The hosts of Fox & Friends on Monday morning placed blame on everything from video games to gun-free zones after two deadly mass shootings left almost 30 people dead over the weekend.
On the morning show frequently watched by President Trump, the hosts ran through "warning signs" that the shooter in Dayton, Ohio exhibited, with Ainsley Earhardt citing his suspected Twitter page and saying that the shooter "praised Satan." From there, Pete Hegseth suggested that violent video games played a role.
"You add those impulses with video games ... first [person] shooter games would desensitize folks to the violence," Hegseth said, citing the lieutenant governor of Texas' similar comments on Sunday. "...When you see it through a screen and you don't relate to it in person, it makes it seem like it's more accessible."
Earhardt agreed that video games could be one of "so many factors" at play, hypothesizing that another could be not growing up going to church on Sundays, as that "teaches you to have fear of God and to have good morals."
Fox's Pete Hegseth mentions the El Paso shooter's "hit list against girls in his school" not as a red flag of violent misogyny, but of "mental illness." Ainsley Earhardt says it could be video games, Satan worship, or just "maybe a child is born with mental illness." pic.twitter.com/SvDTWe2Jlp
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) August 5, 2019
Hegseth also blamed gun-free zones for preventing people from "immediately shooting back," reports Media Matters for America's Bobby Lewis, "So it’s not as simple as saying, 'ban weapons of war,'" Hegseth said. "Some people would say, hey, I as an individual should have the right to defend myself, myself included."
Earhardt, meanwhile, suggested that gun control measures may be useless anyway, as "if you're bad enough to be able to walk into a Walmart and just blast people and take people's lives, you're bad enough to go and steal a gun." Brendan Morrow