There is no good evidence that violent video games cause real-life violence. Christopher Ferguson has reviewed the literature extensively and shown that claims to the contrary are bogus (and the Supreme Court agreed). Just for starters: the era in which video games exploded in popularity is exactly the era in which violent crime among young people plummeted. It’s not true, though, that anyone is fated to be violent. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, I presented a hundred graphs showing rates of violence changing over time, mostly downward. The near-80% decline in US rape since the early 1970s, and the halving of the homicide rate since 1992, are just two examples. Rates of violence respond to certain features of an environment, such as the incentives of an effective police and criminal justice system, and the surrounding norms of legitimate retaliation. They just don’t respond to video games.”