In comparison to other countries, the United States has had the most mass shootings. Mass shootings in public settings have received a lot of media coverage, making it look like the new normal. Many studies focus on gun control (Newman and Hartman 2017). Violent video games and aggressive behavior is less of a research focus. Using information about each individual shooter from the American Psychological Association (APA) and a range of popular sources describing the killers, I find that those that were diagnosed with mental illness had also played violent video games and some of them reenacted the scenes. The way that the shootings unfolded were consistent with the types of video games the killers played. Those shooters who were not mentally ill, did not have the same focus on reenacting video games and their tactics. This research suggests that access to video games alone is not a cause of violent shootings, but together with mental illness violent video games appear to be strongly related to mass shootings. Public debate should consider violent video games in the context of mass shootings and mental illness, similarly as is gun control.
