Claims that Donald Trump will ban violent video games have returned in a viral video. In the 24-second clip, the former president partially blames “grisly and gruesome” video games for the glorification of violence throughout the United States. He believes action needs to be taken “to stop or substantially reduce this,” urging that this must be done immediately. This video has resurfaced weeks before the 2024 presidential election on Reddit and on X (formerly Twitter), where it has amassed over 1.5 million views, with fears that Trump would try to ban video games if he wins the election against Kamala Harris.
Will Donald Trump really ban violent video games?
While Trump has blamed video games for increased violence and mass shootings throughout the US, no ban on violent video games came to fruition during his term as president.
For context, the viral clip comes from a much longer speech that Trump gave from The White House on August 5, 2019 (the full video can be viewed on YouTube via Sky News). It came after horrific back-to-back mass shootings, with Trump specifically naming the El Paso shooting on August 3 that killed over 20 people and the Dayton shooting on August 4 that killed 10, including the gunman. In addition to violent video games, he also argued that “mental illness and hatred” contributed to U.S. mass shootings.
This was not the first time that Trump pointed the finger at video games for violent behavior. In 2018 after the Florida school shooting, as reported by PBS, he made plans to meet with representatives of the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). In 2013, then Vice President Joe Biden also held meetings with video game industry executives after the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school.
The ESA stated after Trump’s meeting that while the organization is also “deeply concerned about the level of gun violence,” it believes that “video game are plainly not the issue.” It notes that violent video games are played around the world, yet “the U.S. has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation.”
Joe Biden, in a CNN interview during his 2020 campaign via The Hill, said that while violent video games were “not healthy,” it was “not the reason why we have this carnage in our streets.”
Numerous studies over the last two decades have not found a casual link between video games and violence. In fact, some research shows the opposite effect. Patrick Markey, a psychology professor at Villanova University, found that men “who commit severe acts of violence” actually played less violent video games and were much less interested in them than the average male. That said, other countries have banned video games outright.
