After a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, left 20 people dead, Republican officials partially blamed the attacks of terror on violent video games.
“How long are we going to let, for example, and ignore at the federal level particularly, where they can do something about the video game industry,” Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick said Sunday on “Fox & Friends,” condemning the attack as “evil.”
The shooting occurred Saturday morning, when a gunman identified as Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old from Allen, Texas, opened fire at a packed Walmart near the Cielo Vista Mall in El Paso with an assault rifle, killing 20 people and wounding dozens.
Officials on Sunday declared the attack an act of “domestic terrorism.”
Another mass shooting occurred early Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio, and left 10 people dead, including the suspected gunman. Details are still emerging about both attacks.
A hate-filled “manifesto,” as police called it, published online before the El Paso shooting, has been linked to Crusius. Although El Paso police authorities have not confirmed if the shooter wrote the 2,300-word anti-immigrant tirade, the police chief there said they are examining it as “a nexus to potential hate crime.”
On “Fox & Friends,” Patrick noted the document’s apparent reference to the video game “Call of Duty.” (From the document: “Don’t attack heavily guarded areas to fulfill your super soldier COD fantasy. Attack low security targets.”)
“In this manifesto that we believe is from the shooter … he talks about living out his super soldier fantasy on ‘Call of Duty,’” Patrick said.
“We’ve always had guns. We’ve always had evil. But what’s changed where we see this rash of shooting?” he continued, calling violent video games “the common denominator.”
“I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill,” he said.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also pointed to violent video games Sunday and said they “may be a place where we could find this ahead of time.”
“The idea of these video games, they dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals and others,” he said in a Fox News interview. “When you look at these photos of how [the El Paso shooting] took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.”
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