Kentucky, Bevin included video games as part of the entertainment industry “filth” that is “desensitizing young people to the actual tragic reality and permanency of death.”
Games have been a favored explanation for school shootings and other youth violence among many commentators at least since the shooters in the 1999 Columbine massacre were revealed to be fans of Doom. Some media reports focused on the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter’s love of Counter-Strike, and a Norwegian mass shooter claimed at his trial that he had trained for his rampage using Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
Florida lawyer Jack Thompson was one of the loudest proponents of the link between video games and real-world violence for years before he was disbarred in disgrace in 2008. But violent video games as a potential cause of real shootings is an idea that has been floated in some form by everyone from the NRA to President Obama over the years.
International comparisons of per capita spending on violent games and gun-related murders show a negative correlation between the two. And meta-analyses of video game violence studies have found no real link between imaginary on-screen violence and actual aggressive behavior.
Long-term longitudinal studies of children from the ’90s show only very minor increase in behavioral problems for children who played violent video games. But other research has shown that violent video game players actually do become desensitized to violence, at least in the short term.
Science aside, video games and other violent media will likely be a focus for many politicians and commentators looking for an explanation for this latest bout of violence in the coming days. International statistical comparisons, though, suggest that the prevalence of guns in the United States is more closely correlated with these kinds of mass shootings.
READ MORE: What Causes School Shootings and How to Stop Them
