Following the Munich shooting last Friday, which saw 18-year-old David Ali Sonboly kill nine people in the middle of a busy shopping center in Germany, the gunman’s collection of video games has now led many media outlets to point towards gaming as being the catalyst for his actions, stoking the flames of the “violent games cause violence” yet again.
According to officials, Ali Sonboly played the popular PC first-person shooter game Counter-Strike: Source, which has now inevitably led to some reporters claiming that the young man was “obsessed” with gaming, forging an unsubtle correlation between his hobby and his killing of innocent people.
The Telegraph compared Sonboly to the shooters behind the 1999 Columbine massacre, writing: “Like Sonboly, the young men behind the 1999 Columbine massacre – the high-school shooting where 12 students and one teacher were gunned down – were obsessed with violent video games.”
The newspaper’s report continues: “Killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were famously infatuated with the brutal shooting game Doom, and built their own level with a layout similar to that of the school they attended.”
German police gathered in the aftermath of the Munich shooting, (Image Credit: Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)
Meanwhile, CNBC ran with the headline: “Munich gunman, a fan of violent video games, rampage killers, had planned attack for a year.” After the shooting it was suggested that Sonboly had an unhealthy obsession with mass murderer Anders Breivik, with him staging his shooting on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s massacre of 77 people, but CNBC’s headline suggests that this is less of an issue that him playing Counter-Strike every now and again.
Robert Heimberger, the president of the state crime office, also suggested that video games were at least partially responsible for the shooting, saying that Counter-Strike: Source – the game reportedly owned by Ali Sonboly – was “a game played by nearly every known rampage killer.” Of course, those who are in possession of a Steam account will know that it’s almost impossible to be signed up to the network and not own a copy of Counter-Strike: Source, given that it was developed by the creators of Steam and is one of the most popular games to have ever released on the platform.
The suggestion that violent games are in any way linked with Ali Sonboly’s actions is an argument undermined by the complete lack of evidence supporting this theory. While video games have consistently been linked to aggressive behavior in the real world, there has been no conclusive report indicating that this is the case, with the studies that have been conducted in this field having wildly differing results.
A study published by the American Psychological Association (APA) back in August 2015 claimed that evidence suggested video games could be linked to milder acts of aggression, though there was no direct correlation between violent games and real-world crime. However, following the publishing of this report many outlets began questioning the authority of the APA to conduct such a report, considering that four of the seven members of its task force were considered biased against the medium, with two of them having signed an anti-game amicus brief, the third having signed another linking games to violent behavior and the fourth publishing several reports describing a link between games and violence, including mass murders.
With no worthwhile evidence to support the suggestion that games encourage real-world violence, it’s exhausting that certain media outlets still continue to point the finger at this hobby when an atrocity such as the Munich shooting is committed. The suggestion that a game in Ali Sonboly’s Steam library is responsible for his abhorrent actions, and the insinuation that there’s a causal link between games and crime despite no evidence supporting this claim, is yet another attempt to incite a moral panic over the supposed real-world ramifications of playing violent video games. Considering that Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is routinely one of the top streamed games on Twitch with hundreds of thousands of viewers, if it really was causing people to kill in real life, there probably wouldn’t be very many people left on the planet.
