President Trump wants a ban on violent video games which, according to him, are partly responsible for brutal gun shootings by teenagers.
“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society,” the president said in a press conference.
“This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence.
“We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately.”
It’s not the first time President Trump has blamed video games to have a link with terrible gun shootings.
He expressed the same concerns in the wake of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 persons last year.
“I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” Trump said while talking to Florida attorney general at the time.
He has now again proposed a crackdown on video games in the light of two horrific mass shooting incidents that left multiple fatalities recently.
The shootings – one of which killed 20 individuals in a Walmart in El Paso and the other killed 9 in Daytona, Ohio – took place almost along the same lines.
A number of experts believe there is some kind of psychological relationship between the brutal gun attacks and vicious games, but there’s no accurate evidence to back their claims.
A research completed in February suggested that there was no indication of increased aggressiveness in the teens who played violent computer games.
The research analyzed around 1,000 teens, aged 14 to 15, who used to play aggressive video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.
Professor Andrew Przybylski, the lead researcher and a director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, said of the study: “What we found was that there are a lot of things that feed into aggression.”
“There are some effects of gender and some people who are from different life backgrounds have higher or lower ratings, but video game play didn’t really seem to matter here,” he told the Sky News.
“Violent games don’t seem to drive aggressive behavior in young people.
“But really we should be looking at other things – maybe it is frustrations, maybe it is family or life circumstance – that we should be spending more time on.”
The professor concluded: “The idea that violent video games drive real-world aggression is a popular one, but it hasn’t tested very well over time.
“Despite interest in the topic by parents and policy-makers, the research has not demonstrated that there is cause for concern.”