Joe Biden agrees with Trump, blames video games for El Paso, Dayton mass shootings despite evidence that no such link exists
In a rare occurrence, former vice president Joe Biden agreed with President Donald Trump on Monday.
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said that he too held violent video games responsible for the two mass shootings that took place in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, over the weekend and left 31 dead.
Biden was asked if he thinks there is a possible link between video games and mass shootings by CNN host Anderson Cooper on Monday, hours after Trump suggested violent games were behind the mass shootings.
The president suggested putting a stop to children having access to violence-inciting video games. "We must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this and it has to begin immediately," Trump said in brief remarks from the White House after the massacres.
Referring to POTUS' remarks, Cooper told Biden, “When I mentioned that the president talked about video games today as being part of the problem, I saw you kind of rolled your eyes,” but “it’s something people have talked about for a long time.”
Biden explained: "I’ve talked about it, too. But it is not healthy to have these games teaching kids that, you know, this dispassionate notion that you can shoot somebody and just, you know, sort of blow their brains out.”
Cooper counter-argued in favor of the video games, saying that they cannot solely be held responsible for the mass killings as the games were also popular in Japan, where gun violence is significantly lower than in the United States.
“They are. That's my point,” Biden said. “But it's not in and of itself the reason why we have this carnage on our streets.”
It must be mentioned that there have been a number of studies in the past where experts have tried to find a connection between video games and gun violence but they did not find any. In fact, researchers even noticed signs that crime may be reduced by violent games.
"There's absolutely no causal evidence that violent video game play leads to aggression in the real world,” said Andrew Przybylski, a researcher at Oxford University who has been studying the psychological effects of video games and co-authored that 2019 study, told NBC News.
Biden was previously criticized after the 76-year-old bungled up the shooting locations and expressed his sympathy the victims of the weekend’s mass shootings in Houston and Michigan on Sunday.
In his remarks, he also added that he did not hold Trump personally responsible for the massacres that killed 31 people and wounded dozens more.
However, he added that “the president’s words have meaning, no matter who he or she is.”