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To be clear: I am not asking if violent video games cause violent behavior. That is covered here.

I am more interested if there is any correlation between violent video games and mass killings. I want to know if the killers are any more or less likely to play video games than other people from similar backgrounds. Video games are often a target for blame in these tragedies:

"At times like this, we need to take a comprehensive look at all the ways we can keep our kids safe. I have long expressed concern about the impact of the violent content our kids see and interact with every day," Rockefeller said in a statement. "As Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, I have introduced legislation to direct the National Academy of Sciences to investigate the impact of violent videogames and other content on children's well-being." --West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller

But from my own recollection it seems that there is no connection to video games more often than there is. Given the number of young males that play these games, it may even be an abnormally low number of these people who play violent video games.

It is well-known that the killers in the Columbine massacre were avid players of Doom. The shooter in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting is said to have spent hours in his basement playing Call of Duty. The killer in the Virginia Tech massacre played some Counter-Strike, but probably not very much. The killer in the 2011 shooting in Norway said he trained for the attack by playing Call of Duty. I can't recall others.

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Kip
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    School shootings are extremely rare so it is almost impossible to get statistical evidence that videogames contribute to such shootings. In 1993, the release of Doom lead to many people thinking the game would produce killers, and in the shootings in Paducah, Kentucky; Springfield, Oregon; and Littleton, Colorado, it was reported that the killers all loved the game Doom. However in the 10 years following the release of Doom, juvenile homicide arrest rates fell 77%, despite increases in the number of violent video games. – Kenshin Dec 20 '12 at 15:01
  • http://info.asanet.org/images/press/docs/pdf/Winter07ContextsFeature.pdf – Kenshin Dec 20 '12 at 15:05
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    Purely anecdotally, isn't it virtually impossible to find a male in that age group who did NOT play Doom? :) – user5341 Dec 20 '12 at 15:27
  • @chris to be clear, i am talking about killing sprees in general, not just school shootings, and not just cases where the perpetrator is very young. this would include the theater shooting in Aurora, CO and the shooting at Ft. Hood, and the shooting at a Sikh temple, among others. i understand that it is still a small sample. i guess i'm really just interested in whether any meta-analysis has been conducted on this small sample, and if my intuition is correct or not – Kip Dec 20 '12 at 15:29
  • Also, you may want to provide an explicit quote that asserts some sort of correlation, which you are skeptical of – user5341 Dec 20 '12 at 15:29
  • @dvk i added one example. it shouldn't be hard to find others. jack thompson made a career out of making such claims – Kip Dec 20 '12 at 15:41
  • @chris it is also possible that while homicide rates in general have fallen, the rates of mass killings have gone up. it is only the mass killings that i am asking about here. – Kip Dec 20 '12 at 15:47
  • Yes you're right Kip. I did some research on your actual question but I couldn't find much. I just posted the above which I discovered in my search out of interest. I hope you find the info you're looking for. – Kenshin Dec 20 '12 at 15:51
  • I think this question would have to imply that there were no mass killings before violent video games even existed in order for the correlation to be true. – Dunk Dec 20 '12 at 23:03
  • @dunk not necessarily. people died of lung cancer before cigarettes were invented, but there is still a correlation between cigarette use and lung cancer. if it were the case that the frequency of mass killings has gone up significantly since the release of Doom, and the killers were more likely to play violent games than other people with similar backgrounds, you could make a case for causation. – Kip Dec 21 '12 at 13:50
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    *"**91 percent** of kids between 2 and 17, or about 64 million people, are playing video games"*. You could as well as a question, if perpetrators in mass killings more likely watch TV. – vartec Dec 21 '12 at 13:52
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    Regarding Lanza playing CoD. Consider top selling games of all times on **X360 alone - CoD:BO - 16.4mln, CoD:MW3 - 13.7mln, CoD:MW2 - 12.9mln.** The popularity of MW3 (which was the latest at the time): "Activision reported sales figures for Modern Warfare 3 in the U.S. and UK being more than **6.5 million copies sold on launch day** and grossed $400 million in the US and UK alone in its first 24 hours, making it the biggest entertainment launch of all time. [...] Modern Warfare 3 went on to gross **$1 billion throughout the world in 16 days of availability**". – vartec Dec 21 '12 at 14:02

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