Former Vice President Joe Biden said Monday evening that video games teach kids “this dispassionate notion that you can shoot somebody and just, you know, sort of blow their brains out.”

Making the comments during a Monday interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Biden was responding to a question about President Trump mentioning violent video games in his White House speech about the two mass shootings over the weekend.





Cooper told Biden that “when I mentioned that the president talked about video games today as being part of the problem, I saw you kind of rolled your eyes,” but that “it's something people have talked about for a long time.”

“I’ve talked about it, too,” Biden said. “But it is not healthy to have these games teaching kids that, you know, this dispassionate notion that you can shoot somebody and just, you know, sort of blow their brains out.”

Cooper responded that “video games are popular in Japan.”

“They are,” Biden replied. “That's my point.”

“But it's not in and of itself the reason why we have this carnage on our streets,” Biden concluded.

Trump proposed a number of solutions Monday for curbing the number of mass shootings this morning, including empowering the FBI to target domestic terrorism, directing the Justice Department to work with social media companies to detect and stop violent extremists and to come up with legislation to make the death penalty easier following hate crime convictions, reforming the mental health system, implementing red flag laws related to gun ownership, and addressing violence in video games.

“We must stop the glorification of violence in our society, and this includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace,” Trump said. “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.”

Trump also condemned the ideology motivating the El Paso shooter, whose four-page racist, anti-Hispanic, white supremacist manifesto was posted on 8chan prior to his attack on a Walmart.

“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” Trump declared. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul.”