Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Video Game? Media-Based Moral Panics

entered the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., and killed 12 people before being shot himself by police. Reports on the shooter suggested he may have been delusional and had a history of several past angry outbursts that came to the attention of law enforcement (Bothelo & Sterling, 2013). Briefly, speculation arose that Alexis may have played military-themed shooter games and that these games may have influenced his behavior. After the shooting, one scholar speculated that factors such as mental illness likely contributed to the shooting, “but it isn’t hard to believe that video game use may have been a contributing factor,” and speculated that such games might not only contribute to the motive but also train shooters to be more accurate (Bushman, 2013). Claims about violent video games in the Alexis case were based mainly on rumor, however, not facts, and unlike the previous 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, the issue of video game violence did not get much traction among lawmakers (Palmer, 2013) as Alexis’s considerable mental health problems became clearer. Nonetheless, the D.C. Navy Yard shooting fit a common pattern, in which news media and some scholars zeroed in on the issue of video game violence before how much exposure the shooter actually had to violent video games was even clear. Furor over the issue of video games in the Navy Yard case was likely primed by the previous year’s Sandy Hook shooting, in which a 20-year-old male killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary, as well as his mother before killing himself. As in the Navy Yard case, speculation about shooter Adam Lanza’s exposure to video games began in earnest. As with the Navy Yard shooting, such speculation was based on rumor rather than on fact, but politicians, scholars, and journalists all contributed to fueling this speculation. Most pronounced were the efforts of the National Rifle Association (NRA) to shift blame for the Sandy Hook shooting away from real guns and onto the imaginary guns of video games (see Beekman, 2012). But this effort was abetted by politicians such as Senator Rockefeller or Congressman Wolf, who called for ‘studies; linking violent video games to societal violence in language which made clear the results they wanted to see. Journalists were also able to find scholars willing to speculate that 12 Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Video Game? Media-Based Moral Panics