For gamers of a certain vintage, the idea that video games lead to violent crimes and mass shootings is a tale as old as the founding of the ESRB. Yet despite plenty of scientific studies finding otherwise, it’s not stopping the current administration’s leadership of the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) and members of the government from trotting out the scapegoat yet again as part of a supposed wider focus on gun violence.

This effort was brought up during a press conference with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in which he discusses, sans citations, the “many, many things” that are causing what he characterizes as an increase of gun violence in the U.S.

“One is the dependence on psychiatric drugs, which is, in our country, is unlike any other country in the world. It could be – there could be connections with videogames, with social media, or a number of things. We’re initiating studies to look at the correlation and the connection, potential connection, between over-medicating our kids and this violence, and these other possible co-founders as well.”

Kennedy also recalled an apparent dream scenario where kids in schools were supposedly allowed to have firearms and therefore had less to worry about (???) until the 1990s, when he says was the point of an uptick in violence (it was not). “We had comparably the same number of guns. Nobody was doing that,” Kennedy claimed in the conference. “We had gun clubs at my school. Kids brought guns to school and were encouraged to do so, and nobody was walking into schools and shooting people.”

These bizarre claims do not match up to reality. Since the ’90s, violent crime and juvenile crime specifically has plummeted as much as 50%, owing heavily to the rise of the internet and video games, whose revenues quadrupled over that same period. Also, we realize that some of our readers may not have been kids in the ’80s and ’90s, but several of us were, and we can assure you that under no circumstances were we encouraged to bring guns into schools; we were all too busy practicing how to bunker down in case of nuclear war, among the many other things we most definitely had to worry about.

Also, while we’re fact-checking this nonsense, it’s worth pointing out that overall household gun ownership over the last 40 years has declined by 28%, so that part isn’t true either (there are more guns, but fewer people own them, i.e., people buying them buy a lot of them). Finally, perhaps the Secretary isn’t aware, but other countries also have video games! And yet for some reason that’s escaping us, they just do not have the same gun violence problem. Some countries even spend more per capita on them than we do! For example, in 2019, China spent roughly as much on video games as the United States per capita, and yet we had dramatically more gun violence deaths. Huh!

In any case, the press conference was ostensibly a part of the government’s report on improving the health of children in America, but it doesn’t make any sort of specific note about a study related to video gaming and violence, noting only a planned effort by the Surgeon General to “launch an education and awareness initiative on the effect of screens on children and the actions being taken by states to limit screen time at school,” which first of all is a totally different issue and second of all is quite a feat since the government does not actually have a Surgeon General. Worst. Timeline. Ever.