Video games are being blamed yet again for a killing spree. No stranger to scapegoating video games for everything awful under the sun, the German government is now saying video games sparked a man’s decision to execute nine people, including four children, at a shopping mall in Munich before turning the gun on himself.
A day after the shooting, German Minister of the Interior Thomas de Mazière released a statement claiming that shooter had played many video games—first-person shooters, in particular, and had “glorified” the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik. Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae then claimed without evidence that the shooter had an “obvious link” to Breivik. A narrative was established early on to tie the killings to far-right nationalists, and with the statements made by de Mazière, video games were also thrown into the mix.
German authorities are now discounting the notion that the shooter, Ali Sonboly, had any ties to Breivik, and now say that the 18-year-old Iranian killer targeted others in his age group because he was picked on at school for his ethnic background. They say he used a fake Facebook profile to lure some of his victims into a McDonald’s. As we previously reported, media were quick to claim that the shooter was not religiously motivated despite eyewitness reports that the shooter screamed “Allah Akhbar!” before executing his victims. The media is now latching onto the anti-video game narrative.
Reuters, CNBC, CNN, BBC, the Telegraph and others are reporting that Sonboly had an “obsession” with violent video games, with claims that he may have played Counter-Strike based on a statement by Robert Heimberger, president of the state crime office. He called it “a game played by nearly every known rampage killer.”
Speaking on the shooter’s motivations, de Mazière claims the “intolerable degree of violence glorifying games on the Internet also have a detrimental effect on the development of young people,” and proposed the creation of strong laws to control video games.
No evidence was provided for these claims. Jobs in the video and computer games market between 2009 and 2012 grew at about 13 times the average rate in the U.S. Violent crime dropped by 10.4% over that time, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics.
Germany is the largest gaming market in Europe, home to well over 23 million active gamers. Every year, the German city of Cologne hosts the world’s largest annual gaming event, Gamescom.
Video game imports to Germany are already heavily censored by their publishers to meet the stringent guidelines set forth by the USK, the German government’s video game board. The censorship usually extends to the removal of blood and gore, and in cases like South Park: The Stick of Truth and Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, even gameplay and story-based content is changed. New laws could call for violent video games to be banned outright.
Long-term studies by established researchers suggest no connection between that video games and real-world violence. If video games were responsible, one has to wonder why shooting sprees don’t happen more often in Germany, or why violence isn’t endemic to gamers. Both the authorities and the media should focus on resolving real issues instead of blaming imaginary causes.
