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From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Wednesday,

President Obama outlined his proposals for gun control. Among them, a request to Congress for $10 million to study the impact of media on violence with a specific reference to video games.

And Congress should fund research into the effects that violent video games have on young minds.

We don't benefit from ignorance.

We don't benefit from not knowing the science of this epidemic of violence.

You'd think that there would be a heap of academic studies on the effect of violent video games,

and actually there are more than 100.

Jason Schreier, reporter for the gaming website Kataku, took a look at many of those studies

and the meta-analyses of those studies and found that they may not study what we're looking for,

like the connection between violent video games and criminally violent behavior.

You can't put a kid in front of a video game and then give him a gun or an ice and see what he does of it.

You just can't do that.

So what researchers are looking for is a link between violent video games and aggression,

which in general means hostile behavior that isn't criminal. So it might be a kid

bullying another kid in school. And what have the studies found in that area? If you ask Chris

Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M, who's one leading researcher on the subject, he'll say

they found nothing. There's too many variables. There's too many factors. There's not

enough good research. If you ask Brad Bushman, a professor at Ohio State University, who is also a

...