Head's up that I'm seeing increasing online chatter blaming the Charlie Kirk assassination on video games. 1990s-era Boomer takes on video games from people who have never held a controller are back on the menu.

I first noticed it in this Michael Savage column:

Even more disturbing, Savage warned, is the way violent rhetoric online merges with role-playing in video games until players can no longer separate fantasy from reality. “Many of these games are about fighting an oppressive fascist government. So the kid playing becomes the hero taking on fascists — then one day he carries that mindset into real life. And suddenly Charlie Kirk is a ‘fascist’ who must be eliminated.”

At the time, I dismissed it as an out-of-touch and uninformed opinion from an elderly man who didn't grow up around video games the same way the generations of men after him did. Unfortunately for us, however, there are people who listen to these uninformed talking heads. Those people are now parroting back the same "it's those darn video games that are making the kids violent" nonsense in comment sections all over the internet.

For better or for worse, video gaming is far more mainstream than it was in the 1990s. Anti-gaming arguments aren't going to have much sticking power against now multiple generations of gamers. Plus there probably isn't much interest at Steam or Sony or Microsoft on cracking down on anything that isn't porn. I'm not going to doom about it. But still, head's up.