What happened to Generation Z?
Former Fox News anchor Brit Hume reposted a tweet on X yesterday from Abe Greenwald, executive editor of Commentary magazine:
“The suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk is 22 years old. The perpetrator in the Annunciation Church mass shooting was 23. The alleged gunman in last December’s killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was 26. The shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was 20. What happened to Generation Z?”
An obvious answer—ironic, given where the post appeared—is social media. Young people spend enormous amounts of time online, and many adults, myself included, do too.
But I believe that, far and away, the bigger answer is: video games.
In their most formative years, children — especially boys — spend countless hours in front of screens playing games like Call of Duty, Fortnite, Counter-Strike, and Grand Theft Auto. The objective of these games is simple: players earn points or progress to the next level by killing—whether it’s enemy soldiers, zombies, police officers, rival gang members, aliens, or dragons. For someone my age, who grew up building Lincoln Log cabins, the sheer scale of violence these boys experience daily is unimaginable.
Boys today come home from school, plop down on the sofa, and dive into alternative digital worlds where satisfaction comes from watching enemies explode, collapse, or vanish. By the time they reach their early twenties, many have racked up millions of virtual kills. Each one chips away at their sensitivity to violence, normalizing it in subtle but powerful ways.
I don’t know squat about these games. The only video games I play are online bridge games. To even put the above list together, I had to ask ChatGPT about the top sellers and the “enemies” players are rewarded for killing. But I do know my elementary school-age grandsons are obsessed with at least one of them—Fortnite. Millions of kids around the world are.
And I’d be willing to wager that the twenty-somethings Greenwald listed in his tweet played them too, as their parents went about their lives, cooking dinner, raking leaves, and looking forward to seeing their young boys grow up into men of whom they would be proud.
