After the August 3 mass shooting in El Paso that left twenty-two dead and twenty-four injured, Dan Patrick, the right-wing-radio-host-turned-Texas-lieutenant-governor, offered a glib explanation for what turned Patrick Crusius, the twenty-one-year-old who drove ten hours from his home in the Dallas–Fort Worth area to an El Paso Walmart in hopes of slaughtering the highest number of Mexican immigrants possible, into a mass murderer. It was the lack of school prayer and the popularity of violent video games, Patrick insisted. “We’ve always had guns, always had evil, but I see a video game industry that teaches young people to kill,” he said on Fox and Friends the next day, as the nation reeled from massacres not just in El Paso, but also in Dayton, Ohio.

For self-styled “pro–Second Amendment” politicians like Patrick, who in 2018 received an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, the focus on Call of Duty and other shoot-’em-up entertainment certainly diverted attention from the state’s Wild West–like gun laws. In Texas, handguns can be carried openly or concealed in most public places. The AK-47-style weapon Crusius used in his spree is legal in the state. And Texas’s lax gun regulations will become even looser on September 1, when gun owners will be able to carry concealed weapons into churches, synagogues, and other houses of worship, and without a license for up to forty-eight hours anywhere under a mandatory evacuation order following a natural disaster. (In spite of all that legally permitted firepower, Texas recorded 434.4 violent crimes per 100,000 persons in 2017, seventeenth-highest in the country and outranked only by states with similar gun laws.)

Scapegoating video games shifts the focus not only from the state’s gun culture, but from another part of the mental and cultural landscape Crusius inhabited: the xenophobia and bigotry of Texas politics, particularly in its rich white suburbs. In the online “manifesto” posted shortly before his rampage, Crusius wrote: “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”