On Wednesday, California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein spoke at a public affairs forum in San Francisco. She said the video game industry should take steps to limit violence in games, and chased it with a passive-aggressive little threat:

“[Video games play] a very negative role for young people, and the industry ought to take note of that. If Sandy Hook doesn’t do it, if the knowledge of these video games this young man played doesn’t, then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the future.”

Admittedly, games were not the focus of the forum. Much more time was devoted to the role of the NRA and gun manufacturers in offsetting public support for gun control. Both issues are central to the Sandy Hook debate that continues to shape the political conversation in Washington. Understandably, the entire country is still trying to make sense of one of the most senseless tragedies in American history.

Regardless of anyone’s personal feelings on either issue, the two obvious issues for lawmakers to focus on following Sandy Hook were mental health and gun control. In recent weeks, that debate has turned decidedly towards gun control. But video games keep coming back into the conversation.

On December 21, one week after the Sandy Hook shooting, NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre said in a press conference: “Guns don’t kill people. Video games, the media and Obama’s budget kill people.” LaPierre went on to propose a nationwide program to have every school in America guarded by armed volunteers, somewhat overshadowing his earlier condemnation of gaming, at least in the media.

Tennessee Republican Representative Diane Black later attributed the Sandy Hook shooting to “unprecedented levels of violent games, music and so on.” Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia introduced one of Congress’s earliest Sandy Hook-related bills: a bill to study the impact of violent video games. Apparently the Sandy Hook shooter was a devoted player of Modern Warfare 3 and Starcraft. Given this information, a study of the impact of violent video games actually makes sense.

Except for all these reasons:

Since 1984, many studies relating video games to violence and aggression have already been conducted. While violent games do lead to slightly heightened aggression in the short term, no ties to extreme violence have ever been shown.

Other countries around the world have access to all the same games we have in the United States, with nowhere near the corresponding number of gun-related deaths.

The number of violent video games sold in the U.S. continues to grow, but for years, violent crime in the U.S. has steadily gone down.

In 2011, Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games are protected under the 1^st Amendment right to free speech.

I don’t condemn a study like the ones proposed by lawmakers. But the psychology community leads me to believe another study won’t teach us anything. Statement after statement comes out saying “mass shootings occur too rarely and randomly to effectively conduct a group study”; “these things happen as a result of many factors, not any one factor”; “any new study would take many years to glean any reliable information.” Lawmakers who place blame on the gaming industry for Sandy Hook simply do not have facts on their side, meaning they’re making stuff up and passing off their own uninformed opinions as science, either to 1) Tell their constituents “Look at me, I’m doing something!” without offending anyone whose influence they care about, or 2) manufacture a false debate to divert attention away from real-life guns.

Could violent video games be one of many factors that together contribute to tragedies like Sandy Hook? It’s unproven, but yes, it’s possible. But the next time I hear a politician screaming for the gaming industry to take responsibility for a mass killing, I want to hear some science to back it up, not take their duplicitous, self-serving word for it.

One last thought: Nobody’s questioning the shooter’s mental instability. Nobody. Washington, if you want to make America safer, don’t pass a law that makes the Gamestop cashier check my I.D. Show me a bill that improves quality of and access to mental health services. [drops mic]