Demonstrating that while they oppose women and most of the Bill of Rights, the Justices of the Supreme Court retain some margin of respect for the First Amendment, the highest court in the United States has upheld the Ninth District ruling in Schwarzenegger Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association. It is officially Not Constitutional to penalize retailers for erroneously selling age-inappropriate games to minors in the United States.
Says the usually-evil Justice Scalia:
This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence. And California’s claim that “interactive” video games present special problems, in that the player participates in the violent action on screen and determines its outcome, is unpersuasive.
Poor Leland Yee. He’ll have to actually do something for the people of California now.
For those of you in other countries, we will be bombing you shortly. Please take cover.
Excellent! 😀
The hand-wringing over the court’s decision in the comment sections of the mainstream media websites is sort of mind-boggling. I guess we as a people have lost the basic ability of logical reasoning. And parenting. And any concept of Compartmentalization 101.
Here’s an idea for concerned parents. Sit down with your kids and play their games with them. Talk about the game with them.
Amazing. A correct ruling.
And then there’s Ernest! 😉
Leland Yee won’t be productive. He’s the Asian Al Sharpton.
Mike, you are so right about the mainstream site’s comments sections. Of course, most of those comments are fueled by the fact that the articles themselves are depicting this story as, “U.S. Government says it is ok for children to play violent videogames”, which is not what this case was about. The articles should read more like, “U.S. Government says it is not their job to punish retailers for not doing a parents’ job”.
Reading those articles and the comments that follow is soooo frustrating!
What makes this so ironic is that this whole thing happened about comic books back in the early 50’s. Superman, Captain Marvel, etc etc would turn the children of my generation into vicious killers. Nothing changes. kay
Actually this isn’t surprising at all, for if there’s one value this version of SCOTUS has upheld, generally at the expense of everything else, it’s freedom of expression.
Kay, I remember reading about the comic book wars back then. The horror comics were also singled out. One peek and gentle, happy children would morph into criminally insane monsters. Here we are again. Round and round.
There is a lot of interesting stuff in the various opinions.
There is some language in the majority’s opinion that I think pretty much rings the death knell to any future attempts at similar laws. California’s law was carefully worded to mirror, as close as possible, a New York law that made the sale of obscene sexual materials to minors. That law was upheld by the Supreme Court back in 1969. The majority cut right to the heart of the distinction stating “that violence is not part of the obscenity that the Constitution permits to be regulated.” It further states that “[o]ur cases have been clear that the obscenity exception to the First Amendment does not cover whatever a legislature finds shocking, but only depictions of ‘sexual conduct.'”
Despite the fact that I think America’s puritanical views on sex and nudity and its very lax views on violence are messed up and a bit misguided, it is, nonetheless, very true. You don’t have to look too much further than the reaction to HBO’s Game of Thrones. There was very discussion about the blood, the beheadings, the slit throats, the heads on spikes, the tearing out of tongues through throats, etc. And most of the discussion about those things were about the quality of the action depicted. Whereas there was all sorts of hand-wringing and eye-rolling when it came to the nudity and “sexposition”.
The majority opinion also makes the reasoned arguments that this recent attack on video games is no different than prior attacks on other “new” media of the time. First it was “dime novels”, then movies, then radio, then comic books, then television and music lyrics. The opinion also, rightly, dismisses the scientific studies showing a correlation between playing violent video games and violent behavior or tendencies of the children.
Justice Alito, in concurring with the majority’s decision, feels it necessary to voice his complaint by going over all of the graphic, horrible things that one can find in video games. I am not sure if I have become desenitized over time or if I am just playing very different games, because the kind of stuff he talks about sounds like video games one would find in a “hyper-violentized” world. Like in, say, the Los Angeles of “Predator 2”. While Alito cites to websites showing that these games actually exist, such things are completely off my radar and, I would assume, off the radar of like 99% of all gamers, “hardcore” or otherwise. He also goes on to say that things are likely only to get worse with the advent of things like Ninetendos’ Wii, Microsoft’s Kinect and the Sony Move, where people start actually act out the violent actions instead of just pressing buttons. I am not sure I buy into that reasoning. It’s quite a leap without any real scientific background.
Justice Breyer, in a separate dissenting opinion, gets in on this argument and even goes so far as to say “[a] typical video game involves a significant amount of physical activity.” Uh, Justice Breyer, I have been playing video games for over 30 years and none of them have ever involved a “a significant amount of physical activity.” I can assure you that those that do, such as “Dance-Dance Revolution” or the new wave of Kinect/Wii games, are not “typical.”