Not a game any more

Be honest now. When you first heard of a mass shooting at a Florida gaming convention did you initially think that someone had just transitioned from some sort of computerised shoot-em-up to the real thing?

Not so. The animated world in this competition was a recreation of a National Football League game.

You could still call that computerised violence if you like, but most people won’t.

Witnesses say the suspect, identified as David Katz, had been eliminated from the tournament before fatally shooting two others, injuring 11, and taking his own life. So it would appear to be a sore loser rather than someone who was necessarily rendered trigger-happy through the stimulus of gun-related gaming.

Mass shootings are so routine in the land of the freely armed that this wasn’t even the year’s first for the state of Florida. Following the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, US President Donald Trump showed his usual acuity for getting to the heart of a problem by using the tragedy to revive debate over whether violent video games can trigger violent behaviour.

Well, yes, some studies have indicated a link between gaming and emotional arousal, but they’ve pulled up short of finding evidence that this, in turn, leads to physical violence.

And the gaming industry was quick to point out that its wares are distributed to an ardent and truly global market, which scarcely explains why the US has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than just about anywhere.

The industry has also been able to rebuff clampdown legislation in California on constitutional grounds – the First Amendment. That’s the one about rights to free speech. Whereas it’s the Second Amendment, regarding the right to bear arms, that the onlooking world tends to regard as more germane to the problem of mass shootings.

Initial indications are that this latest shooting spree lacks either the sheer scale or the distinctive point of interest to agitate a whole lot of public feedback other than an avalanche of ‘‘you can’t blame gaming’’ memes on social media.

But that may be a rash prediction. We might yet wind up with bumper-sticker reactions: ‘‘Guns don’t kill people, gaming kills people.’’

One thing’s for sure, though. You won’t be seeing any White House tweets that the link between one of the nation’s most beloved sports and mass shootings is something that needs looking into.

There is a change, a significant one, to be noted as these shootings roll around with such frequency.

This one was captured on live streams. And we’re getting used to that. It’s increasingly the case that footage emerges from the very heart of the chaos and carnage, and not from news cameras in the first instance.

The case has been put that in the US, where Vietnam was the first truly televised war, the advent of colour TV was a significant factor in accelerating anti-war sentiment. Suddenly blood was actually red. Well, that’s a thin theory, but in any case here and now, we have almost achieved the reverse. Actual footage of actual atrocities doesn’t yet look quite as realistic as a tip-top game.

‘‘Mass shootings are so routine in the land of the freely armed that this wasn’t even the year’s first for the state of Florida.’’