Right before he shot up a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in a murderous rampage this week, Joshua Jahn of Texas was playing first-person shooter games on Steam — a startling collision point where real life and the online world seemed to bleed into each other.
Jahn’s astonishing gaming habit — more than 17,000 hours on Steam in total — was revealed in a Substack piece by investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, who also learned from Jahn’s friends that he was a devoted habitué of 4chan, the longstanding imageboard that’s been linked to other mass shooters.
A Steam screenshot obtained by Klippenstein shows that Jahn was playing first-person shooter games Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 in the wee morning hours of Wednesday before he attacked the ICE office in Dallas at around 6:30 am.
Jahn found an elevated position on a neighboring building and started shooting indiscriminately, killing two immigrant detainees and leaving one other person injured. None of the victims were ICE agents. Jahn later killed himself at the scene.
This newly revealed information linking Jahn to first-person-shooter video games and 4chan will surely add more fuel to the ongoing debate on what is driving people, mostly young men, to engage in violent acts against the public or political targets such as right wing influencer Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated earlier this month at the age of 31, and President Donald Trump, who had his own brush with death last year during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
The ICE shooting, along with Kirk’s killing by a suspect who’s another avid gamer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, has revived in the public the controversial notion that games are a harmful influence — an idea that earned currency in the days after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, when killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were found to have played the shooter game Doom.
Many studies have failed to establish a causal link between gaming and violent aggression, but these two recent shootings would make anybody take a second look. Jahn’s all consuming video game habit, and the fact that Robinson allegedly engraved bullets with catchphrases from memes and video games, are certainly very troubling.
The 4Chan connection is also a big red flag; previous mass shooters have frequented or posted on the forum and similar sites.
Jahn, an avid 4chan poaster, honed his sarcastic, dark humor in the infamous anonymous message board; his friends described him as an obnoxious edgelord who hated all political parties, according to Klippenstein’s reporting.
That brings us to the political dimension of the ICE shooting. Trump officials have claimed Jahn was a left wing extremist because they found his personal notes that said he wanted to target ICE agents, minimize injury to detainees during his attack, and that he hated the federal government.
He also left behind an unused bullet with “Anti-ICE” written on it — but his friends told Klippenstein he was most likely being ironic and nihilistic. Jahn’s brother also told NBC News that “he [Jahn] didn’t have strong feelings about ICE.”
In other words, his motivations are hard to read. Was he a self-styled left wing vigilante, or just someone cosplaying as one?
Trump officials have also accused Kirk’s suspected killer, Robinson, of being motivated by left wing ideology. Again, though, there’s little public evidence beyond that he was upset with Kirk’s divisive rhetoric.
“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” a person close to the investigation told ABC News.
So who or what’s to blame for this violence? We don’t have any easy answers here (though 4chan and similar serve as mimetic conduits for extreme ideas and violence.) It’s the latest grim evolution in a long tragic history of public violence in which perpetrators leave more questions than answers. Perhaps, at the end of the day, violent games, 4chan, and radical political ideologies are risk factors rather than definitive explanations.
In any case, the greater context is hard to ignore: a world where trust in institutions has crumbled, there’s deepening wealth inequality, and ordinary people — especially the young — can’t find jobs, purpose or hope.
No wonder it’s pushing troubled youth toward violent nihilism.
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