President Trump announced his support of stricter gun laws Thursday morning, but during a meeting about school safety later in the afternoon, he suggested he might take it a step further and target violent media as well. "A lot of bad things are happening to young kids and young minds and their minds are being formed," Trump said. "We have to do something about maybe what they're seeing, and how they're seeing it."
Trump specifically singled out video games — "I am hearing more and more people say the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people's thoughts" — as well as movies. "A kid is able to see the movie if sex isn't involved but killing is involved," the president claimed.
Violent movies and video games have long been a topic of intense debate. Studies, though, have inconclusively linked violent media to real world aggression: "Research done by the U.S. Secret Service and our laboratories have both found that less than 20 percent of school shooters played violent video games with any amount of regularity," writes Rolling Stone. "Not only is interest in violent video games rare among school shooters, these perpetrators express much less interest in this violent medium than most other individuals."
Trump concluded cryptically: "The fact is, you are having movies come out that are so violent, with the killing and everything else, that maybe that's another thing that we're going to have to discuss." Watch his comments below. Jeva Lange