A massacre at a U.S. Navy shipyard in Washington, D.C., left 12 deadMonday. Today, as the nation once again looks for answers following a shooting rampage, some are renewing their calls for gun control.
But that’s not what they’re doing on Fox News. On that network’s morning show Fox & Friends, the hosts pointed to video games as a potential “strong link” leading to mass shootings, and one host called for government oversight of gamers, as first spotted by Rawstory.
Cohost Brian Kilmead argued we shouldn’t focus on gun control because the alleged shooter, 34-year-old Aaron Alexis, had a history of drinking, video games, and “a few shooting instances.”
“He’s got a friend that says [Alexis] had an obsession with video games,” Kilmead said. “His friend would come over and [Alexis] would be playing these video games for so long — these shooting video games — that we’d have to give him dinner. We’d feed him while he continues to stay on them.”
This prompted Elisabeth Hasselbeck to ask if some people, with fragile mental states, are more susceptible to a negative reaction from playing violent video games.
“Is there a link between a certain age group of men — 20-to-34 year-old men — that are playing these games and their violent actions. We’ve yet to find out.”
That didn’t stop the show from presenting a list of mass shooters who played video games. The list included Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dyland Klebold, The Dark Knight Rises movie-theater shooter James Holmes, and Norwegian shooter Anders Breivik. Of course, that doesn’t prove causation. I’m sure I could find a list of gamers that tragically end up interning for cable news. Is there a link? We’ve yet to find out.
That lack of evidence didn’t stop Hasselbeck from presenting her solution to the problem as she perceives it. The host suggested something that sounds very similar to a national gun registry but for gamers.
“What about frequency testing? How often has this game been played? And I’m not one to say get in there and monitor everything,” she said. “But if this is indeed a strong link to mass killings, then why aren’t we looking at frequency of purchases per person and how often they’re playing. Maybe they timeout after a certain hour.”
Check out the video below: