RFK Junior Says Mass Shootings Are Being Caused by Video Games

America’s health crank in chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr is promising to unearth the root cause of the deadly mass shootings gripping our country. His absurd conclusion? Video games, a long-debunked scapegoat for public violence in America.

During a press briefing to discuss his “Make America Healthy Again” commission’s latest report on Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services secretary speculated about what caused a “sudden onset” of gun violence that kicked off in the 1990s. That’s when he started throwing out a scattershot farrago of non-firearm related culprits.

“One is the dependence on psychiatric drugs,” RFK said, “which in our country is unlike any other country in the world.”

“There could be connections with video games, with social media,” he mused.

The 71-year-old Kennedy scion then revealed that the National Institutes of Health have “initiated” studies to investigate a supposed correlation between “overmedicating our kids” and gun violence.

The cause has to be something other than guns, according to Kennedy, because “we had lots of guns when we were kids. We had gun clubs at our school!”

Video games have long been a bogeyman for out of touch parents and lawmakers to blame for an uptick in gun violence. Though everything that takes place in them is entirely imaginary, these interactive escapist fantasies reward kids for carrying out violent behavior, the thinking goes, which carries over into the real world. Also, tons of kids play them.

But a link between gun violence and video games has never been convincingly demonstrated, despite extensive research in the area. A 2020 report from the American Psychiatric Association was unequivocal that there was insufficient evidence supporting a causal link between violent video games and violent behavior.

“Attributing violence to video gaming is not scientifically sound and draws attention away from other factors, such as a history of violence, which we know from the research is a major predictor of future violence,” the then APA president Sandra L. Shullman said at the time.

That report, though, did suggest that gaming might lead to “aggressive” behavior. But a meta-analysis published that same year which examined dozens of studies found that even attributing “aggressive” behavior was going too far, slapping down a theory that gaming could cause a gradual build up of aggression over time. 

Technically, a correlation had been observed between mounting aggression and gaming — but it was too meager to even meet the bar of having a “small effect.” The meta analysis authors called on the APA “to be more forthcoming about the extremely small observed relationship in longitudinal studies between violent games and youth aggression.”

In short, while there’s room for nuance in the discussion, there’s absolutely no way you can spin the existing evidence to support video games being a significant cause behind gun violence.

But “evidence” has never been all…