Tea Party-endorsed candidate Zach Dasher is trying his best to unseat Rep. Vance McAllister (R-La.), but an old podcast about the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting has come back to haunt him. Dasher, who is the nephew of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson, hosted a podcast called "Why Did This Happen" three days after the school shooting in Newtown, Conn. (which occurred on December 14, 2012), claiming that the shooter Adam Lanza was influenced by atheism, postmodernism, and video games.

Conservative TV and radio host Glenn Beck criticized Ubisoft's recently released open-world hacking game Watch Dogs on his Internet TV show. During a recent episode of his show The Blaze, Beck called the game's protagonist Aiden Pearce an "anti-hero."

"Why must everyone be an anti-hero? Why must everyone break the law? Why can't we have a Superman? Why can't we have somebody who is doing the right thing, does the hard thing? Instead, everybody is an anti-hero," Beck said.

Washington D.C-based news station WIJA offers a report that tries to solicit anger from local policemen about the depiction of violence in Starbreeze Studios.

Connecticut state lawmaker DebraLee Hovey (R) has penned a lengthy editorial calling for warning labels on video games and for a sin tax to be levied against interactive entertainment products rated "M" by the ESRB. This is the second time Hovey has called for a sin tax on video games in the state, though her last effort failed to get passed by CT lawmakers.

A 15-year-old teen from the UK accused of stabbing his Spanish tutor is being pegged as a "loner" and a "gamer" who enjoyed "achievement hunting" and playing games like "Dark Souls" and other PS3 games by UK paper The Daily Mail. The Daily Mail calls the unnamed teen a "depressed recluse" obsessed with a "video game [Dark Souls] where [a] lone cursed character travels through fantasy world killing others."

The 15-year-old is currently being held on suspicion of stabbing his Spanish tutor Ann Maguire.

What's faster than a speeding train? Apparently U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who was nearly clipped by one at a press conference on Friday while standing on a train platform. Ironically enough, Sen. Blumenthal (who is known on GamePolitics as a politician keen on passing laws against gaming and the video games industry at large) was at the train stop to promote train safety.

New research coming out of Iowa State University (can you guess where this is going to go?) suggests that children who play violent video games will have more aggressive behavior and keep aggressive thoughts regardless of age, gender or parental involvement.

The research results are based on a three-year longitudinal panel study that surveyed (on an annual basis) 3,034 children and adolescents from 6 primary and 6 secondary schools in Singapore. The study notes that the beginning of the survey period participants were in the third, fourth, seventh, and eighth grades.

New research from Craig Anderson, a psychologist and professor at Iowa State University who is known for his anti-game research is making the rounds this week, but it is not going unchallenged. Anderson's latest research suggests that children who play violent video games "may experience" an increase in aggressive thoughts, which "could" lead to aggressive behavior.

According to a Wall Street Journal report (membership required), the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) spent a considerable amount of money and effort in fighting anti-videogame laws in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Jersey - and in Oklahoma last year. Many of the bills have either died or are locked in legislative committees waiting for approval.

The ESA is also taking aim at a federal bill, according to records and a co-sponsor of the bill.

I'm not sure if this Telegraph article on game addiction is supposed to be some kind of Onion-esque comedy bit, but it sure reads like one. In it the author offers five tips for beating your game addiction.

Putting aside that fact that game addiction (and Internet addiction for that matter) is not a real recognized addiction like gambling is by mental health professionals around the world, the article offers such wonderful tips as:

1) Time Yourself.

MCV points out a pretty astonishing story that recently appeared in the UK newspaper the Daily Mail.

A nine-year old boy from Orlando, Florida has been placed in "home confinement" for bring weapons to school. His father claims that the boy brought "an unloaded handgun, a magazine with six bullets inside, a steak knife and a small-handled sledge hammer" to school because he was emulating what the main character "Steve" does in Minecraft.

"They use hammers to dig and knives and guns to protect themselves from zombies," he said, according to the a report from Orlando news station WFTV.

It must be hard for the mainstream media to continue with the hypothetical that Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis was heavily influenced by playing violent video games in the wake of new evidence released by the FBI on Wednesday. The FBI released a note written by Alexis prior to his shooting rampage that led to the killing of 12 people. His rampage ended when police shot and killed him. In the note, Alexis says that ultra-low frequency attacks had unsettled him enough to kill:

Conservative college group Campus Reform's Caleb Bonham asks college students about the "virtual morality" (or lack thereof, from his perspective) in Grand Theft Auto V. In his video he interviews college students about whether it is acceptable to run over a prostitute and get your money back or kill policemen in the game. Most say that these are perfectly acceptable activities because the world is not real. Bonham does manage to stump a few people when he asks if allowing a player to rape someone is acceptable, just like the other things players can do in the game.

Christopher J. Ferguson, chair of the psychology department at Stetson University goes head-to-head with Dr. Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at Ohio State University in two different editorials on CNN.com.

Tulsa, Oklahoma Talk Radio Station KFAQ AM 1170 gives former Florida Attorney and familiar anti-game crusader Jack Thompson a chance to talk about his favorite subject: Grand Theft Auto.

On Pat Campbell's podcast, Thompson discusses at length the effects of the Grand Theft Auto series, the Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis' obsessive gaming habits, and the possible culpability of corporations that make violent video games.

You can find the show here. It's about 30 minutes long.

Dr. Charles Williams, Ph.D., Associate Teaching Professor of Psychology and Education at Drexel University, stopped by Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor to talk to host Bill O'Reilly about "the impact of violent video games."

An article on ABC News tries to determine how violent video games fit in with real-world violent behavior. The report focuses on what Michael Ritrovato said about Washington Navy Yard Shooter Aaron Alexis' obsessive gaming habits.

Ritrovato, who has been name checked in a number of stories for these comments, tells ABC News that the former Navy reservist was obsessed with military-style video games:

Not to be left out of the "let's blame video games for every mass shooting that happens" narrative being pushed by American cable news outlets like MSNBC and Fox News, UK paper The Daily Telegraph offers an article on how Washington Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis was "obsessed with video games." The title of the article?

While we (rightly) point the finger at Fox News for pushing the narrative that violent video games somehow drive people to shoot people like the Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis, the cable news network is certainly not alone.

The new Fox & Friends host, Elisabeth Hasselbeck (formerly the lone conservative on ABC's The View) suggested during the Tuesday morning show that "the left" was trying to make Monday’s mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard about "gun control." Instead she pointed out that the country doesn't need a national registry for guns, it needs one for to track video game purchases.

In a new report, the conservative news network tries to link video games to gunman Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people before police shot him dead at the Navy Shipyard in Washington where he worked earlier this week. While the report goes into great detail about the gunman's troubled past - including issues with mental illness and multiple run-ins with police, the focus of the Fox story is about his video game habits.

On August 14, Connecticut Speaker of the House J. Brendan Sharkey wrote a letter to executives at Valve Software, Take-Two, the Entertainment Software Association, and Activision Blizzard asking them to stop licensing real guns from gun manufactures for popular first-person shooter franchises such as Call of Duty and Battlefield.

While it took a long time, Andrew Eisen has finally created a video response to the State lawmaker's request entitled "Guns Don't Kill People, Licensed Guns in Video Games Do."

Fox News can't seem to get enough of trying to connect the dots between real-world mass shootings and violent video games. Part one of a two-part report on the subject gathers the usual suspects to try and say definitively that video games played a central role in inspiring some of the worst shootings in the last decade or so including Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, Adam Lanza, etc.

Fox Nation report highlights a recent conversation between Fox & Friends morning show co-host Gretchen Carlson and Dr.

The Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) sent out an action alert asking its members to tell the United States Senate that it should NOT support S.

Joan E. Bertin, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, has penned an editorial for the Times of Trenton calling on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) to reject a bill the New Jersey legislature passed this week requiring the state to publish and promote what it calls "dubious research about the effects of violent media."

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) says that exposure to violent media such as video games can put those with mental illnesses "over the edge" and that he supports President Obama's plan for more research into violent games. The research - which includes (for the first time) the study of the (possible) connection between guns and mass shootings - was recommended by the Administration in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown Conn. in December of last year which resulted in the deaths of 20 children and six adults.

In Episode 55 hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the latest GamePolitics poll, a video game researcher's testimony at a mass murder trial, the Xbox One, the Ouya, and some discussion on the upcoming E3 press conferences. Download Episode 55 now: SuperPAC Episode 55 (1 hour, 37 minutes) 89.5 MB.

In a syndicated editorial penned by Dr. Mehmet Oz (who is known best for "The Dr. Oz Show") and Dr. Mike Roizen (chief medical officer at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute), the good doctors proclaim that "It's official (again)- violent video games hurt teens." They determine (without citation) that playing games like Call of Duty: Black Ops (which they say features dismembered limbs, obscene language, torture) and Hitman: Absolution is "bad for teens" (both games are rated "M" and therefore shouldn't be played by teens).