This is a sad day for self-righteous politicians, religious tight-asses and conservative cultural monitors. A new study calls bullshit on the connection between video game violence and real violence. Christopher Ferguson, a professor in the Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice at Texas A&M International University, looked at 22 years of clinical studies on the effects of video games and found them seriously flawed.

The reasoning is so obvious it’s almost dumb. Gaming is a 30-year-old, multi-billion dollar industry, and has survived for so long and accumulated so much money because video games are so popular that they're ubiquitous. Yeah, a couple of school shooters played video games. They probably watched television and ate at McDonald’s too.

The supposed proof that video games cause violence is sourced in a year 2000 study by Iowa State University researchers Karen Dill and Craig Anderson. It was the first behavioral study of the correlation between video games — Anderson referenced it as a cornerstone in the 2007 study that seems to now be the Bible for anti-video game crusaders.

The study was strikingly weird. Two hundred or so college-age students, who either identified themselves as veteran violent game players or not, were split into two groups,. One played the snooze fest, puzzle game Myst while the other group played the ancient, first person shooter Castle Wolfenstein. Afterwards, members of the two groups competed in a timed contest where the winner could hit the opponent with “noise blasts.”

The Wolfenstein crowd rocked the noise blasts longer and louder, and the researchers concluded that they were therefore more prone to violence, ignoring how, violence aside, the games require vastly different modes of thinking. Myst requires players to think carefully and analytically. A fast, first person shooter game like Wolfenstein requires much quicker, more reactive thinking.

Anyway, Ferguson says, the whole noise blast thing didn’t prove anything about video games leading to violence.

In an "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"-worthy twist for the family values crowd, families themselves were found more likely to cause violence than video games.

Despite the study, video games are likely to continue getting blamed for youth violence. This week Douglas Gentile, an Iowa state researcher who’s worked extensively with Craig Anderson, released a study that asserts a correlation between video games and violence.

But more importantly, video games are a deliciously easy target. There’s no NRA for Halo players — actually, a truly valuable study of video gamers would investigate whether or not they vote. But it’s unlikely that a gamer bloc could put numbers that match old people, the demographic most and large scared of technology and young people.

Currently, Washington politicians are riled up about the ESRB rating system. The video game rating system, Democratic and Republican legislators say, is too vague to protect our nation’s innocent little children. Not to be too much of a wise ass, but there’s still a massively unpopular, costly war going on, right?

The uproar revolves around Manhunt 2, a game that features gruesome decapitations, rape, dismemberment, and encourages violent homophobia and fratricide.

Oh, no, wait, sorry. It doesn’t. The first three things in that list are from a Shakespeare play. The last two were from the Bible.