The Damaged Brain, Part 1: Kirk’s Assassin

There are times when the news of certain crimes haunts me into deliberating with the most white and gray brain matter I possess to try and understand them. This is one of those times. In this essay, Part 1 of 2, I look at Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old who assassinated Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus on September 10th. I argue “but for” Robinson’s dysfunctional brain, the murder would not have occurred.

My task is a climb. Although I offer a science-based analysis, it can be mistakenly interpreted as concluding that a broken brain was the cause of the crimes, as if behavioral scientists would endeavor to isolate one cause. I am not presenting neurology as the cause, but I am prepared to describe it as necessary for the murder to have occurred.

Tyler Robinson and Internet Gaming Disorder

Not much is known about this young man; it is early in the investigation. However, this has not stopped pundits from claiming affiliations without evidence, and causes without reason. Now I jump into the fray with speculations derived from reports from those who have known him over the years, along with his own statements—speculations which, to me, beg to be examined. I cannot diagnose him, but neither is it wise to ignore critical signs which figure in the dynamics of his crime. I trust you will have your own intuited opinions, since it is all I offer.

Raised in a politically-conservative, hunting-centered Mormon home, Robinson lived with his transgender lover. Friends, parents, and his internet footprints indicate the couple centered their lives around video-gaming. Robinson favored the community Helldivers 2, based on an online community of shooters. It’s my conjecture that this man showed signs of being extremely involved, which begs the logical assumption that he had been encapsulated in the process at least since his formative adolescent years. I imagine it derailed him from benefitting from his full college scholarship; he dropped out the first semester.

No standard metrics exist for the psychiatric diagnosis of Internet Gaming Disorder, itself a preliminary DSM category awaiting further study. Studies show that while the “average” gamer spends ten hours a week in the process, addicted gamers engage from six to sixteen hours per day! Reports of his behaviors lead me to view him so overinvolved with the unreality of that world and its experience of immersion, that it is likely he became addicted, a description shot through academic literature¹˒².

We must take into account whether Robinson had a unique vulnerability to addiction, leading him to IGD, or whether his excessive engagement with gaming’s addictive qualities materially altered his brain. We cannot know this answer. What we can know, however, is that extreme engagement is not a neurologically neutral input.

How Do We Confront “Cause?”

So, what does IGD mean, and how is it connected to his crime? Millions of young men are wrapped up in shooter video games, even grossly violent ones. Only a “tiny few,” as scholars like to qualify, go on to kill. Every study, no matter how much it indicts the role of internet gaming, ends with the warning not to see it as “the cause.” Well, of course. (Okay, I hate being talked down do like this.) There exist no simple-minded answers to human behavior of any kind. Can’t we just stipulate this assumption?

However, simply because we cannot predict how one variable out of several dysfunctions will result in murder, we cannot be dissuaded from examining each individual killer, breaking down the salient conditions or forces which contributed to the result. In any driven public murder, one may see “a perfect storm” situation. Yet, these conflagrations have so much to teach us about the damage of regular disturbances, we cannot afford to dismiss them and go back to denial.

To be clear, extreme video gaming didn’t cause Charlie Kirk’s death. But does that conversely mean that we can we say it still would have happened, in this case, without gaming’s effects on his murderer?

Robinson’s prosecution—if it goes to trial—will no doubt settle on the cause of the crime as his independent personal choice. Western jurisprudence is constructed in such a way as to shape this narrative. However, scientists, clinicians, and the thinking layperson will get no satisfaction from this simple-minded explanation. The purpose of research funding is to study ways to prevent public murders. In order to effect prevention, we must identify causative variables beyond personal choice, which is the specific purpose of behavioral science.

The Mind Control Aspects of Excessive Video Gaming

Propaganda. Brainwashing. These are deliberate processes utilized by usually nefarious political and cult leaders to control their followers. But we all are targets of the most common use of propaganda: advertising—the purpose of which is consumer mind control. Game designers now employ powerful new technology designed to immerse, addict, and retain youthful gaming shooters who lose themselves in its manipulated psychological elements. (Methamphetamine or fentanyl, anybody?)

First, working within the mode of propaganda³:

• algorithms serve to engage (or ensnare) players through devices, such as outrages; slogans; tribal identity; repetition; enemy-making narratives;

• reward patterns which activate hits of dopamine in players;

• ubiquitous use of meme culture, those modern-day propaganda posters conveying simple, emotional, endlessly repeatable messages.

Are young men simply “players,” or subjects of mind control? Repetition is at the heart of the process.

Second, brainwashing³ elements can also be identified:

• a kind of indoctrination through repetition of the same jokes, underlying ideologies, and world-creating;

• the inherent isolation of playing, even in online community contexts, where no in-person, complex, self-reflective, self-corrective interaction can grow;

• game-created stress resolved only through group validation;

encouragement of the “player” to fuse his sense of self with both his gamer identity and the online player community.

The loss of self is at the heart of this process.

How Brains Go Partially Offline

Particular mechanisms engage one in an addictive process⁴˒⁵˒⁶ with psychological implications:

• sustained immersion in an unreal world;

• well-being and identity get fused with the gaming world.

• playing becomes stress relief from a painful interior life and social reality;

• reward centers are highly activated according to artificial triggers;

• the undisputable power of repetition shapes the mind.

Excessive engagement in such an addictive process is shown through the use of MRI, PET, and DTI scans to cause brain dysregulation, both structural and functional, such as:

• decrease in both white and gray matter, decrease in brain volume;

• hyperactivity in circuits producing feelings of reward through distinct cues, similar to those found in gambling addiction;

• decreased activity producing weaker regulation in controlling impulses, focusing on attention and decision-making, resisting cravings;

• poor connections in how regions, such as cognitive and emotional, talk to each other.

To be blunt, this brain is not playing with a full deck: not enough good functioning, coupled with too much poor functioning. Further, if the young man has been playing from a young age, his normal neurological development was already somewhat hijacked.

The “use it or lose it” principal applies here: if a young person is not developing real-world thinking and emotional regulation capacities, if those skills have been replaced by dulling, addictive processes, he becomes primed to the wrong rewards, desensitized⁷ to the values and development of self which are critical to living as an adult in society. In Robinson’s case, he became desensitized to the normal inhibition against the reality of murder.

The Role of Excessive Gaming in Robinson’s Impulse to Murder

In short, gaming rewarded and then trapped him in an unreal world which psychologically and neurologically stripped him of the ability to process his feelings and think through his actions. When distresses of his “real” life collided with the hollowed out young man, he looked for a new way out of the distress, a way not adequately provided for by his addiction.

My clinical intuition tells me Robinson was coping with a significant life stressor in the form of his sexuality. How could it not be that his on-going decision to act not only on his gay sexuality but with a transgendered partner provided so much cognitive and emotional dissonance from his family and religious upbringing, that he needed a way to reconcile the stress?

Charlie Kirk provided a “Christian” demon for Robinson to slay. Not only could the troubled young man project his own internal feelings of Mormon-taught “evil” onto Kirk, but he could also rationalize it by doing a social good in slaying the “hater,” the social menace. Perhaps he thought it a brave and patriotic act to “neutralize the enemy” (gaming/military/law enforcement language) of his new-found political beliefs—not unlike the reward experienced as a shooter in his players’ world. I found it interesting how he told his lover he planned to hide his actions till the day he died, mirroring, perhaps, his desire to hide his sexual sins.

I theorize that as an addicted gamer, Tyler Robinson ceased at some point to feel himself as an actor in reality, so fused was he in his game-based identity and community. He was, if you will, living within a delusion. I also think it likely this young man possessed little rational comprehension of his actions—in the real world, with its life-long consequences—until sometime after he was fitted with a bullet-proof vest, booked, and jailed.

Reports describe him as suicidal. One always has to wonder whether these youthful public killers were latently suicidal to begin with. But it also doesn’t surprise me, since suicidal feelings are a logical consequence of being removed from his addiction and his supportive community, with nothing to distract him from his grim, overnight fate. My guess is Robinson has no clue as to what happened to him or “why” he assassinated Charlie Kirk since he had been sleepwalking through his life for years.

A Strategy for Causation in Robinson’s Case

Here I pose a clinical interpretation of the process which led Tyler Robinson to take a life. It didn’t begin with video gaming addiction, but became activated by it. Fertile ground can be found in the young man’s choices—if you can call the destabilizing escape from religious indoctrination a discrete choice—of how to cope with the shame of his sexual “sins.” The identity his parents planned for him had been transformed, and it seemed he was winging the possibility of staying attached to his judgmental family and his forbidden love life. Such religious proscriptions and religious guilt are hard for a young adult to shake. Kirk’s message was designed to keep him in Christian hell.

Robinson relied on his long-time friend—video gaming—to cope with the depression, stress, and anxiety of this conflicted life. While being the “player” distracted him from his social and emotional losses; while it rewarded him for the skill of shooting the bad guys in Helldivers 2; while he felt a sense of community (confined as it was to flattened online interactions), the loss of his self to the game also accomplished a deadly outcome: desensitizing him to eliminating a real-world opponent, destroying his natural inhibition to murder.

His long-time altered neurology provided the channel to act out. Essentially living a virtual life, he no longer had a reality check, having long-since consigned it to the Game.

His unconscious shame needed to be excised. the Charlie Kirk Show—the acidic shaming, rejection, and Christian damning of gay and transgender people—provided an opportunity directly in Robinson’s path. By targeting this hatemonger, the tormented young man might kill his own shame and self-hate and provide a service to his gay comrades.

And then, we have “Grandpa’s rifle.” Growing up in a hunting family, the rifle functioned like a third arm. The presumed fact that this shooter did not own an assault rifle is statistically serendipitous, raised in the culture as he was. However, Tyler Robinson did not carry the nihilistic rage of the mass shooter in his blood; it was, rather, the shame of those sex hormones which stalked him. How else could this young man stop the kind of pain Kirk’s effective messaging caused him: argue with him in his campus performance? write him a letter? pray about it?

For me, the Tyler Robinson story presents two “but for’s.” First, but for the brain and psychological disturbances produced by video game addiction, I contend, Kirk would be alive. Second, but for the easy access to that third arm—Grandpa’s gun and all it gave permission to—Kirk would be alive, at least for a while longer.

The brand of Christian hatred by which Charlie Kirk made a living promises to trigger the next maligned young person who can’t negotiate his inner turmoil.

Citations

¹ “How Video Games Are Shaping a Generation of Boys, for Better or Worse,” by Claire Cain Miller and Amy Fan, in New York Times, 10-3-2025.

² Lemmens, et al., Pathological Gaming and Aggressive Behavior,” in Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 40(1), pp. 38-47, epub 6-13-2010.

³ Material on propaganda and brainwashing comes largely from ChatGPT.

⁴ Mohammadi et al., “Structural Brain Changes in Young Males Addicted to Video-Gaming—Structural MRI and DTI Study,” in Brain and Cognition, Vol. 139, March, 2020, epub 1-15-2020.

⁵ “Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?” by Ferris Jabr, in New York Times, 10-22-2019.

⁶ Gao, et al., “Structural and Functional Brain Abnormalities in Internet Gaming Disorder—A Systematic Review/Synthesis,” in Frontiers in Psychiatry, Vol. 12, epub 7-1-2021.

₇ Turel et al., “Videogames and Guns in Adolescents,” in Computers and Human Behavior, epub 3-29-2020.

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In my next essay, Part 2, the subject is Shane Tamura, the 27-year-old former high school football player who killed four people in a Manhattan building housing the NFL headquarters on July 28^th before shooting himself in the heart. I believe if it were not for Tamura’s degenerated brain, those five people would still be alive.