GTA: SCOTUS
June 27th, 2011 - 9:15 am
Score a win for liberty:
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a California law banning the sale of violent videogames to minors is unconstitutional.
The court, in a 7-2 vote, said the law violated First Amendment free-speech protections. “Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an 18-page opinion, which was joined by four other justices.
Message to parents: It’s your job to be the parents.
Strangest bit? Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer dissented. That’s a pairing you don’t see very often.
While it’s hard to disagree with the premise that the state should be required to pass a strict line to ban something, how is banning the sale of violent video games to minors any different than banning the sale of Penthouse or Playboy to minors?
Violent video games sounds fairly vague (Would Mario Bro. qualify? Pokemon?), so it’s hard to comment on the specific law, but I don’t have a problem with the state assuming that the default position of parents is that they don’t want their kids to have “violent” video games (like the Resident Evil series, for example) and if they do, they can march their happy butt down to WalMart and buy it for them. The law doesn’t appear to say that kids can’t have violent video games, only that they can’t purchase them. To my mind, the law is allowing the parents to be the parents by actually having to make a positive step to procure these games for their kids.
Besides the fact that most retail outlets won’t sell “M”-rated games to minors anyway. This is just an attempt to trample on the Constitution so that politicians can be seen to be “doing something!!11!!”
And that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that parents can lock the game consoles to only play certain content ratings. Seriously, it’s not just parenting – it’s minimal parenting.