St Louis Continues Pushing Violent Games Law 35
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..
The question they need to be asked: (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and that game those punk kids play, you know the one where they pretend to have this war, you know? and they're trying to kill everybody on the other side so they can capture the king? That seems pretty violent too.
Well.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok... (Score:4, Insightful)
From the sounds of things so far, slashdoters make this sound like a bad thing.
Guess then you don't care for the same rules applying to movies either. By this logic little Johny should be able to see M an XXX rated movies.
Re:another question that needs to be asked (Score:2, Insightful)
There is also H. L. Mencken's definition of Puritanism to consider, "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." He was really onto something with that. Think of all the things that have been in trouble. Pool, pinball, comic books, Rock and Roll, and RolePlaying Games have all had their time in the dock. All of these things have in common that they are fun without being educational or "spiritual." Some people really hate that, you have to come up with a better reason for stuff like that to exist than just because it is fun, because to those people fun=bad.
I actually kind of wish that the game companies would fight this not in courts but by complying. They could just stop shipping games to stores in St. Louis County and close the arcades. The trouble is they are worried that if it succeeds in St. Louis, Joseph Lieberman will decide to introduce a bill making it national. It would be interesting to see what would happen, though, even though a lot of small arcade and video game owners would end up suffering in the short term. (If I was an arcade owner in St. Louis county, I'd already be looking to relocate.)