Speaker 1: without missing a beat in the aftermath of the Buffalo mass shooting where a racist 18
year old using quite literally Fox News talking points in a manifesto allegedly left behind,
went and sought out black people, killed ten, injured three, 11 of the victims black two white.
Fox News brought on a guest to speculate about, you know, the violence has correlated with the
video games getting really realistic and really violent. They're doing it. They're doing it
with a straight face. Look at this. Speaker 2: I think of, you know,
what must go through the minds of these people. Like like the guy yesterday who's accused of
shooting up that supermarket. He's 18 years old. His whole life was in front
of him. And now his life essentially is over because of what he decided to do.
Do they not think about this before they open fire? Are they so wrapped up in themselves,
as you say, so psychopathic that nothing else matters to them? You'd have to have a conscious
to feel that way. And so, no, there's not. Speaker 5: It's a blind obsession. It lacks
empathy. That's what makes them so incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 2: I wonder, you know, it seems like these things have gotten so much worse
since video games became so realistic and so violent. Have you done research or learned
that that video games struggling. Speaker 1: Even to how we know we
want to blame video games but don't even know how to put together a question.
Speaker 2: Tend to just desensitize people to the actual results of pulling a trigger.
I think in terms of causation, what the information shows us is that
as we become more disfranchized as individuals and groups, people leave of faith, for example,
the family units become smaller. Speaker 3: Or more just.
Speaker 1: So this guy talks about leaving faith and Disfranchized and the guest doesn't
even really know how to respond, even though John Scott wants to blame video games. So every country
has violent video games. The United States is not unique in that. Do you guys have any idea
how much Grand Theft Auto I played growing up? Do you have any idea how many people I have brutally
murdered in a video game since I was like 14 years old with every weapon imaginable? And I have never
even thought about committing a violent act. I am not in any way desensitized to real world
violence. If anything, the real world violence and the shootings are what we've become accustomed to
because it is so frequent. But it is not. The video games and other countries with tons of
video games don't have this problem. There's a ton of gaming in Europe. There's a ton of
gaming in Argentina. In South Korea, there's an insane video gaming world. They don't have a gun
violence issue. They also don't have nearly as many guns, which is an interesting thing.
They also mostly have access to mental health treatment, if you believe that that is actually
the primary cause. And then we are a country without any real access to that treatment.
You also have to consider that. So they've been pushing this for 40 years or longer. First it was
movies, then video games. We have academic work on the topic. The best findings that I'm able to
find are include work from Erica Shah, who has been a guest on this show, talking about this from
the University of Massachusetts. A study called Violent Video Games Do Contribute to aggression.
And what the study found is that while violent video games can generally
promote aggression in some general sense, they don't make nonviolent people randomly
go out and do shootings. And most importantly, most importantly, as Erika Shah has made clear,
it is impossible to link video games to mass shootings. And this has been studied
and this has been debunked. So I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Fox News so
quickly went to that. They seem to often do it, but it is not based in evidence. Let me know your
thoughts and remember that Monday, Memorial Day will have our one day membership special.
I hope that you're on our newsletter at David Pakman dot com if you are. Monday Memorial Day,
you'll be notified about this great opportunity to get a highly discounted membership.