We said the same thing about Rock and Roll.

While nobody here has really attempted to make this argument, I’ve heard everyone under the sun preach it when trying to identify the problems behind the Uvalde shooting. And I won’t sugar-coat my response: the “desensitized to violence” argument is ridiculous.

As I’ve said, I’ve heard uncountable people say that “violent video games and movies” desensitize young people to violent, terrible actions, as if shooting someone on screen somehow makes you just as inclined to shoot someone in real life. I’ve heard both politicians and murderers alike try to claim that if those gosh-darned violent video games hadn’t existed, well then by golly they wouldn’t have tried to murder people.

But that raises an important question: why aren’t video gamers or movie goers the most violent demographic of our society? Why do violent crime, murder, and mass-shooting demographics invariably point towards fatherless homes? If the narrative was true, then that would show as a correlating/causal factor when investigating these crimes. Yet it never does. The most anyone can ever really say is that people who commit violent crimes and mass shootings have played violent video games. That’s not causation. That’s not even correlation. That’s as irrelevant as saying that every violent criminal has been born. Yes, that comparison does imply that video game usage is extremely prevalent. It is. That itself furthers the notion that video games are hardly desensitizing people. In fact, they can actually do the exact opposite.

SPOILER WARNING for a game called Bioshock, for those who care.

Epic Games does random free giveaways once in a while, and they just handed out the entire three-part Bioshock series. The first Bioshock game is set in a fictional underwater city named Rapture in 1960. Rapture was founded by a man named Andrew Ryan in an attempt to create a perfect utopia free from God, government, and the overgeneralized “parasites” that have been tearing humanity down on the surface: a place where human greatness can just thrive and achieve on its own without interference. Where “the artist would not fear the censor, and the scientist would not be bound by petty morality,” in the words of Andrew Ryan himself. Like all good utopias, Rapture failed catastrophically. Our unnamed protagonist (the player’s character) accidently finds himself in Rapture after the passenger jet he was riding on crashes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Within Rapture lies the secret to human genetic alteration on an incredible scale. “Plasmids” are specific genetic alterations that grant seemingly supernatural powers within the subjects, like the ability to shoot electricity from your hands or telepathically pick up and move objects. A substance called “Adam” is used to make these genetic alterations, and for the purposes of gameplay, Plasmids give you fantastical powers, and Adam is the currency you use to buy Plasmids and gene tonics to upgrade your combat potential. In an attempt to satiate Rapture’s out-of-control genetic “splicing” addiction and recycle Adam, young girls were taken, brainwashed, and genetically altered to be Adam-harvesting drones. They’re called “Little Sisters,” and they wander the streets of Rapture harvesting Adam from dead bodies. And yes, this is all at least as horrifying and disturbing as it sounds.

As you fight through Rapture, combating mutated, degenerate people who genetically altered themselves into insanity called “Splicers,” you can acquire Plasmid abilities, and you therefore have to find Adam to acquire new Plasmids and improve your existing ones. The only way to do that is to harvest Little Sisters for Adam. But when you get a chance to harvest a Little Sister, you’re given a choice: harvest her completely, gaining the most Adam possible, but killing her in the process; or rescue her, cleaning the Adam out of her system and restoring her to a normal little girl, but you gain very little Adam in the process. It’s a legitimate compromise, because the right thing to do is to rescue the children, but that means less Adam, which means fewer upgrades, weaker abilities, and therefore a MUCH harder time trying to survive the horrors of Rapture. Do you save the Little Sisters and make do with what you have, or do you harvest and kill them because your survival is more important? It’s a simple yet definitive “smart choice vs. right choice” question.

If you choose to save all the Little Sisters, the story ends with the protagonist helping them escape Rapture. He adopts them as his own daughters and raises them, and the story ends many years later as an old man on a hospital deathbed, with the daughters he saved from Rapture there with him the hospital. It’s an absolutely beautiful and heartwarming ending to an otherwise dark, creepy, gloomy, depressing story.

I know you get an alternate (and extremely dark) ending to the story if you choose to kill the Little Sisters instead, but I’ve never seen it, because I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. Yeah, they’re fictional characters set in an imaginary universe and the only consequence to my actions is that the ending cutscene of the game is dark and gloomy, but I still can’t do it. I can’t make myself kill imaginary children. I’d rather die dozens of times, restart entire levels, and struggle through the entire game than investigate the fictional portrayal of murdering children. And this is how I’ve felt ever since the first time I played Bioshock years and years ago. It has nothing to do with Uvalde.

At the same time that we say things like “we didn’t have mass shooting problems in the past,” we forget that those little boys spent no small amount of time “shooting” and “stabbing” each other with sticks and cap guns as they played Cowboys and Indians. I can speak for my own childhood that there was death, destruction, and plenty of dismemberment to be had during all those lightsaber duels and wizard battles I played with my siblings. There is one real thing that actually correlates these tragedies like the one in Uvalde, and that is a failure of morality. The kind of failure that tells a father he should abandon his sons and leave them to rot instead of teaching them to be real men. What does that failure, when compounded with other failures of morality, teach those sons? It tells them that respecting your fellow man, protecting children, and doing the right thing are stupid, empty, meaningless ideas that only morons and weaklings believe in. We’ve taught people to believe that morality is optional and relative, rather than absolute and imperative. And so, we’re getting to see men devolve in real time back into Stone Age barbarism, where slaughtering entire villages of people, raping the women, and selling the children into slavery were the norms. What we should be doing is teaching our sons to be men instead of leaving them to turn into barbarians. Instead, people are blaming photons, audio pressure waves, and electronic signals as the culprits.

Think about yourself when you ask what happened. I know I have. And I can tell you this, having played games that let me explore the deepest, darkest depravity humanity has to offer with no consequences: “violent video games and movies” are only inspiration to commit terrible acts to people who have already converted to barbarism. Only a mind already sick with terminal moral rot could look at a fictional story and say, “Yeah, that looks like something I’d do.” And, as if we needed further proof that blaming digital entertainment is as ridiculous and absurd as blaming guns, I present to you both the title of my little rant here, as well as the single most bloody school massacre in American history, which took place in 1927 (well before video games) and didn’t even involve guns.