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That is, school shooters are actually less likely to be interested in violent games than their peers. A few, such as Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho, had no interest at all a fact that surprised his roommate, who thought it was weird he didnt play video games, Markey said.

In fact, only about 20% of school shooters play video games, compared with about 70% of high school students overall.

Markey, co-author of the 2017 book Moral Combat: Why the War on Violent Video Games Is Wrong, said school shooters as a group tend to do things that arent typical of their peers. Typical teenage behaviors include playing video games, many of them violent. Its just a sign of a healthy childhood to do things that our peers do, even if parents dont like it, he said.

Previous research supports his assertion, suggesting that when violent games and media are released, real-life violence actually drops. In 2011, University of Texas economist Michael R. Ward and two colleagues found that higher rates of violent game sales coincided with a drop in crime especially violent crime.

The perceived games-and-violence connection is nearly as old as the first-person-shooter video game itself. After the Columbine attack in 1999, victims families sued more than two dozen gamemakers, saying games such as Doom, a first-person shooter that teen gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold played, desensitized them to violence.

A judge dismissed the lawsuits because the games werent subject to product liability laws they hadnt failed like a badly wired toaster. But the lawsuits and post-Columbine uproar in Congress added to a heated debate that had pushed the industry to adopt a ratings system similar to that of movies.

A year after Columbine, the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education looked at the habits of 41 school shooters, including Harris and Klebold. They found that five of them were interested in violent games, but that twice as many liked violent movies and books. The largest group, more than one in three, exhibited an interest in a different kind of violent media: their own writings, such as poems, essays and journal entries.

Twelve years later, in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, criticized the video game business as a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people."

But when Connecticut State Police investigated in 2013, they found a surprising video game link: Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman, had obsessively played the game Dance Dance Revolution, a Japanese arcade staple, for nearly a decade. Once he was old enough to drive, Lanza would spend all night in the lobby of a movie theater, challenging others to beat him.

A subsequent report from the state Office of the Child Advocate noted that Lanza had played the game as far back as 2003, often dancing to the point of physical exhaustion. Investigators said this could have been a way for Lanza to contain anxiety-producing impulses and thoughts. One witness said the theater manager on occasion had to unplug the game to get Lanza to leave.

Other research has shown that countries that spend the most per-capita on video games have lower gun-related murder rates than the USA. Our gun-related murder rate is about 20 times the average, and virtually every other nation the ones that spend more on video games and those that spend less have lower gun-related murder rates.
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