In the wake of Friday’s mass murder of 20 children and six adults at Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook Elementary by shooter Adam Lanza, cries for tighter gun control and additional focus on mental illness have been made by media, social networks, politicians and everyday citizens. But as America grieves, another culprit has emerged: First-person shooter video games.

Lanza was reported to have been a fan of computer games featuring killing and warfare, with an entire room in his mother’s home dedicated to a computer where he spent hours each day playing violent games such as Mass Effect or Far Cry 3. Did the line between reality and game fantasy somehow blur in his mind? Although it’s possible, it could have just as easily been any number of other factors.

“Aggression is multicausal,” said Iowa State University developmental psychology associate professor Douglas Gentile, according to the Web site ScholarsandRogues. “There are over 100 known risk factors for aggression; media violence is just one of them—not the biggest but not the smallest. The only way that anyone does something seriously violent is if they have multiple risk factors and limited protective factors for violent behavior, and thankfully most of our children have a great many protective factors, can consume a lot of violent video games, and still never do anything violent.”

Therefore, the fact that Lanza’s mother was an avid gun collector could just have easily caused the young man, who has been described by family as autistic, to snap. Still, gaming organizer and reporter Antwand Pearman, who runs the outfit GamerFitNation, is calling for a show of solidarity among all online shooter gamers Dec. 21, with a 24-hour Day of Ceasefire for Online Shooters. Pearman says the call to cease fire is not an admission of guilt, but “a show that we as gamers give a damn.”

In a video posted Dec. 15, Pearman spoke of growing up around guns.

“I grew up in a really bad neighborhood,” he said. “And I grew up with gun violence in my life. It got to a point where, to me, it got numb. I was used to it. When I heard somebody got killed to me it was just another story, but as I got older and became a man, I started realizing I just didn’t want to hear the stories no more.”

[Image via Shutterstock]