Seizing on a hot political attack, House Speaker John Boehner followed suit: “Pres Obama wants more tax hikes, refuses to #cutwaste like $1.2M spent paying people to play video games.” Other House Republicans hopped on the bandwagon, too, with similar tweets attacking science and video games like "World of Warcraft" (also known as WoW).

In assailing people "playing video games," the lawmakers were referring to a team of Ph.D. researchers and doctoral students who earned two National Science Foundation grants totaling $1.2 million for scientific study of the cognitive benefits of certain games to older people. Their statements were factually wrong, harmful to a proud American brand and exerted a chilling effect on legitimate and essential scientific research.

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He is every bit the profile we've created for the mass shooter.

And he knows it.

In an essay for video game website Kotaku, Scimeca writes:

People speculate that violent games and mental illness mix badly. They theorize that the former exacerbates the latter.

I can't listen to conversations about mental illness and violent video games -- all the speculation that those games could inspire the mentally ill to commit these atrocities -- and not think that these people are also talking about me.

How could he not? Growing up as a young, manic kid in a post-Columbine era, he has, for years, seen his "type" splashed across headlines as a nation tries to make sense of incomprehensible violence. Scimeca understands, perhaps better than most, how fraught these psychological profiles really are. How the story is always much more complicated than having too few friends and playing too much "Halo 3."

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