How many of your children saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk on their phones? Did they seek it out, or did it just roll in unannounced on their feeds? If they had never heard of Kirk before they watched his gruesome murder, how did they make sense of what they saw? Did the horrific image—I won’t describe it, because you have probably already seen it—sear itself into their memories?

I ask because I have two young children and spend most of my time around other parents. In the days after the videos of Kirk’s death spread across social media, I realized that most children with phones, as far as I could tell, had viewed at least one unedited version. This was likely not the first disturbing video these children had encountered, of course, nor the first act of political violence that had appeared on their feeds. These same children, who are mostly between the ages of eleven and eighteen, saw the President’s bleeding ear and dozens, maybe even hundreds, of images of unfathomable trauma in Gaza. How will these already infamous scenes fall into order in their minds and coalesce into something resembling history?

Widely dispersed photos and video—the stuff we all see—are the closest thing we have to a collective, democratized history, but the connections between memories and their associated images wear thin and become increasingly unreliable. For baby boomers, those images include people standing and pointing in the direction of gunshots at a motel in Memphis, Kennedy’s exploding head, the documentary footage of crowds at Woodstock, the girl in the picture in Vietnam, the bodies at Jonestown, and so forth. As boomers have aged, those images have become a bit unmoored from their place in time, and more evocative of a feeling of rebellion and change, or whatever. I’m sure many members of that generation would tell you that they watched Kennedy get shot live on television, and would describe the terrible movement of his head, without realizing that what they were describing was the Zapruder film, which first aired to the public in 1975, more than a decade after Kennedy’s motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza. Maybe they will also tell you that they saw the photos of the My Lai massacre—and they very well may have, but perhaps the image they are recalling is that of the naked girl running from a napalm attack in Trảng Bàng.

My generation—I am forty-five years old—seemingly grew up with far fewer public images of violence. One of the texts I’ve grappled with and referenced before in my column is Jean Baudrillard’s “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” which argues that Operation Desert Storm was a conflict designed specifically for a new media landscape in which most people would be following the war on cable news. Americans watched Patriot missiles light up the night sky, but, in contrast to those watching TV during the war in Vietnam, we did not see casualties, or much destruction, nor did we tune in every night to hear a litany of the names of dead servicemen. Until 9/11, the violence that we did see on TV was mostly poor quality and from a distance: the shaky shots of the burning Branch Davidian compound, in Waco; the remains of the federal building in Oklahoma City. (One notable exception was the images of starving children during the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia, which inspired a worldwide effort marked by the release of the charity single “We Are the World.”)

So here’s a series of questions:

If exposure to images of violence changes a generation of children, how are boomers different from my generation—and how will my own children, who will be exposed to far more evidence of political violence than I have been, be different from me?

Is the effect of seeing carefully selected images of violence through the evening news or newspapers different from that caused by the chaos of violent images children see today through their phones?

If we agree that history is formed through these images, what does history look like when there are thousands of different choices, camera angles, interpretations, and even fakes? How would we understand the massacre at Kent State if it happened today? What would it look like? What happens when, rather than all of us seeing an image of a young woman in the throes of shock and mourning kneeling over a dead body, we see hundreds of cellphone videos that capture the terror as it unfolds in real time?

I don’t have any satisfying answers to these questions, nor do I have a particularly strong opinion on whether children should see these scenes or not. There have been years of studies on the effects that violence on television and in video games has on young minds, and some authors have suggested that they desensitize children and might even lead to copycat acts. I have always been a bit skeptical of these claims, and particularly of the way that they are invoked during that emotional period after a tragedy has taken place, when people are looking around for someone or something to blame. And, of course, such studies do not fully explain why some kids can watch gore or play violent video games without any problems, and other kids allegedly turn into killers because of them.