President Barack Obama presented his plans in a news conference Jan. 16 for the government’s future initiatives on gun control.

In the conference, he announced 23 executive orders. Most of these made sense in the grand scheme of things, but others — “Nominate an ATF director” — probably should have just been notes on the President’s iPhone task list.

In addition to the executive orders, Obama suggested Congress fund a study on the societal effects of violence in entertainment media, especially video games.

For reasons I cannot fathom, Fox News and MSNBC are not included in the list of media to be studied.

Reuters reported that a “senior administration official” said the president urged Congress to send $10 million to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fund the study.

At first glance, this seems like a rational response to the recent stream of violence our nation has been wading through. Ten million dollars isn’t much these days, either.

This study would certainly be at least 30 times more useful than the $325,000 the government spent to create (mwahahaha) “RoboSquirrel,” a fake squirrel built to see how a rattlesnake would react to it, right?

I don’t think so.

After Googling for about 0.46 seconds (according to Google, so no questions), I came across more than 30 existing studies on the effects of video game violence. Here is a small but semi-representative sampling of the findings:

First, a study by the University of Georgia’s J. R. Dominick found physical aggression was related to arcade video game playing.

Second, a study by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s G. Kestenbaum found video games not only have a calming effect but also help children vent their frustration nonviolently.

Third, a study by Iowa State’s D. Gentile and Ohio State’s B. Bushman found violent video game consumption, along with factors such as familial violence, increased the risk of aggression in children.

These three examples nicely wrap up the history of studies on video game violence — it may or may not lead to aggressive behavior. Will a new study find something different?

I find the third study, which was performed in 2012, most telling because it points to other things that contribute to violence. Even if video game consumption leads to aggression in some cases, problems like bad parenting do as well.

A study published in the 2010 March/April issue of the psychology journal Child Development showed that poor parenting influences bad behavior. Surprise, surprise.

Government officials should not attempt to legislate video games because they cannot effectively legislate everything else that causes aggression.

There’s no need to single out one or two industries, especially when doing so affects those industries and their consumers’ First Amendment rights to express themselves.

I’m sure Victoria’s Secret models have indirectly caused more than a few cases of anorexia in teenage girls. Why not legislate responsible modeling to combat this?

The commonly made argument that criminals will break the law is valid. Violence prevention legislation already exists, and it doesn’t work when one person wants to hurt another.

Additionally, every second and dime we spend combatting video game violence is one we don’t spend on the things more closely associated with youth violence, such as mental health care (right, Governor?) and home life.

The government should focus on improving children’s quality of life by supporting strong families and increasing access to and reducing the stigma of mental health treatment.

Bottom line: Violence — even of the school shooting variety — has been around a lot longer than video games and movies.