Cause and Effect: Violent Games

Normally the American Humanist Association's magazine is smarter than this, but I suppose everyone makes mistakes sometimes. The current edition put out an article connecting some of our recent mass shootings to violent video games and the military's use of such things as recruiting and training tools.

As I understand the article's point, it points to the military's use of such things for training and recruitment to underscore how realistic the games are and how they can be used to train people how to kill. It stops short of calling for bans, but does fairly clearly argue that the US should pay more attention to obsessions with gaming and treat it as an illness to be corrected.

I don't think this is correctly understanding the cause and effect relationship here, though.

A large part of the reason why is that the two mass shooters the article cites are far from the only obsessive gamers in the world; there are many others that are avid fans of realistic first person shooters. And yet out of all those people, only this tiny number have a serious problem. I think that says there's more here than just the video games.