Digital Violence

It is obvious from Donald Trump's statements about many topics that he is not skilled at philosophical deductions, and his recent claim that violent video games cause mass shootings is a fine example of this.  Conservative slippery slope fallacies such as Trump's are tools of demagoguery and ignorance that are only effective on those with a weak grasp of logic (liberals use slippery slope arguments of their own, of course).  Slippery slopes are common precisely because one can easily use them to inspire fear in unintelligent people.

Screenshot from Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

Thankfully, it takes only a brief period of reflection to reveal the errors in a given slippery slope claim, including the one Trump made.  There is no correlative connection between partaking in digital violence and enacting actual violence, much less a causal connection between the two activities.  Whether a person assaults or murders others has nothing to do with what video games they play, much less with whether or not they play video games to begin with, and everything to do with their own desires and moral character.  Furthermore, this can be proven without ever talking to another person or looking at historical data.

Contrary to the insistence of fallacious epistemologists, there is neither a need to conduct a study to discover this fact nor any benefit to doing so.  One can prove from logic alone that a person might play video games and never commit acts of violence and that a person might never play video games and still engage in violent behaviors.  Without so much as standing up or leaving one's room, one can establish that there it does not follow from a person playing video games that he or she will develop a malicious personality.

Screenshot from Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

Treating entertainment that they dislike as a scapegoat for real crimes is not a new tactic for many political or theological conservatives, and yet, although it is rather easy to expose as asinine, it persists despite its obvious fallacies.  Ironically, conservatives have a high regard for personal responsibility when it comes to many aspects of life, but this concern for individual responsibility often vanishes when controversial entertainment is brought up--or when erotic media or displays of the human body, which many conservatives believe have the power to make people sin, are brought up.

Conservatives like Trump would rightly affirm that gun ownership does not mean that a person will become a murderer, only to commit a different slippery slope fallacy by saying that playing violent video games can cause mass shootings.  The conservative affirmation of individual responsibility is selective.  All major ideological groups have their hypocrites, but conservatives, like liberals, often put their hypocrisies on full display.  One does not have to exert a great deal of effort to find glaring inconsistencies in the stances of most conservatives.