Americans are addicted to guns, and like most junkies, they’ll blame anything but guns for the damage caused by their beloved death machines. This explains the sadly predictable response from gun lovers after a white supremacist gunman murdered 10 people in Buffalo. (The shooter is 18, so he was legally able to buy a gun but not a beer.)
GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene bemoaned the “severe mental health crisis” in America that presumably led to the shooting. She tweeted, "Instead of investing billions in foreign countries, we should only be investing in our own people and our own problems.” So, she responds to a racist murder spree with more of her racist xenophobia. I’m too old and depressed for this level of irony.
This morning, Greene replied to a tweet where the killer said he chose Buffalo because of its relatively large Black population. She ignored his stated racial animus, and instead focused on his claim that he chose New York because of its gun control laws. She wrote, "When people can’t carry, they are defenseless.” This is dumb and offensive even for Greene. Retired police officer Aaron Salter, who worked security, was armed, but firing at the shooter didn’t work because he was wearing body armor. The shooter then killed Salter. The average person isn’t going to the grocery store dressed for combat. You’re better off using Instacart and rolling the dice on bad produce picks.
Deranged people have absurdly easy access to guns. That’s the problem, but we still get the most ridiculous deflections. Right-wing media quickly dusted off its favorite gun violence scapegoat, video games.
Fox host: It seems like these [shootings] have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and so violentpic.twitter.com/wil6FRPoir— nikki mccann ram\u00edrez (@nikki mccann ram\u00edrez) 1652655640
Sunday, Fox News anchor Jon Scott wondered what went through the mind of the 18-year-old shooter, who had “his whole life in front of him, but now his life is essentially over” because of how he murdered all those Black people, whose lives are literally over. It’s kinda early to start centering the white supremacist but this is Fox News.
SCOTT: It seems like these things have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and violent.
Correlation is not causation, asshole.
Scott further pondered if video games “desensitized” people to the impact of violence. His guest blamed the decline of the family unit. Meanwhile, both these fools were on a network that has arguably desensitized viewers to overtly racist rhetoric.
This wasn’t Scott’s first bullshit rodeo. He also linked video games, without a shred of evidence, to the racially motivated mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.
Scott wonders if these guys "raised on a diet of violent video games—if they actually start pulling the trigger of a real weapon and they see real death and they find it's not as satisfying as it was when they're playing on a television screen." He wonders out loud if this is why the alleged shooter, Patrick Crusius, stopped shooting.
The National Rifle Association has also grossly tried to blame fake violence for causing the real violence it enables. Look, I’d probably suggested pulling from shelves any KKK-approved Great Replacement Theory video games where white-only avatars murder 72-year-old Black grandmothers. However, studies consistently show that playing violent video games doesn’t lead to violent behavior. It’s the prevalence of guns that leads to gun violence. In Japan, people play more video games than their American counterparts, but the nation has 96 times fewer gun homicides. However, Japan has stricter gun control laws and doesn’t waste time chasing down strawmen.
I admit I prefer the First Amendment to the Second, but it’s not like we'll ever make racists go away. We can make it harder for them to kill us.
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Stephen Robinson is a writer and social kibbitzer based in Portland, Oregon. He writes make believe for Cafe Nordo, an immersive theatre space in Seattle. Once, he wrote a novel called “Mahogany Slade,” which you should read or at least buy. He's also on the board of the Portland Playhouse theatre. His son describes him as a “play typer guy."
