In the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, lawmakers in league with the National Rifle Association’s maximalist position on gun ownership have thrown up all the usual defenses to keep the status quo in effect. Mental health is an oldie but goodie, as well as the fact that the teachers lacked guns (which the gun industry will happily sell to them with the money they don’t have). The Russia investigation got blamed by Trump for apparently preventing the unrelated Miami office from investigating the shooter, in a particularly desperate little tweet. Like the one he put out this past Tuesday.
The words of an innocent man.
But the oldest of all the weak defenses being employed is the scapegoating of violent video games. Trump suggested on Feb. 22nd that violent video games were to blame for the shooting, suggesting a rating system that already exists as a potential salve to the problem of disturbed 19-year-olds buying literal weapons of war and gunning down humans with them.
I’ll grant that he’s a dumb septuagenarian who is extremely slow to catch onto cultural shifts he can’t immediately exploit, and can’t be asked to know exactly what’s en vogue within the relatively young medium now that he’s the alleged Leader of The Free World. But he has to at least grasp that video games don’t have a definitive one-to-one link to violent behavior, especially given the fact that we’re the only country where mass shootings happen all the time.
Given this and other inane proposals like arming underpaid teachers in an effort to turn that VR parody of American gun fetishism into real life, I’m reasonably certain Trump and a large contingent of GOP lawmakers are attempting to run out the clock on this issue. We’ve moved on with our lives before, so why would this time be any different?
Logan Graham is a senior studying media arts with a focus in games and animation at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. What are your thoughts? Let Logan know by emailing him at lg261813@ohio.edu.
