After Newtown Massacre, Video Games Legislation Beats Gun Control Bills To Congress

This morning, Sen. Jay Rockefeller introduced legislation in the Senate “to arrange for the National Academy of Sciences to study the impact of violent video games and violent programming on children.” It’s depressing to see lawmakers rushing after diversions in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, when the conversations we ought to be having should be about gun control and mental health treatment, among other structural factors. And it’s even worse when you consider that Rockefeller’s wholly redundant bill has hit the floor of Congress before any gun legislation was introduced.

Part of what makes Rockefeller’s request that the National Academy study video game violence so frustrating to watch is that the Academy’s done just this before. The 1999 Missing, Exploited, and Runaway Children Protection Act included a provision that had the Secretary of Education contract the Academy to study the origins of school violence, including “the impact of cultural influences and exposure to the media, video games, and the Internet.” Katherine Newman, the Johns Hopkins professor who lead up that team, wrote in Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings, her later book on the subject, that “Millions of young people play video games full of fistfights, blazing guns, and body slams. Bodies litter the floor in many of our most popular films. Yet only a minuscule fraction of the consumers become violent. Hence, if there is an effect, children are not all equally susceptible to it.” In other words, finding out why a very small number of consumers are overly influenced by popular culture may be more useful than trying to measure the uneven and diffuse influence of movies, television shows, and games.

Gun Lobby has engaged their deflector shields!!!