Guns and games have a symbiotic relationship | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Thursday 2nd June 2022

Blame defies basic mathematics.

Just because one person is 100% to blame for something, that doesn't mean others don't have their own portion of culpability.

For example, in last week's mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the shooter was to blame. He planned the shooting, he bought the guns to facilitate it, he pulled the trigger.

Yet if the blame was his and only his, there wouldn't be anything left to do, as he's now dead, and we can be certain he'll never do this again.

But everybody's arguing about next steps, because we all understand this shooting was not an isolated incident. Mass shootings have become so commonplace that most of them are barely a blip in the news cycle. Mass Shooting Tracker has identified 21 mass shootings -- four or more people shot -- in the US in the nine days since Uvalde, collectively killing 21 more people and injuring 93.

Drilling down into the individual shootings, we see a variety of motivations: bigotry, desperation, nihilism, revenge, and so on. But the common thread, of course, is guns.

These shootings are part of a larger trend across society, something happening the world over, but finding expression in the US with overwhelming regularity. If we assume the US has not cornered the market on bigotry, desperation, nihilism, and revenge, the differentiating factor would seem to be the abundance of firearms in the US, and the ease with which people can obtain them.

So who's to blame for that?

Politicians, for one. Like the politicians who made researching gun violence off limits to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who let the federal assault weapons ban lapse, who routinely do the gun lobby's work for it,