Donald Trump held a listening session on violent video games on Thursday, but no one seems to really know what the point was:
As he has done with recent round-table discussions on gun restrictions and immigration, Mr. Trump on Thursday seemed most interested in drawing impassioned opinions out of the people around him, according to people who attended. But he stopped short of offering solutions. [...]
“There are no researchers, no scientists,” [former Obama adviser Mark] DeLoura said of Mr. Trump’s meeting. “It doesn’t look like people reached out to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the West Wing.”
(The meeting was hastily arranged by the White House communications staff, according to one person with direct knowledge of how it came together.)
On Thursday, White House officials kept the aims of the meeting vague, and declined to say why they had revoked journalists’ planned access to it.
The most likely goal is for Trump to try to run out the clock on the energy behind gun reforms by pretending to listen (because, seriously, Donald Trump listening to anything but his own ego is not a thing that happens) to people talk about school safety or video games or arming teachers or really anything but making it more difficult to obtain the kind of guns that are meant for nothing but mass murder. Spreading the blame for gun violence to factors other than guns is the point.