See if you can tell what’s missing from this discussion.
While Democrats clamored for stricter gun regulations and Gov. Greg Abbott discussed measures to tighten school security following Friday’s mass shooting at Santa Fe High School, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick set his sights on another target: the makers of violent films and video games.
Patrick spent the weekend on national television talking about what was to blame for the tragedy in southeast Texas that left 10 people dead, the latest in a spate of mass shootings across the country. It wasn’t the ready availability of guns in this country, Patrick said. Instead, the bloodshed was the result of a “violent culture where we’ve devalued life,” Patrick told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“We have devalued life, whether it’s through abortion, whether it’s the breakup of families, through violent movies and particularly violent video games, which now outsell movies and music,” he said. “Psychologists and psychiatrists will tell you that students are desensitized to violence, have lost empathy for their victims by watching hours and hours of violent video games.”
But many of those games are at least partially produced in Texas — including “Prey,” a first-person shooter horror game rated for mature players age 17 or older, and “Doom,” another mature-rated first-person shooter that depicts “mutilated corpses with exposed organs/viscera strewn in the environment,” according to the Entertainment Software Rating Board. And the state government has given millions of dollars in incentives to some of their creators.
Patrick has supported those state-funded incentive payments to lure film, television and video game creators to Texas, but on Wednesday he said those payments should be barred from certain projects or he would withdraw his support for the incentives program.
“The lieutenant governor does not support using state taxpayer dollars to make violent films or video games that are harmful to our children,” spokesman Alejandro Garcia said in an email, noting the Texas Film Commission may decide which projects get reimbursed. “If this is the direction they are going, the lieutenant governor will not support their funding requests in the future.”
Hey, you want to cut the film incentive fund, I’m fine with that, and I bet you could get a majority in the Lege for it. But that’s not what Patrick is proposing here – he’s saying that only films and video games that meet his standard for artistic merit should be eligible for those funds. Putting aside the ridiculousness of Dan Patrick as the official state movie and video game critic, there’s also the fact that the idea that violent films and video games lead to gun violence is even more ridiculous.
Pretty much everything Patrick said here is wrong. He also went on to blame abortions and broken homes and suggest arming teachers, but I’ll stick to his claims about video games.
Here are the facts. The evidence is abundantly clear at this point: Violent video games do not cause violence.
Longitudinal studies of youth have not found evidence that early game playing is associated with later violence, decreased empathy or conduct problems. In fact, the release of popular violent video games like “Grand Theft Auto” are associated with immediate declines in societal violence, and long-term relationships show that increased violent game consumption is associated with reduced youth violence — and we have to remember that youth violence is down by more than 80 percent from 25 years ago.
Also, playing games like “Grand Theft Auto” does not appear to decreaseempathy toward women. Internationally, the countries that consume the most video games per capita are among the least violent.
And analyses of school shooters have found that they appear to consume unusually low levels of violent media for males their age.
Villanova University professor Patrick Markey and I discuss much of this in our book “Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong.”We note that, contrary to the lieutenant governor’s claims, most psychologists who study the issue do not link violent media to violence in society.
Indeed, across studies, only about 10 percent to 30 percent of scholars agree with him, making it a decidedly minority view. Just this year, the Media Psychology and Technology Division of the American Psychological Association (APA) released a policy statement asking politicians to stop making exactly the kinds of claims Patrick made about video games and violence.
Dan Patrick has a long record of not being interested in anything that doesn’t further his own political agenda. Nothing will change until Dan Patrick and others like him are voted out of office.
The elephant in the room gets bigger and bigger.