Violent Video Game Law Struck Down

The Importance of writes "Washington State banned the sale of violent videogames depicting violence against 'law enforcement officers' to minors under age 17. When challenged, the law was blocked by a preliminary injunction. Yesterday, a federal district court decided that the law was unconstitutional because it failed the strict scrutiny test and was also void for vagueness. Read the 15-page decision [PDF]. A summary of the case's holdings with quotations here."

Comments

Re:i love violent games.

[dirk]

While many studies have linked violent video games and movies with violent crime, there have been no studies that they prove that violent movies/games CAUSE violent actions. Correlation is not causation.

To steal an example from Michael Moore, why do these people playing violent games mean that is what caused their violent actions? The Columbine kids liked bowling as well, but no one is trying to say bowling causes violent actions. While it is easy to say that most people who committ acts of violence see violent video games and movies, that ignores the fact that most people who see voilent videos games and movies do not committ acts of violence.

Re:i love violent games.

[AuMatar]

Cases of Polio go up in the summer. Amount of ice cream eaten goes up in summer. The two are linked. Therefor, ice cream causes polio and must be banned!

Don't be too ashamed, its a common misunderstanding to think correlation means causation. I highly suggest reading this course on Causal Reasoning from CMU.

Study vs. Study

[lakeesis]

For those following the "your study is better than my study" debate, the Seattle PI ran this article in early July giving a general run-down of several of the well known, and often quoted, studies on both sides of the fence.

The most telling part of the article is the tagline at the end - "Media violence is only one of many factors that contribute to societal violence," Anderson has written, "and is certainly not the most important one."

Re:i love violent games.

[Izago909]

Remember in comic books when the good guy turned the bad guy into the cops? Now the 'good guy' rips the cops guts out and leads the others on a high speed chase killing more.

Around the time of the red scare and HUAC the comic book industry feared being black balled as communists so they voluntarly censored themselves for over 30 years. No shadow could be cast over a law enorcemnt officers, government was blindly trusted, and no talk of drugs (even anti-drug story's). Personally, I'm glad that's changed. I couldn't tolerate living in a fake, leave it to beaver world.

As far as cutting class and slapping women are concerned, country music has been doing that for decades, and people have been romanticizing killers and gangsters for even longer. And it's not cool to be a drug dealer, but some people have nowhere else to go and there's too much money to be made. I do recall some of the prohibition era gangsters being idolized too.
Same product, new wrapper.

Re:Mod Parent Up

[CreatureComfort]

I find your proposition interesting. Can you provide links to reputable, scientific studies showing a positive correlation between pornography and rape?

On the contrary, most of the reputable sources I can find have distinct quotes such as:

One of the first authoritative bodies to spell out an unequivocal verdict of not guilty for pornography was the Danish Medico-Legal Council whose 1965 report to the Danish Penal Law Committee concluded that, to the Council's knowledge, based on criminological and clinical evidence 'there exists no scientific investigations to form a basis for the supposition that pornography . . . can contribute to normal adult's or young persons' committing sexual offences' (Penal Law Committee 1966, p. 80). This distinguished body of forensic physicians and psychiatrists explicitly mentioned that the statement referred to pornographic writings, pictures and films describing normal as well as perverted sexual phenomena. Five years later the United States Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970, p. 53) (or rather twelve of the seventeen participating members) arrived at a similar conclusion, stating that 'empirical research designed to clarify the question has found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behaviour among youth or adults'. Another verdict of not- guilty but this time based on overwhelming amounts of research: careful reviews of earlier research and thirty-nine additional effect studies sponsored by the Commission."

and

"a number of researchers in the late 1970s who, applying modern sexological laboratory techniques, were able to measure erectile responses in convicted rapists and normals who were watching, listening to, or reading depictions of sexual activities including consenting and coercive sex. The first results (several studies by Abel, Barbaree, Marshall, Quinsey and others) seemed very promising: while normals showed greater arousal to scenes of mutually consenting sex than they did to similar scenes involving coerced sex, rapists appeared to be equally aroused by the consensual and the coerced scenes. However, subsequent large-scale replications of these studies, as well as a more recent intensive study have shown that among a group of rapists, arousal to forced sex was significantly lower than it was to consenting sex; moreover, the rapists did not differ in this regard from groups of ordinary men (Kutchinsky 1991; forthcoming). Meanwhile, despite the negative findings of the United States Obscenity Commission, which were later reiterated by the British Williams Committee in 1979, the idea that pornography may be the direct cause of rape had continued to gain support among anti- pornography groups; and since the mid-1970s the Christian/Conservative moralists viewpoints (which had been voiced, among others, by the minority of the U.S. Obscenity Commission) were joined by feminist oriented groups."