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Aug. 6, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
51:39
Ep. 311 - Why Mass Shooters Are Always Men

Today we'll discuss the one commonality between all of these mass shootings that isn’t talked about nearly enough. Also, President Trump says video games are part of the problem. Is he right? Date: 08-06-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today on The Matt Walsh Show, we'll discuss the one commonality between all these mass shootings that isn't discussed nearly enough, and that is that they're all men.
I think we need to talk about that.
Also, President Trump says video games are part of the problem.
Is he right, though?
We'll talk about that today on The Matt Walsh Show.
Caroline Rothstein is a feminist on Twitter, and apparently she describes herself as an internationally touring writer, poet, performer, and educator.
And I guess this happened on one of her international tours where she was performing and educating.
And she tweeted this.
She said, saying no thank you I got it to the middle-aged white man on the airplane
who offered and began to take my suitcase out of the overhead compartment for me was
a quickly calculated act of resistance.
So she was resisting.
Resisting.
Resistance.
By declining a polite gesture from a man.
Now this obviously, I mean it goes without saying, this is brave, this is courageous, this is stunning and beautiful.
Honestly, I'm always so grateful to feminists for this kind of stuff because what feminists can do, and they have an incredible knack for this, is they can sort of dig under what appears to be a very routine act of kindness or courtesy, just a normal interaction between people.
They can dig under that and they can discover underneath all of that persecution.
They're very good at... They're like persecution treasure hunters.
Where, you know, they don't need an X on the map, they don't need a metal detector, they'll find it.
You know, you bury persecution under a stack of needles, they'll find it.
Like, someone's being nice, right?
And you and I, as idiots, we think, oh, that person's being nice.
But what feminists do, and this is really all they do, this is their whole mission in life, this is their whole thing, they come in and they say, no, that wasn't nice.
That was actually bad.
Let me explain why.
Which is good for me, even as a man, because feminists say that when a man tries to help a woman with her bags or hold a door open or whatever, he's really promoting the patriarchy and he's being patronizing.
But the thing is, as a man, there are plenty of times when men have held the door open for me or if I'm on a plane and my bag is a few rows up and I can't reach it, if there's a guy standing there, there's plenty of times where he'll just grab the bag and hand it to me.
Here you go.
And I always thought, okay, that's just normal courtesy, really normal thing to do.
What I'm learning is that that's really an act of dominance.
So he's saying, what he's saying audibly is, here, let me grab it for you.
But what he's really saying is, back up you puny weakling with your twig arms.
Let a real man handle this.
And then he grabs it, ugh, here you go.
See, I never, I have to remember to be offended in the future by that, because I never saw it that way.
So I'm so glad that feminists could enlighten me.
All right, now, before we, Before we move on entirely from the mass shootings over the weekend, I said yesterday that the country will probably have forgotten about it by Thursday.
It looks like maybe we need to move that timeline up to Wednesday or today.
I don't know.
But before we have forgotten, which we always do, I think there's more to be said on the subject.
One main point in particular that somehow isn't discussed that often, it's actually pretty amazing when you think about it, that we don't talk more, much, much more about this point that I'm going to raise.
And I'm not the first person to raise it, of course, but it should be front and center in our minds.
It should be maybe the main thing we talk about in relation to these shootings.
And that point is this, that nearly every single mass shooter in the history of the country, and nearly all of the mass shooters who comprise the recent epidemic, the spike in mass shootings over the past decade or so, almost all of them, With very, very, very rare exception are men.
Young men, mostly.
Again, with rare exception.
The Las Vegas shooter was older, was an older man.
He's a man, but he was older.
Almost all of them are young men.
And in fact, for this, you could expand the definition of mass shooter to include drug violence, gang violence, all the stuff that happens in the city, which of course is much more common than this other kind of mass shooting, which itself is far more common than it should be.
But you expand it and include that, it's still, it's all young men.
Almost all young men.
I mean, for the sake of simplicity and for argument, I'm just going to say all men, because that's basically what it is.
How is it that we aren't focusing intently on that fact?
How is it that we're talking about guns and all this other stuff when nearly every mass shooter fits so neatly into the same demographic?
Shouldn't we be discussing that?
I mean, imagine for a moment that the next, say, four mass shooters were women, all between the ages of 18 and 22.
Just imagine that for a second.
Now, you can't imagine it because it would never happen, but just imagine that the next four mass shooters are women.
After four, probably after two of them, maybe even after one.
We would be, it would be a crisis.
We would be asking, you know, we'd be saying, what's going on with our girls?
How is this happening with our girls?
What are we doing that's resulting in girls acting this way?
It would be a huge topic of conversation.
It'd be the only thing we talked about, really, in relation to the mass shooting is the fact that these are girls and what's going on with that.
But when you have hundreds and hundreds, thousands, again, if you count the mass shootings in the city, which for this, in this case, you should, Thousands of boys doing this, and all we say is, well, okay, that's all right.
I think that's wrong, and I think we need to talk about it.
I want to talk about the gender factor of this, and we will do that.
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Okay, so almost every mass shooter is a young man.
Why is that?
What's going on?
I think that's a question that we should be asking.
Well, it won't shock you to learn that the first thing I'm going to point to And explaining why it's always young men doing this is the thing that I mentioned yesterday, fatherlessness, broken homes.
A disproportionate number of these boys, especially in the inner city and especially among school shooters specifically, don't have dads in the home.
And even many that do have dads in the home, the dad is emotionally or psychologically absent or worse or actively abusive.
So the dad factor here is unmistakable.
But then the question arises, okay, there are just as many girls who have living in fatherless homes as boys.
as many girls who have living in fatherless homes as boys.
Why does it have this special impact on boys rather than girls?
Why is that?
Why are boys more likely to go down this violent path if their dad, for whatever reason, fails to be present, fails to be active and engaged?
It's not enough to just point to fatherlessness and say, well, there's the problem.
I think the why really matters and we need to talk about the why.
As far as the why, there are many, probably countless ways that a boy, especially, is affected by not having his dad around.
But let me point to three of the most obvious ones.
First, boys, as I'm sure you've noticed, have a ton of aggression.
They have a ton of physical energy.
And so they need safe and healthy outlets for that aggression and for that energy.
They need it.
Okay?
Need.
It's an actual need.
It's not like it would be best if they had it.
Oh, gee, wouldn't it be nice?
No, it's an actual, real, physical need they have.
If the dad's not in the picture, of course there are things that a mother can do to compensate.
It's not like, you know, it's hopeless and there's nothing you can do now.
And in fact, especially in the cities, this is where sports become so important.
You know, probably millions of boys have been saved from a life of drug dealing and gangbanging by getting involved in football or basketball, not just as an outlet for their aggression, although it is that also, but then in the bargain they also get access to a football coach who's going to be a male role model, an authoritative, no-nonsense, disciplined male role model, which is indispensable.
But there's still no replacing the advantage of having that male role model actually in the home.
And there are things that a father can do.
When it comes to giving their son an outlet for energy and aggression that a mother can't do or probably won't do, or that a son isn't going to look to the mother to do, right?
So, for instance, I wrestle with my boys all the time.
It's one of the main things that I think a father needs to do with his young boys is just kind of horse around with them, you know, roughhousing and things.
Well, I'm able to do less of it now after the Achilles injury, so I've had to take a break from it.
Although sometimes my sons will still come in and just jump on me.
Even when I was laid up on the couch and I was in a cast, like a day after surgery, my son ran up and basically just pile-drived me.
Because, you know, that's how he sees me.
They even wrote a whole book on it, Hop on Pop.
I mean, it's an entire book about physically abusing your father.
So but I think that this is this is an all seriousness something that that fathers should need to be doing with their sons to give them that outlet for aggression.
My oldest son Well, as I just mentioned, but especially when I'm able to walk, he'll just out of nowhere sometimes just come leaping from the couch or somewhere onto my back like a spider monkey and then just start punching me in the shoulder.
Now, a boy isn't going to do that with his mom and probably shouldn't.
That's what fathers are for.
Now the trouble comes in, and this could happen even with a father around, like I said, just because a father is there doesn't mean that he's actually there.
But the trouble comes in when that energy and aggression is stifled.
And unfortunately these days, there are many ways.
We have innovated many ways to stifle that masculine energy that boys have.
Well, for one thing, the pharmaceutical industry, they make billions doing this.
So you can always drug them.
You can shove chemicals into their bodies, into their mouths, chemically lobotomize them, sedate them essentially, so that they're less of a handful.
And that's, look, I'm not saying that every single boy who's on some kind of psychotropic drug is, there may be cases where it's necessary or the right thing to do.
I can't, I'm not gonna rule that out.
I couldn't rule that out.
But I think in so many cases, in so many cases, This stuff is used just as sedation, because the energy is a hassle to deal with, especially in school, but even at the home.
And so parents say, look, I can't deal with this.
I don't feel like dealing with it.
The other form of sedation, more common, is TV, and video games, and phones, the internet.
The problem is that boys are so rambunctious, so energetic, and sedating them with TV and video games is so easy, and so, on the surface, seemingly harmless, that many parents resort to this method way more often than they should.
I mean, we all, as parents, look, we've all had days, at least, where we rely on the TV way more than we should.
I've had days like that, where you just have days where you're like, I just don't feel like dealing with it, just watch TV.
And every once in a while you have a day like that, it's fine.
Because I also believe as parents, you know, you need to be able to survive psychologically and sometimes give yourself a break.
And you can't beat yourself up over that.
But when it becomes a way of life, and this is all your kid does, and becomes dependent upon it, well now that's a real issue.
Because all of, especially for boys, all of that energy and that aggression, that doesn't go away.
Just because they're sitting there with a blank face, a blank expression, staring at a TV, almost drooling, like they've been lobotomized, just because they're doing that, that doesn't mean that they've really been calmed down and that energy's gone away.
The energy's bottled up or converted into something else.
And that's the thing about energy.
A physicist will tell you, though this is a different kind of energy they're talking about, but the principle still holds.
Energy doesn't go away.
It doesn't leave.
It's there forever.
It's converted into something else.
Well, the male energy... I feel like I'm sounding like Marianne Williamson now.
The energy that connects all people.
Next thing you know, I'll be suggesting healing crystals as a solution.
But no, a boy's energy also doesn't go away.
It's stifled, it's bottled up, and eventually it's converted into something else.
Into emotional aggression, defiance, backtalk, or worse.
So that's where I think a father comes in, giving that outlet for aggression.
And last thing I'll say about that, I keep saying aggression.
Aggression in and of itself is not a bad thing.
It's just what you do with it is the question.
And this is the other thing that we do in our society where we treat aggression as in and of itself a bad thing.
And if it's in and of itself a bad thing, then that means that there is something fundamentally wrong with all of our boys because they all have that in them.
And if we're saying that aggression is just wrong in every context, what we're saying to our boys is there's something wrong with you.
And so we're gonna drug you or we're gonna put you in front of a TV until that's been drained out of you.
Or stifled so much that we can't detect it anymore.
And boys pick up on that also.
So while we're sedating them, while we are not giving them healthy outlets for their aggression, we're also telling them there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with you.
And it seeps in after a while.
The other thing that a father does, I think, for his son is facilitate risk-taking.
And I think this is an aspect that is not talked about hardly at all.
But, you know, kids want to take risks.
Boys and girls.
But again, especially boys.
You know, boys are especially inclined to take physical risks.
And where a father can come in is helping to facilitate that risk-taking, to show kids, their sons, how to take those physical risks in a sort of controlled and safe environment.
The other day, I was out with my son, and I let him, you know, a very normal thing, I let him climb a tree.
He climbed it all the way pretty much to the top.
Now, that's a risk.
Okay, he's up 20 feet in the air.
If he were to fall from there, he could get very, very hurt.
So it is definitely a risk.
I was there.
I saw the tree.
I could see the limbs that he was on.
I was kind of coaching him through, oh, grab that limb.
I could see that the limbs were sturdy, okay?
I was also standing there.
If he did fall, I'd be able to catch him.
So it's a control.
It's a risk, but it's a controlled risk.
And you might say, well, why take any risks at all?
If there's any chance that he falls and, you know, breaks his leg or worse, why do it at all?
Well, because, first of all, I can't imagine, you know, my son having a boyhood where that doesn't involve climbing trees.
I just can't imagine that.
It is, in fact, worth the risk.
And also, I know that if I'm not allowing him to take some risks, and if he doesn't feel comfortable, Taking risks around me?
Or if he's not even going to ask me anymore, hey daddy, can I do this or that?
Because he knows I'm going to say no every time to anything that's remotely risky.
Well then, he's not going to stop taking risks.
He's just going to take them when I'm not in view.
That's what's going to happen.
Or, he'll stop taking risks and then it will come out later.
And that's where drug abuse, alcohol, partying and everything, these teenage boys that go out in their parents' cars and race down the street at 90 miles per hour, that is uncontrolled, unsafe, unfacilitated risk-taking.
And that's the kind of risk-taking where people die.
So that's where fathers come in.
And finally, of course, and this kind of sums it up, this is the underlying thing, that beyond healthy outlets of aggression, beyond risk-taking, included in that, but also beyond it, boys need their dads to show them what men do, what a man is, what the point of a man is, what men are for.
They need that example from their dad.
I think what we've ended up with is a situation where there are millions of boys out there who've never been shown how to be men, don't know what a man is for, feel like their masculinity is a disease, have been drugged into non-existence almost, have spent cumulatively years of their lives staring at screens,
Have never learned how to interact with people on a human-to-human basis.
Have never learned how to take healthy risks.
Have never learned how to stick up for themselves, how to defend themselves.
Other things like that, that dads are for.
You know, teaching your son how to throw a punch.
That's something a dad should be doing.
How to defend themselves.
Encouraging them.
You know, the dad is supposed to be the one, if your kid gets into a fight at school, the dad is supposed to be the one that says, okay, who took the first swing?
And if you find out that, oh, he swang at you first, you defended yourself, that's okay.
You're not in trouble with me.
I mean, that's what a dad's supposed to be there for.
When all boys have is a sort of feminine influence.
Now, not all women are like this, but a mom is more likely to say, oh, you still don't hit back.
The mom is more likely to, because she's the feminine influence, she's more focused on the fact that her son is hurting, he's got the black eye.
That's what she's focused on.
As the father, you're worried about his physical pain, but that's not the main thing you're focused on.
You want to know, did he swing first?
Did you win?
That's going to be one of your questions.
Boy needs that also.
He can't just have the feminine influence.
It's not healthy.
All right, now, so I think that's part of it,
and I have to stipulate this.
I shouldn't have to stipulate it, but I'm not, look, you could have a boy who grows up with,
there are many boys, many, millions, who grow up with no father in the house.
They play a lot of video games.
They watch a lot of TV.
They're on the drugs, and they don't grow up to become mass shooters, okay?
The vast majority of boys in that category are not gonna grow up to become mass shooters, of course, because for that extra dramatic step of becoming a killer, there's going to be a lot more needed.
But boys are still being put at a disadvantage, even if they don't end up as mass killers.
They are still going to end up taking unhealthy risks in some form.
They're still going to end up finding unhealthy outlets for their aggression in some form.
They're still going to end up confused about who they are, and that is in some way going to come out.
Okay, now here's the point where I think probably most of the people listening or watching right now, you would probably agree with most of what I just said.
Here's the part where I lose a lot of you, alright?
Because I can never quit when I'm ahead.
I want to for a few minutes home in on something that I've mentioned tangentially the past couple of days.
I just mentioned it today and mentioned it yesterday, and that is the video games, specifically.
Now, it's my contention that media, our obsession with media, the saturation of media, has a harmful effect on ourselves and on our children.
And when we raise our kids to be obsessed with all forms of media and they spend their lives staring at screens, that has a certain effect on them.
They are influenced by that.
They are influenced by what they see on the screen.
They are influenced by the media they consume.
I don't think that video games are an exception to that rule.
I don't think they're special.
Okay?
Now, I also don't think that they're the sole culprit.
I don't think that they're a special case.
I just don't think they're an exception.
So I'm making this statement about media in general.
Media influences people.
If a kid is raised on this stuff, if it's all he does, that's going to hurt him.
It's going to influence him in a bad way.
That's my point.
And yeah, are video games part of that?
Of course they are.
And they're a part that should be discussed.
The problem is that we've got all these boys and young men obsessed with media, obsessed with the screen, and we all agree that that's a problem.
You're not going to find very many people who say, yeah, whatever, just let them watch as much as they want.
But, a lot of people, because they themselves enjoy watching video games, and they take the games very seriously, and they're very defensive and protective about it, so a lot of those people, they do want video games to be an exception.
So that we can talk about the ill effects of media, we can talk about the influence of TV and movies and the internet and all that, but we can't talk about the very form of media that many kids spend hours a day consuming.
So what you have are a lot of gamers, I talk to these people all the time, anytime this subject comes up, their attitude appears to be, sure, yeah, I agree kids are consuming too much media, I agree it influences them, but that one form of media that many young boys spend most of their time consuming, that you'll leave alone, that's a sacred cow, we don't talk about that, we don't mention that, that's fine, that's harmless, let's focus on all these other forms of media, even if the kids are using that less.
Where video games become this untouchable thing.
It's absurd.
I mean, it's childish.
It's unreasonable.
The attitude that a lot of people have is that with video games you cannot criticize them at all.
I'm not exaggerating.
That is clearly the attitude a lot of gamers have.
They will not listen to any criticism.
None.
It's again unreasonable.
Look, yeah, you could say it's easier for me to say I don't play video games.
That's right.
I am on the internet a lot.
I make my living on the internet.
I am an internet personality, I'm afraid to say.
Yet I criticize the internet all the time.
I did an entire show on it yesterday.
Where it was one of the main things I pointed to as a potential culprit in creating an environment where you have mass shooters.
Yet I'm on the internet and it's my job to be on the internet.
Just because I use something and it's important to me, In many ways, it's important to me.
My family depends on it.
That doesn't mean I'm going to suggest that it should be immune from criticism.
All I'm asking is if you're a gamer, I mean, stop pretending just because you like it that there's no criticism that could possibly be offered of it.
It's not fair.
And what you're doing is you're shutting down the potential to have a very worthwhile and valuable conversation.
When you have kids spending hours a day doing anything, We should look at what that thing is and inspect what the influences of it might be.
I mean, of course we should do that.
President Trump yesterday pointed a finger, not the finger, not all of the fingers, he pointed one little finger at video games very briefly.
He's gotten a ton of blowback for it, even from his fans.
This is what a sacred cow video games are.
President Trump, famously, he's the one who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his fans would still like him.
That's probably true.
He can say whatever he wants, and his most hardcore supporters are going to go in line with him.
Yesterday, I saw people who I've never, ever, ever seen criticize Trump over anything.
All of a sudden now, they've turned on him because of video games.
That's the one thing.
That's where they draw the line.
You can say anything else you want.
If you touch video games, now we've got issues.
So here's what Trump had to say.
Watch this.
We must recognize that the internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize, disturb minds, and perform demented acts.
We must shine light on the dark recesses of the Internet and stop mass murders before they start.
The Internet, likewise, is used for human trafficking, illegal drug distribution, and so many other heinous crimes.
The perils of the Internet and social media cannot be ignored, and they will not be ignored.
We must stop the glorification of violence in our society.
This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace.
It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.
We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately.
Okay, what's his point?
Well, just that kids are influenced by what they see.
If they spend hours a day playing violent video games, they'll probably be influenced by that.
Will it cause them to commit a shooting?
No.
Will it make them?
No.
Will it hijack their brains and hypnotize them, where their eyes become little squiggly circles like in the cartoons?
No.
No one is suggesting that.
It's just an influence.
One influence of many.
But an important one to look at.
Gamers, what gamers like to do is they like to strawman this argument.
They say things like, hey, I played Super Mario World when I was a kid and, you know, it didn't make me eat shrooms and jump into drainage pipes.
Okay, obviously.
Hey, come on.
Don't waste my time.
And please, if you're watching this right now, you're listening, please don't waste my time with that kind of stuff in the comments.
Nobody is saying that.
You know that nobody is saying that.
You know that's a straw man.
Of course no one is arguing that there is that direct of a correlation between playing video games and committing violence or reckless acts.
It's not a one-to-one connection.
But let me ask you, if your kid was watching Peppa the Pig, And Peppa all of a sudden pulled out a bong, okay, and started ripping bong hits.
How would you feel about that?
Would you like it?
Would you be fine with it?
Would you say, ah, it doesn't matter.
What, just because she sees that she's going to run out and find a drug dealer and get some weed?
No, of course that's not what's going to happen, but you probably wouldn't be a fan of Peppa the Pig ripping bong hits or Mickey Mouse shooting heroin.
You probably wouldn't be a fan of that because you realize that even though it's not going to directly, right this minute, turn your kid into a heroin addict or a pothead, it will influence them.
It will have the effect of Especially over time, okay?
If all cartoon characters started acting this way, if they all became druggies, it's going to have the effect of influencing, desensitizing, normalizing these things.
And so you know that.
We all understand that.
We all understand that.
Have you noticed that teens today don't smoke cigarettes like they used to?
Now, they smoke other things because, as I've said before, I think, I mean, it's kind of a losing battle.
It's just, they're going to find something, whether it's vaping.
But they don't smoke cigarettes anymore, nearly as much as they used to.
Have you also noticed that characters on TV don't smoke cigarettes like they used to?
I mean, if you go back and you watch TV shows from the 50s and 60s, everybody smokes cigarettes.
Every character's smoking all the time.
They don't anymore nearly as much, and kids don't smoke as much.
You think that's a coincidence?
Is that some kind of like, there's, oh, well, you know, who knows?
There's no correlation?
No, it's not a coincidence.
And it's not as though any kid had ever said, oh, I saw this particular character smoking cigarettes, so I'm going to run out and get a cigarette.
No, it's just over time, when your environment is saturated with these kinds of images, it just has an effect of desensitizing, normalizing, or even making whatever the activity is seem cool.
Okay?
And the cigarette companies knew that.
That's why, for a long time, they were paying these TV shows to have the characters smoke.
The marketing industry in general has made billions of dollars On the premise that kids are influenced by media.
People are influenced by the stuff they see on screen, kids or not.
If that wasn't true, the marketing industry wouldn't exist.
Instead, rather, it doesn't just exist, it runs our lives because we're being marketed to so much.
I'm not singling video games out.
I'm just saying they aren't an exception.
They are an influence too.
I'm doing the opposite of singling them out.
It's the gamers, some of them, many of them, who want to single out video games as a form of media that somehow has no influence at all, no detrimental effect, none.
It's ridiculous.
Or at least it's a fantastic claim.
See, we know from our experience as human beings And from common sense.
That media affects people, it influences people, it drives people certain directions, it normalizes, it desensitizes.
We know all of that.
No person in their right mind denies that as a general principle.
Now if you claim that video games are somehow an exception to that rule, Even though it's a form of media that kids are consuming
hours a day, and not only consuming, but actually participating in.
They have a more direct participatory relationship with the media that they're consuming as video
games.
If you're telling me that that form of media somehow is an exception completely from this,
that is a fantastic claim and you need fantastic, extraordinary evidence to prove it.
If you don't have it, then we're going to revert back to the rather safe and logical assumption that yes, it is influencing kids to some extent, to some degree, in some way.
Now, what you will find In fact, is that a lot of defenders of video games will actually claim that they can prove that video games don't influence kids and don't have any link at all to violence.
I mean, you'll see this claim.
I'm sure there are people making this claim right now as we speak in the comment section that are saying, it's been debunked!
It's been proven!
There's no link!
No link!
I've heard this so many times.
I've heard studies, studies have disproven the link.
I've even heard people say, I've heard people say that every study, I've seen this claim many times, every study done has disproven the link.
That's what I've heard.
It's nonsense.
It is total nonsense.
If you're making that claim, you don't know what you're talking about, and you know that you don't know what you're talking about, because you know you've done no research, because if you have done any research, you would know how ridiculous that claim is.
It's not true.
It just isn't.
I'm sorry.
It is true that some studies, some, Have failed to establish a link between aggressive behavior and video games.
That is not the same thing as proving that there is no link.
Failing to establish a link is not the same as disproving the link.
There's a very clear distinction there.
There are many things in life that are probably linked, that probably have some relationship, but you also probably won't be able to prove the link.
We just know it intuitively.
Okay?
Now, If you actually read some of these studies, and I've read them, okay?
People send me studies.
I've read all the studies.
I actually read this.
I don't just look at it.
I read the studies.
Read the methodology.
Read the results.
Read the conclusions.
What you're gonna find is that these studies disproving the link, they're all laughable.
They're not just illegitimate.
They're actually laughable.
If you read the methodology.
There's one of the One study that was sent to me and is touted as maybe the most conclusive and sort of far-reaching study that's been done on it, and it failed to establish a link, didn't disprove.
Now, the scientists who do these studies, they would never actually themselves claim that they've disproven anything, because they're going to be a lot more careful in their wording.
It's the media in their headlines that will say, link disproven, even though that's not what happened.
But in this one particular study, just as an example, It relied on self-reported data from gamers themselves and their parents.
And what you're going to find is many of these studies are relying on self-reported data from one of those groups, either the gamers or the parents, or both.
This study was both.
Okay, so gamers basically are asked whether they are violent or have violent thoughts.
And then the parents are asked whether their kids are violent.
Do you see the problem here?
You're asking gamers to go against their own interests to criticize themselves and admit to a negative thing about themselves and about their favorite hobby.
Shockingly, they don't do it.
I mean, wow!
Debunked!
Whoa!
Science, folks!
Amazing!
Can you believe that people who love a certain hobby aren't necessarily eager to admit that it has any influence, negative influence on them at all?
Amazing!
I just, I can't believe it!
Well, there you go.
Matter is settled, folks.
Or you're asking parents to admit that their own kids are violent and that their own parenting is flawed.
You're asking parents to admit, yeah, I let my kid play violent video games all the time, and you know, honestly, I'm seeing a lot of aggression in him, but I'm letting him do it anyway.
Parents aren't going to admit that!
Parents are famously, infamously hesitant to admit that their kids have any flaws or that their parenting is flawed.
Ask any teacher about this and they'll tell you.
Ask any teacher how eager parents are to fess up or even to acknowledge, to accept that their kids have any flaws.
So, I mean, if this is the kind of study that you think proves anything, Come on, come on.
I've also seen studies that attempt to vindicate video games by drawing a one-to-one comparison between the crime rate in a particular area and the video games that have been sold in that area.
I saw one study that showed, oh, did you know that when a certain video game goes on sale, not only is there less crime in the area, or not only is there not an increase in crime, but there's less crime.
Well, yeah, because all the kids are home playing the video game for right now, but no one is claiming that it's a one-to-one direct link.
No one is saying that kids are playing the video games and they're putting the video game down and going out like a zombie and killing each other because of what they just saw.
Nobody is saying that.
You're disproving a claim that nobody on earth has made.
Um, another study had kids play video games and then they came in and you looked at a brain scan to analyze their empathy.
As if empathy can be measured in a brain scan.
Like you can just look at someone's up.
Well, okay.
They have 80% empathy.
Empathy is looking good, folks.
I saw it in the brain scan.
Okay, if any scientist claims that they can conclusively determine the link between your neurological activity and your empathy, they're lying.
Because they know they can't.
It's one of the great mysteries in science right now is the nature of consciousness.
And again, as if there's this direct link, as if your empathy, which you can't measure, but even if you could, as if your empathy dwindles at direct proportion to the amount of time you spend playing violent video games.
No one is saying that, okay?
It's just, I think what we discover is that studies are insufficient.
When you're trying to analyze why people do something, especially why they commit an act of egregious evil, you're not going to be able to just do a study and say, well, there it is.
Solved it.
People are much more complicated than that.
And what motivates people to act the way they act is a much more complex question.
Okay, there are so many things that you do on a daily basis, so many choices that you make, which hopefully don't include killing people, but you make a million choices in a day.
All of those choices have been influenced by any number of factors.
And we can use our intuition and our common sense to kind of figure out what some of those factors might be, but you could never, there's no survey you could fill out that would spell it out like a pie chart with exact mathematical values.
It's just people don't work that way.
Which is why I am not going to try to prove my point by gesturing towards the studies that have found a link between aggression and video games.
And those studies have been done.
There are many studies that have been done.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which I think is a pretty good authority when it comes to to these sorts of issues.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, they, according to them, according to their report, there have been 3,500 studies done about the effects of violent media on kids, including video games, and all but 18 of them have found a link.
Okay, so this claim that there are no studies is, it's just such a ridiculous lie.
It could not be more, 3,500, that isn't none, that's 3,500.
And they found that all but 18 found a link, okay?
And not all those studies were focusing on video games.
Some of them were, but the point is we have a, you know, it appears based on all these studies that violent media does influence people and it influences kids.
That's what it appears.
But I'm not even, that's, you know, I'm not gonna try to win by saying I have more studies than you do, even though I do.
But that's not my point.
It's a basic insight of human nature that people are influenced by the images they spend hours a day consuming.
Here's the real point.
The real problem or potential problem with video games It isn't.
We're focusing on the violence.
It isn't really the violence.
I do think the violence in video games, like violence in movies, and like violence on TV, and like violence in YouTube videos, and all that.
I do think that has a desensitizing effect.
Of course it does.
Obviously it does.
The human mind is something that can be conditioned certain ways.
This is, again, a fact of human nature.
And if you're exposed to certain images a lot, even if the images are fake, You become desensitized to those images and concepts.
This is one of the reasons why kids are very much damaged psychologically by their early exposure to pornography.
Yeah, it's not happening in the real world, okay?
But kids psychologically respond to exposure to graphic pornography in a similar way that they respond to sexual abuse.
What you're going to find psychologically in a sexual abuse victim is something very similar to what you find in a 10-year-old kid who's been exposed to graphic pornography.
It's not the same thing exactly, but it has a similar effect.
on you psychologically because that's just how we are.
I mean, we look at images on a screen and we internalize them.
That's the whole reason why we enjoy watching movies in the first place, okay?
Why do you even like watching a movie?
You know that it's fake.
You know that they're just pretending.
Yet, in the moment, when you sort of hand yourself over to this, you kind of give yourself to this The story that's being told, and you kind of get lost in it, and you do, in a way, sort of forget that it's fake.
That's the only way you can enjoy it, right?
So that shows, again, that images have a real effect on us.
But aside from that, the real issue, potentially, with video games is that they are isolating.
They breed isolation.
Forget about the vinyls.
I don't care.
A kid never plays any vinyl in video games.
Forget about that.
The fact is when you have kids, rather than running around outside, rather than interacting on a person-to-person basis, rather than going out and like we talked about taking risks and getting their aggression out and climbing trees and going on adventures, rather than that, they're inside experiencing life in virtual reality.
That is unhealthy.
That is not a recipe for raising a well-adjusted person.
So the real danger of video games is that a kid obsessed with them will be isolated, alone, inside, cut off.
That's the real danger.
And in that case, it doesn't even matter if they're violent.
Just like if you have a kid who plays video games sparingly and every once in a while plays a violent video game, I'm sure it probably has no effect, basically no effect, negligible effect.
On the other hand, if you have a kid who never plays violent video games, but he plays 7 hours of video games a day and never goes outside, he's going to be destroyed by that.
The same way he would be if he just watched 7 hours of TV a day, or if he just stared at his phone for 7 hours a day, which a lot of people do.
A lot of us are being destroyed by this.
Mutated by it, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.
Now, there are people trying to vindicate video games by pointing out that video games are very popular in Asia, yet mass shootings don't happen there.
True enough.
And if I or anyone else was claiming that video games directly cause violence in a one-to-one relationship, which I'm not, but if I was making that point, then yeah, the point about Asia would blow my case out of the water, and you're right.
Absolutely.
But actually, what I'm claiming is that video games are a form of media, number one, and media, number two, influences human behavior.
And also, number three, video games breed isolation and can be unhealthy in large doses.
That's my claim.
Okay?
And as it happens in Asia, people literally play video games for days on end until they keel over dead.
They play video games to death.
They starve themselves while playing video games in Asia.
And this is not just one case.
This is a trend over there.
What you have in Asia, in a lot of these Asian countries, especially in the urban centers, you have a young generation that has retreated from human life almost completely And now they live their lives in virtual reality through video games and computer games.
And somehow, what?
Somehow you're saying that proves that video games aren't harmful?
I mean, pointing to Asia as proof that video games aren't harmful is like pointing to Ireland or Russia as proof that alcohol is no big deal.
That's the worst place you could possibly look.
That's exactly, people say, what about Asia?
Yeah, that's my point, exactly.
Look at what's happening with the youth over there.
Look at what happened with the young generation.
It's like they're not even, they've just collapsed into, they've rejected reality.
They just live every, when you've got people going to these internet cafes and playing
video games for 36 hours, that shows that video games influence people and they can
influence in a negative way.
They breed isolation or they can and being overexposed to them has negative consequences.
Now in order for a mass shooting to be one of the potential things that can be linked
in some way with video games, in order for, you need a lot of other ingredients.
It's not just going to be video games.
So a mass shooter who spent hours a day playing violent video games, what I'm saying is I
don't think those facts are unrelated and I think the claim that they're unrelated is
absurd on its face and not even worth taking seriously?
And I have a hard time believing that anyone actually believes that it's completely unrelated.
But it's obviously not anywhere close to the only factor.
And there were so many other things that had to go into it.
But the video games didn't help, certainly.
And they probably did, in some small way, help to push towards this result.
But there were a lot of other things.
I mentioned fatherlessness.
For a lot of these cases, the fatherlessness was a much bigger factor.
But they all compound.
I talked yesterday about the snowball effect, and it's just one thing after another, after another, after another, and eventually you have an avalanche.
Are video games part of the avalanche?
Yes.
Is internet part?
Yes.
TV, violence in movies?
Yes, yes, yes.
Fatherlessness?
That's a huge part.
Lack of spiritual grounding?
Huge part.
Problems in education?
Another big one.
All of this stuff.
All I'm saying to you is don't try to absolve video games completely and agree with me on
all of these factors but then try to pretend that video games somehow are an exception.
It's not only laughably ridiculous but we are stopping ourselves from making small improvements.
And the thing about video games, people always say, well, okay, even if all this is true,
what are we going to do about it?
Well with something like video games or internet usage, with a lot of these things, I don't
know what we can do.
And I certainly am not looking to the government to solve the problem.
But something like video games, if we could acknowledge this is an issue, then there are things like, well, parents could do more to regulate their own kids' video game consumption.
I mean, just something like that.
There's one small solution that will help in some small way.
Godspeed.
If you prefer facts over feelings, if you aren't offended by the brutal truth, if you can still laugh at the nuttiness filling our national news cycle, well, tune on in to The Ben Shapiro Show, where you'll get a whole lot of that and much more.
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