As Team Trump flails around in an attempt to be seen as doing a still-nebulous something about our nation's ongoing epidemic of gun violence, we still face the same insurmountable problem as always: These are some of the stupidest people in public life. We are used to b-tier Republican functionaries advancing theories on how the nation's gun murders can be blamed on every other aspect of American culture than the "gun" part, but either some idiot in the White House is genuinely bringing back the hoary "it must be the violence in video games" theory and peddling it to Trump or Donald has been watching news programs from two decades back.
Because while there's definitive evidence that people who murder other people with guns were able to do so because they had guns, researchers have yet to find any evidence that they were spurred to murder by Fallout: New Vegas or the like. And they have looked.
Patrick Markey, a psychology professor at Villanova University who focuses on video games, found in his research that men who commit severe acts of violence actually play violent video games less than the average male. About 20 percent were interested in violent video games, compared with 70 percent of the general population, he explained in his 2017 book “Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong.”
You could explain the White House gravitation toward “those kids today and their violent video games” as mere effort at distraction, and perhaps it is, but it's also got two scoops of “Donald Trump has zero awareness of the world around him and thinks everything he hears is something he himself just invented five minutes ago.”
Trump has suggested rating both games and movies for violence. Such ratings already exist.
Uuuuuuugh. I don't know how the man can turn even the most serious national issues of the day into crayon-book ideas from a crayon-book mind, but he does. Reliably. Always.
The same goes for the genuinely asinine notion of giving teachers guns and, now, tasking them with stopping the school shootings that law enforcement, security guards, school "hardening," bulletproof backpacks, state legislatures and the pathetic, pathetic United States Congress have not been able to stop. This is not meant to stop school shootings. It is merely meant to provide another future scapegoat, when public teachers making near-poverty-level wages fail to stop the next shooter after being publicly tasked by the nation's most prominent cowards with doing so, so that we do not have to talk about the guns.
There's an unending list of reasons why this proposal is stupid. It is so stupid that it's insulting for anyone in the country to be treating it as not stupid. It's not "controversial," it's not "conservative," it's not "innovative," it's just stupid. The people who propose it are stupid, the people who write it up as a sincere proposal rather than a scam by politicians to dodge more consequential actions are stupid, the gun-toters who are demanding it because they earnestly believe Ms. Simmons and her fourth period history class can Rambo up an AR-15 wielding killer and his hundred rounds of ammunition are stupid and should move themselves into a war zone where they can try their hand at such aspirational acts of heroism themselves rather than involving the rest of us.
We really need to get over this notion that the politicians doing the bidding of the National Rifle Association and their club of would-be "good" murderers are anything but cowardly. The president, though, is as dumb as a brick. If he pipes up tomorrow demanding a new video game rating system that just happens to look like the one already on every damn box, not a single one of us will be surprised.