President Donald Trump held a meeting at the White House today to discuss his perceived link between video games and gun violence. CNN's Jake Tapper released the names of those invited—and it contains not a single scientist or psychologist or anyone credentialed to address the extremely important, and public health-related, issue of what motivates people to commit such mass acts of violence.
The list includes members of Congress (all Republican, of course), law enforcement officials, and video game executives.
The meeting was closed to the public and the press— and is the latest stunt included in Trump's nebulous response to the Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen people were murdered by a 19-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15, the weapon of choice in most mass shootings.
Instead of access to guns, Trump has blamed violent video games and movies for the rash of gun violence plaguing our country and even suggested that movies have a rating system (they already do, obviously).
The link between video games and gun violence, or violence in general, is wholly unsubstantiated and not supported by science.
Despite numerous studies into this issue, no causal link has ever been established between violent video games and violence in the 3-D world.
"“Video games are plainly not the issue: entertainment is distributed and consumed globally, but the US has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation,” said Dan Hewitt from the Entertainment Software Association, which represents companies including Ubisoft, Nintendo, EA and Activision," reported The Guardian.
"Heads up: you should Investigate the link between guns & gun violence," TV personality Russell Woolf tweeted.
Besides deliberately ignoring science (as usual), the Trump administration managed to botch one of the names on the list. "The White House made a mistake on International Women's Day by misidentifying the president of the ESRB, Pat Vance, as a man," Mashable noticed this afternoon. "The ESRB was quick to correct the White House, noting that Vance's entry should read "Ms. Pat Vance."
Leave it to the Trump administration to get this wrong on International Women's Day.
Amidst the controversy over his choice of how to address gun violence, Trump spent the latter part of his afternoon enacting tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, something which he threatened to do while in a rage last week.
