First off, I have absolute proof that video games are not the cause of this epidemic of youth violence in America. No, really, I do. Ready?

There is no epidemic of youth violence in America.

The whole concept is a lie manufactured, distributed and perpetuated by the media. Kids are not killing each other more frequently than they used to. In fact, it turns out the opposite is true.

It doesn't take a genius to conclude that violent crime is at the lowest it has been in a good thirty years. For effect, I've also marked the release of the Playstation console, the first Grand Theft Auto game, the PS2 console, and the infamous GTA 3. Wow, look at those surges in violence!

Believe it or not, I got that graph - and all the others in this piece - directly from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Statistics. All I added was the video game timeline. This isn't some privately-funded poll or crazy game journalist defense mechanism - this is the actual, most recent government data on crime as used by the FBI. The fact that they all max out at 2003 is irritating, but this debate has raged much longer than the past few months.
Something must be missing. That first graph is the overall violent crime rate, and were talking about youth violence here. So I found the data sorted by age, and it turns out that through 2002, youth homicide actually dropped across the board, the only increase being among adults. If I may quote directly from the D.O.J. report, "Recently, the offending rates for 14-17 year-olds reached the lowest levels ever recorded."

The lowest levels ever recorded. In other words, the Playstation era has, in fact, produced the most non-violent kids ever. But I thought video games were training children to kill? I'm sure I read something like that here and here and here and here and here and here.

To be fair, there have been about 300 studies on the effects of violent media, about 30 of which have been about video games. Most have found little to no connection, although some studies found a small, casual correlation between aggressive people and violent media.

In an analysis of the risk factors of youth violence by the Surgeon General of the United States of America, violent media is categorized as 'Small Effect Size.' In fact, there are 27 risk factors rated higher than exposure to violent media, like socioeconomic status, academic failure, poor parent-child relations, weak social ties, and being male. Quick! Ban all the males!

So is the media and the government flat out lying to us? Yes, and they have been doing so for years. As touched on in the rabble-rousing films of Michael Moore, fear sells. It's how you turn terrible tragedies like Columbine and the WTC Attack into election votes and must-see TV.

The media in particular loves to bash video games, making sure to point out any time there's an Xbox within 50 yards of a crime. This is because games are the new competition - every hour you spend interacting with a game is one hour less spent drooling in front of their fear-mongering programming.

And it's working. Sparked by Columbine, mainstream media routinely paints a picture of gamers as odd shut-ins dangerously close to the precipice of violent behavior, and almost unerringly misconstrue the games themselves without taking the time to fact check, as in the very first sentence of this CBS News report. Points for killing cops in GTA? Do games still have points?