Speculation continues to swirl around the potential involvement of violent video games in Adam Lanza 's rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December . The official investigation has yet to release its report , but consistent accounts indicate Lanza was an enthusiastic player of violent games . On Monday , CBS News raised eyebrows with a report citing unnamed law enforcement sources conjecturing that Lanza was motivated in part by violent video games as well as Norway shooter Anders Breivik . The investigating Connecticut police later said that 's `` all speculation . '' According to the Hartford Courant , we know that when the police searched Lanza 's home after the shooting , they found thousands of dollars ' worth of violent video games . We also know that Lanza 's mom let him play games while she traveled . News : Report -- Sandy Hook shooter tried to emulate Norway massacre . But just because violent video games seemed to have been a part of Lanza 's life , as with many young men , we can not jump to conclusions . The reality is that there is no evidence linking violent games to mass shootings . We tend to return to this particular element , and it 's interesting to see how quickly people like to latch on to this noncorrelation as if it were truly meaningful . The notion that mass homicides are linked to violent media was debunked as far back as 2002 by the U.S. Secret Service , which found that school shooters did n't consume high levels of violent media . But as a society we tend to focus on video games because it 's easy to do so . For example , in the recent case of Nehemiah Griego , a 15-year-old boy accused of killing his family in New Mexico , the police seemed to have been obsessed with violent games during a press conference . The police representative shifted a reporter 's question about illegal drugs to video games , the gist of which seemed to be that the boy enjoyed talking about `` Modern Warfare . '' However , other reports suggested the boy 's access to violent games or television had been restricted by his family . In the weeks since the Newtown , Connecticut , massacre , there have been a host of high-profile crimes committed by older men . William Spengler , 62 , shot and killed two firefighters and apparently killed his sister in New York . Jimmy Lee Dykes , 65 , killed a bus driver and kidnapped a 5-year-old boy in Alabama . And Douglas Harmon , 70 , killed two people at a Phoenix law office , police said . These older men do n't fit the profile of video game players , yet they all did something horrible . Zakaria : Do n't blame the video games . Curiously , no one seems interested in investigating the effects of media popular among the elderly . Our attention to video games in the cases of some shootings but not others is what psychologists call confirmation bias , and it creates the illusion of a correlation where there is none . It 's worth asking ourselves why we keep returning to video games despite the lack of evidence to support its link to violence . Of course , this kind of association is not new . Some scholars blamed television for the crime wave of the 1970s and '80s , which has since vanished . And comic books in the 1950s were blamed by psychiatrists for not only delinquency but homosexuality ( Batman and Robin were secretly gay it seemed . I 'm not making this up ) . In hindsight , these strands of associations look ridiculous , but in the moment they served a purpose . Opinion : NRA 's video game smacks of hypocrisy . Rare though they are , mass shootings often strike at schools , malls , churches , theaters -- places we all go in places we all live . One of the questions asked repeatedly after the Newtown shooting is why Lanza did what he did . To say that he was an evil young man who cruelly inflicted suffering on others simply because , in his mind , life had given him the shaft is not satisfying . We want to control the uncontrollable , predict the unpredictable . We want to understand why an impossible to understand event happened and give ourselves some illusion of control . If violent video games were some small but critical component of Lanza 's motivation , why we could just get rid of such games and make this whole problem go away . It 's a tempting belief but absolutely wrong . Tech : After Newtown , shoppers think twice about violent video games . If we could make it legal to regulate violence in games , would that have stopped Lanza or any of the other mass homicides through history ? No , not a one . We should not be distracted from looking for the real contributing factors to societal violence .
Consistent accounts indicate that Adam Lanza played a lot of violent video games . Christopher J. Ferguson : There is no evidence linking video games to mass shootings . He says people tend to see an illusion of correlation when there is none . Ferguson : The problem with this argument is it assumes causation, which we know does not exist in the real world.