Videos kids shouldn't play

Editorial

Florida and 10 other states quite rightly are supporting California's defense of its law preventing the sale of shockingly violent video games to minors younger than age 18.

The law bans no speech but was written to help parents protect their children against the more detestable aspects of this product of popular culture.

Yet the makers and sellers of video games and First Amendment purists argue the law is a violation of a minor's right to free speech and is therefore unconstitutional. It is aimed, they say, at the content of such videos rather than the retail object itself.

In our view, states should be able to facilitate parental control over their children's access to violent video games that could hurt them.

The interactive video game that is the focus of a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court is disgusting and of no societal value. It features "girls attacked with a shovel and begging for mercy. The player can be merciless and decapitate them. People shot in the leg will fall down and crawl; the player can then pour gasoline over them, set them on fire and urinate on them."

This is entertainment?

The California Legislature passed the law only after it considered studies and peer-reviewed articles from social scientists and medical associations that tend to show a correlation between playing the games and increasingly aggressive thoughts and antisocial behavior in both adults and children.

Yes, some of the research is conflicting, but there is enough there to warrant restrictions on children's ability to rent or purchase such vile games.

It is true that violent content, unlike sexual content, has not traditionally been regulated by government, but then as Chief Justice John Roberts said during oral arguments recently, our society has never had a tradition of telling kids to watch little girls beg for mercy and then chop their heads off.

Opponents of the law also insist that children have always been exposed to violence. They mention Grimm's fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse mythology and other literary examples as proof.

But reading the depictions of death and mayhem, torture and sadism is different from seeing it and, most distressingly, participating in it, even if only in a game.

What's next, critics ask, censorship in movies? But movies are already regulated for sexual content and violence. Kids younger than age 17 aren't supposed to get into an R-rated showing without being accompanied by an adult.

In his questions, Justice Stephen Breyer kept talking about common sense. Is there any sense in the state preventing a young teenager from buying a nude magazine but allowing him or her to buy and play a video game featuring the gratuitous torture of babies?

We think the answer is no.

If a state may not impose the death penalty on minors or keep a juvenile in jail for life because the Supreme Court has recognized that kids are different from adults, then it "may also keep them from buying games which invite them to commit digital atrocities."

The California law is a common sense regulation that bans no speech, affects no adults, delineates its reach and reinforces parents' authority. It is constitutional.