WASHINGTON — The gun lobby isn’t the only group throwing its weight around trying to thwart President Obama‘s plans to combat gun violence.
Even a modest proposal to study how violent video games might be affecting young minds has quietly run aground, the victim, sources say, of opposition by the burgeoning video game industry — a $67 billion colossus with increasing clout in Washington.
“It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere,” one Senate aide tracking the proposal told the Daily News.
The debate over violent video games reemerged after gunman Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school in December.
Like the mass killers who opened fired at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, and inside an Aurora, Colo., theater last summer, Lanza played violent video games at home.
Lanza also kept an elaborately detailed spreadsheet on mass murders, Mike Lupica reported exclusively in The News last week. A source told Lupica Connecticut cops believe Lanza’s research was a score sheet, “the work of a video gamer, and that it was his intent to put his own name at the very top of that list.”
So a month after the Newtown rampage, Obama combined a controversial demand for sweeping new restrictions on guns with an idea that everyone seemingly could embrace.
“We don’t benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence,” Obama said on Jan. 16. “Congress should fund research into the effects violent video games have on young minds.”
A trade group representing video-game makers seemed open to the idea.
“We will embrace a constructive role in the important national dialogue around gun violence in the United States, and continue to collaborate with the administration and Congress as they examine the facts that inform meaningful solutions,” the Entertainment Software Association said after Obama’s announcement.
And conservatives seized on the proposal as an alternative to new gun controls.
“There are too many video games that celebrate the mass killing of innocent people — games that despite attempts at industry self-regulation find their way into the hands of children,” Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said at a Jan. 30 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I share Vice President Biden’s disbelief of manufacturer denials that these games have no effect on real-world violence.”
On March 7, Grassley proposed legislation to authorize the video game study. The legislation — offered as an amendment to a gun control bill — would require the Justice Department to “conduct a peer-reviewed study to examine the impact that violent or adult-themed video games have on mass shootings.”
But then Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) proposed an amendment to Grassley’s amendment that would vastly broaden the focus of the study.
It would require the Justice Department to examine 13 additional possible causes of gun violence, including bullying, childhood abuse, mental illness, violence in movies — even bad grades.
Two Senate sources described Coons’ proposal as a maneuver backed by the video game lobby to water down the study. Coons spokesman Ian Koski disputed that assertion.
“There are lots of factors that contribute to gun violence,” Koski said. “And rather than prejudging one of them and ignoring the others, it made sense to look at a wider array of them.”
In whatever form, the proposed study — for the moment — appears dead.
The Grassley amendment was attached to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-Calif) measure to ban assault weapons, which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced will not be in the main gun control bill the Senate considers next month.
Trade groups representing the video game industry — even the Entertainment Software Association, which seemed supportive after Obama’s proposal — now argue such research is unnecessary.
“While ESA supports comprehensive scientifically based research, extensive research has already been conducted and found no connection between media and real-life violence,” association spokesman Dan Hewitt told The News.
That the video game industry has the ear of lawmakers is no surprise.
Last week, the Entertainment Software Association hired two longtime congressional staffers as lobbyists — the latest step in a long increase in the group’s lobbying presence.
According to data maintained by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, the association’s annual spending on lobbying has grown from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to almost $5 million last year, a rise that tracks the growth of the video-game industry.
The Entertainment Software Association’s political action committee has also stepped up activity. In 2008, its first year of operations, it doled out about $28,000 in contributions to members of Congress.
Last year, it contributed about $60,000. Among the beneficiaries: the campaign committees of Coons, Grassley, Reid, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
That activity is dwarfed by the National Rifle Association, which spent $11 million in the 2012 campaign.
But the software association is just one group representing the video-game industry.
The Entertainment Merchants Association spent about $50,000 last year lobbying on behalf of retailers in what it calls the “home entertainment industry.”
The Electronic Consumers Association and individual video game companies also have made donations, boosting the industry’s power.
dfriedman@nydailynews.com
