How to talk with kids about violent images of Charlie Kirk’s killing
PBS News Hour - Segments
PBS NewsHour
4.1 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Let's turn now to real questions about how to talk about this political violence and the concerns around graphic and violent images tied to Charlie Kirk's murder that kids of all ages may have seen in the past couple of days. |
| 0:12.7 | During this morning's press conference, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said he was concerned about what people were exposed to already. |
| 0:19.4 | We are not wired as human beings, biologically, historically, |
| 0:26.6 | we have not evolved in a way that we are capable of processing those types of violent imagery. |
| 0:36.6 | This is not good for us. It is not good to consume. |
| 0:40.2 | Social media is a cancer on our society right now. And I would encourage, again, I would encourage |
| 0:45.5 | people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community. |
| 0:51.4 | Within hours of Kirk's death, videos of the shooting had been seen over 40 million times |
| 0:57.4 | combined on TikTok, Instagram, and X. Parents and caregivers have been grappling with how to talk |
| 1:03.4 | to their kids about all of this. We spoke today with some parents and teens about those concerns. |
| 1:08.9 | Here's some of what they told us. I'm no damn to. I am a high school senior from Portland, Oregon. I've got to see the video, but the close-up video without like any warning or anything. So it was the like the most horrifying thing I've ever seen in my life. The gunshot like kind of came in and just seeing that the blood pour out was really horrifying. And yeah,, I did not expect I wasn't warned on like the graphic, the graphic nature of the video. |
| 1:33.6 | So it was really surprising and really horrifying to see. |
| 1:36.9 | We saw it from many different angles. |
| 1:40.0 | It's very graphic and it's disturbing, you know, even for me being almost 60 years old. |
| 1:45.9 | It was just really hard to go online without seeing it. And I think I'm kind of desensitized |
| 1:52.3 | to some things like that already just because of how many times we read about things like |
| 1:59.6 | school shootings and in writers and stuff. |
| 2:02.6 | My name is Keith Hanson. I live in Montana. I'm 59 years old. And this is my daughter Sarah. She's 18. |
| 2:09.6 | I feel like I have to step away from social media for a little bit if it's going to keep showing me that video. I still want to be able to have feelings, you know, seeing something like that happens in |
| 2:22.6 | body. And it's a little disturbing to me how I don't feel anything anymore when I see that video. |
| 2:29.8 | I'm Quillen Musgrave. I'm the parent of two kids age 14 and 7, and we live in Richmond, Virginia. |
| 2:36.2 | These kids, they have seen so much and the things that they've seen happening and unfolding |
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