It's so goddamn predictable and so incredibly lazy.
I'd expect this kind of outrageous knee jerk reaction on Facebook Boomer group pages, not by a "news" anchor. I'm sure he didn't provide any evidence or facts that videogames had any link at all to these shooters.
For the Buffalo case it could not be more clear... the shooter left his manifesto and diaries. We all have access to his daily thoughts, his anxieties, his news sources, his fears and his reasons. None of it was about videogames, and instead was about his racist outrage that minorities should be wiped out based on misinformation he got from 4chan, Fox, etc. It is all there, which makes it all the more outrageous that lazy news reporting targets videogames.
I 100% agree. I never read the full manifesto, but have read parts about it. What gets me is that he was trying to get Zapor to agree with him, and at one point it seems like he was going to ask him if he suggests that video games desensitized people, but then he quickly changed his mind. Thankfully, Zapor was actually smart and didn't fall into that line of questioning.
Whenever a mass shooting happens, it's always video games. In 2022, you would think that the media would be better than that. But then again, they like causing fear in parents that don't know any better.
I honestly hope we hear less and less on this angle. Fox in particular targets cable-watching boomers... who haven't been into games so much so of course their audience will agree with them. Gen X, Gen Y, Millennials and Gen Z have been playing games their entire lives and know it's absolutely not true... so hopefully this uneducated argument dies out and maybe we can actually start to work the actual documented reasons on why people are getting radicalized enough to cause mass murder.
That's the thing. Blaming video games is as stupid as blaming MacDonalds because the shooter use to eat there.