Video games?

We've just been through three mass shootings in just a few days (don't forget Gilroy CA) and the wingnuts have been out in force blaming the murders on violent video games (Trump himself has repeatedly said this), gay marriage, "ignoring God", and various other right-wing bogeymen (this nutcase basically posted a laundry list of everything she doesn't like and blamed all of it for the shootings, without any hint of an actual causative mechanism).  The despotic mind-set never lets a good crisis go to waste, and they can't pass up the chance to exploit these murders in an effort, however forlorn, to turn people against the things they wish they could ban.

But their proposed hypothesis does not fit the data.  Most of western Europe has gay marriage and is far more secular than the US, yet rarely suffers from such large-scale murders (and in the few cases where it has, such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the Paris attacks of 2015, the perpetrators were most often religious fanatics with roots outside Europe).  Violent video games exist in many countries which suffer far less real-life violence than the US.  Japan has more violent and creepy imagery in its pop culture than any other country, but its murder rate is among the lowest in the world.

Conversely, in the Middle East, religion has a much more dominant role than in the US, there is no separation of religion and state, mass culture and entertainment are censored in ways similar to what the Christian Right and assorted control freaks would like to impose here, homosexuality is illegal in most countries and punishable by death in several, and gay marriage is unthinkable.  And mass killings of dozens of people at a time in public places occur with a frequency comparable to the US.  (They're usually carried out by car bombings or suicide bombings, not guns, but that's a trivial point -- dead is dead, and I can't imagine the choice of weapon makes much difference to the victims.)  Almost all of these attacks are carried out by religious fanatics targeting groups who belong to a different sect or have associated with foreigners or violated some taboo -- just as many of the mass killings in the US have targeted groups such as gays, Jews, or Hispanics who have traditionally been objects of bigotry.

Some mass killings in the US have been carried out by young men who felt alienated and resentful for various reasons and were lashing out almost blindly, but actually a lot of Middle Eastern terrorist bombers fit the same profile -- it's just that the nature of Middle Eastern culture makes it far more likely that such alienation and resentment will get channeled into religious intolerance.

There is a secularization process which happens in societies as they become more modern and economically developed, including growing acceptance of a variety of subcultures within society.  In Europe the process is nearly complete; the US lags behind Europe, Latin America is somewhat further behind, and the Middle East still more so, though progress is happening there too.  Spasms of mass violence seem to be endemic to cultures where the process is still under way, and dominant religious or ethnic groups feel under siege and are trying to re-assert supremacy by terrorizing groups they feel should be subordinate or absent.  I know much less about India, but it at least looks like the murderous riots against the Muslim minority in recent years, and the election of an openly Hindu-nationalist government out to re-assert the supremacy of the Hindu majority, could represent the same sort of backlash against a pluralistic and officially secular society.

But video games aren't the problem.