St Louis Continues Pushing Violent Games Law

Thanks to Frictionless Insight for pointing to a St.Louis Today article indicating officials have decided not to give up on trying to outlaw the sale of violent video games to minors, despite a recent tide against their effort. As a CNN article explains, ".. [the original] ordinance, passed by the St. Louis County Council in 2000, requires children under 17 to have parental consent before they can buy violent or sexually explicit video games or play similar arcade games", but this was struck down as unconstitutional on June 4th, with a judge citing the First Amendment and the protection of free speech. The County has now set a petition for review, saying the courts "set too high a standard" for proving a link between videogames and violence. The saga continues..

Comments

Even as a parent I have to agree with the court

[PhysicsGenius]

It's obvious to any right-thinking person that TV in general and video games in particular don't cause violence in children. If that were so, educational TV would make them smarter--and I've never seen any evidence of that either.

However, I think there's still a link there. Clearly people who like violent video games over otherwise-equivalent games must be enjoying the violence. So violent video games serve as a magnet to these violence-prone people, which skews the statistics of the anti-gaming nuts. Perhaps a wiser use of our money would be to establish a national DNA database of these whackos that are spending their free time pretending to kill people--it'll save time when they eventually do murder someone.