With the impact of the horrific attack on a Connecticut elementary school still fresh, a grieving nation turns to an equally grief-stricken media in the hopes of making sense of this nightmare. What they find, though, is a lamentable parade of falsehoods and half-truths. With the true villain in this story having robbed the nation of its desire for revenge, media figures and politicians alike are casting about for an antagonist. Since Sunday, a target has emerged in violent video games, and an emotional media is venting their powerless anger on the entertainment industry. But to indict entertainment, and video games in particular, is a self-serving instinct and irresponsible broadcasting. 
 
 
 
 A disturbing number of public figures have lashed out at video games since the atrocity committed at Sandy Hook Elementary on Friday. A bipartisan group of legislators embraced this scapegoating on the Sunday news programs; from Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge. 
 
 They were joined by members of the media – sadly, too many to count. 
 
 On MSNBC on Monday, Chris Jansing asked her guests what connection Adam Lanza’s interest in video games had to his murderous shooting spree. She quoted senior White House advisor David Axelrod who tweeted “shouldn’t we also quit marketing murder as a game?” Liberal contributor Goldie Taylor revealed that she refused to let her child play games until he was 14-years-old. 
 
 “Exposure to that kind of content is just simply not good for children,” Taylor said. “I think that it’s important to guard our children and keep them safe from some of these messages that are simply destructive.” She noted that music, movies, games, and even cartoons, are responsible for… something. 
 
 On Fox & Friends on Monday, legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. delivered an offensively sermonizing renunciation of entertainment producers and videogame makers who are “clinging to guns economically.” 
 
 “They are glamorizing guns in this country. They are the scourge in terms of these guns,” Johnson Jr. said of game and filmmakers. “Guns can kill if people have evil intentions, but don’t tell our children that it’s acceptable to mow down people in malls, in churches, in schools, on the street – they don’t know better. They know what they’re taught. And we’re teaching them wrong.” 
 
 “Death should not be the byproduct of our entertainment,” Johnson Jr. concluded. 
 
 Johnson Jr. cites a study which purports to show prolonged exposure to violent video games over the course of three straight days made the subjects show “increases in aggressive behavior and hostile expectations.” But Johnson Jr. is guilty of cherry-picking data to support his conclusion. A 2009 study showed that video games which focus on driving make the subjects more aggressive than violent games in where the player is primarily shooting at targets. Another study showed that just thinking about violent video games can make males more aggressive. Given the ever-expanding target demographic for games, gun violence should be on the rise. In fact, the opposite is occurring. 
 
 Violent crime, and gun crime in particular, has decreased as videogame playing has increased. Are the two conditions related – that is unlikely. Myriad factors are responsible for the decrease in violent crime; videogame proliferation is probably not among them. Likewise, there is no causal link between being a videogame player and exhibiting violent tendencies. 
 
 The Economist tackled this subject in 2005, and the wisdom they committed to print still pertains: It’s the classic struggle of the old versus the new that has video games in policymakers’ crosshairs: 
 
 “The opposition to gaming springs largely from the neophobia that has pitted the old against the entertainments of the young for centuries. Most gamers are under 40, and most critics are non-games-playing over-40s.” 
 
 The horror that unfolded in Connecticut on Friday was an unspeakable atrocity. It was not, as some have said, a tragedy. Tragedies are so often beyond control, but gun violence is not an inevitable consequence of living in a free society. Politicians feel the need to do something — anything — in the wake of such a disaster to assuage the inevitable public cries for action. Media figures, however, have a different responsibility. Theirs mission is not to advocate but to inform – unfortunately, that kind of responsible broadcasting is fast becoming an anachronism on cable news. 
 
 It is unlikely that any reasonable law would have prevented this attack without negatively impacting millions of law-abiding citizens. No amount of reverence for an almighty God would have made this killer think twice about his actions. No movie or videogame drove Lanza to murder 20 first graders in cold blood. 
 
 Broadcasters used to feel it was their mission to speak these cold truths to their audiences when disaster struck, lest the electorate reach for emotionally-driven and overreaching remedies to jarring events. Today, broadcasters pull on emotional triggers and further aggravate their viewers with baseless scapegoating. I do not know if there is an immediate solution to that condition. Now that is a tragedy. 
 
 > >Follow Noah Rothman (@Noah_C_Rothman) on Twitter 
 
 Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com ||||| Thirty-one years ago, when a man named Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II, the arrest and the trials that followed were dominated by a question: Who sent the would-be assassin? The Soviets? The Bulgarian secret police? Turkish fascists? John Paul was asked if he had a view, and he said it didn’t matter. In his biography “Man of the Century,” Jonathan Kwitney reported John Paul’s conversation with a close friend Cardinal Andrzej Maria Deskur. “I know well that the responsible one was the devil,” the pope said. “And whether he used the Bulgarian people or the Turkish people, it was diabolical.” 
 
 I thought of that story for days after the first bulletins of 20 children shot in Newtown, Conn. Whatever we find out about the thinking, habits and sickness of Adam Lanza, it was the evil one who sent him to kill those children. And evil is part of life. 
 
 But there are three obvious public policy ideas that come to the forefront after Newtown, and what happened there can push them forward quickly. 
 
 First, broadly, we must provide more treatment options for parents of children whom they know to be mentally unstable and potentially dangerous. If your child is hungry, you can get food. If your child breaks his leg, the hospital is there. But if your child is psychologically sick or mentally unbalanced and beginning to show signs of violent behavior, you’re more or less on your own. We have to change this. We are making more sick teenagers and young men now, not fewer, and this is going to continue as our culture breaks up. I think we all know this, deep down. 
 
 Second, Congress should move quickly—really, right away—to ban something almost every member would ban next week if they were given a clean, short, unambiguous piece of legislation. Two years ago, after Tucson, I urgedPresident Obama to make such a bill a priority in his 2011 State of the Union Address. 
 
 A hot subject then was the polarizing nature of our political rhetoric. But I wrote: 
 
 Normal people are not afraid of a lowering of discourse in political speech. They don’t like it, but it’s not keeping them up nights. Normal people are afraid of nuts with guns. That keeps them up nights. They know our society has grown more broken, families more sundered, our culture more degraded, and they fear it is producing more lost and disturbed young people. They fear those young people walking into a school or a mall with a semiautomatic pistol with an extended clip. What civilian needs a pistol with a magazine that loads 33 bullets and allows you to kill that many people without even stopping to reload? No one but people with bad intent. Those clips were banned once; the president should call for reimposing the ban. . . . The president should seize the moment and come out strong for a ban. 
 
 My reasoning at the time: many Republicans on the Hill were ambivalent at best about extended clips. Few would go to the wall to defend them. The problem, as I saw it, was the Democratic Party, which had overreached after the assassinations of the 1960s, talked about banning all handguns, and suffered a lasting political setback. (Bill Clinton bucked the trend and paid a price for it.) The Democratic Party got burned and didn’t want to mention gun control anymore, even when it came to obvious things like extended clips. 
 
 My reasoning now: Newtown changes everything. Move. 
 
 What I fear is that the Democrats will overreach and put together some big, comprehensive gun bill that will bog down in useless disagreement, debate and acrimony. But they can get extended ammunition clips banned tomorrow with a brief and limited bill, and they can use that victory to gain momentum and launch a bigger debate on gun violence. A quick victory now would be good for the country: At least something good, one small thing, would have come from the disaster in Newtown, and would have come quickly. 
 
 Third, everyone who has warned for a quarter-century now that our national culture has become a culture of death—movies, TV shows, videogames drenched in blood and violence—has been correct. Deep down we all know it, as deep down we know our culture has a bad impact on the young and unstable who aren’t sturdy enough to withstand and resist sick messages and imagery. 
 
 When Hollywood wants to discourage cigarette smoking it knows exactly how to do it, because it knows exactly how much power it has to deliver cultural messages. When Hollywood wants to encourage environmentalism it knows how to do it. But there’s a lot of money to be made in violence…
– Everyone's talking about the need for gun control and mental health treatment in the wake of the Newtown school shooting, and Peggy Noonan is on board with reform in both areas. But there's a third area she thinks sorely needs to be addressed: "our national culture ... of death." Violent movies, TV shows, and video games have "a bad impact on the young and unstable who aren’t sturdy enough to withstand and resist sick messages and imagery," Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal. Republicans can't get anything changed, because Hollywood doesn't respect them—but if President Obama "tells Hollywood it has made America sicker, Hollywood will be forced to listen." () But while Noonan isn't the only one blaming Hollywood, others aren't buying it: On Mediaite, Noah Rothman rounds up the "lamentable parade of falsehoods and half-truths" currently winding through the media. "To indict entertainment, and video games in particular, is a self-serving instinct and irresponsible broadcasting," he writes. In fact, violent crime—particularly gun crime—has gone down as video game playing has gone up. "No movie or video game drove Lanza to murder 20 first graders in cold blood," Rothman writes, and to blame the entertainment industry is "baseless scapegoating." () Quentin Tarantino feels similarly. He's apparently tired of having to defend his violent films: At a press conference for Django Unchained Saturday, he said, “I just think you know there's violence in the world, tragedies happen, blame the playmakers. It's a western. Give me a break." He added that only the perpetrators should be blamed, the Independent reports. Django saw its premiere tonight canceled in light of the shooting.