Should children have the constitutional right to buy the most violent of video games? Games where women are decapitated with shovels and humans are set on fire?
The U.S. Supreme Court will take up that question in its upcoming term. In light of the court’s recent decision that even brutal animal cruelty films are protected by the First Amendment, it might seem like it would be fair game to sell sadistic games to children.
We hope not, and we think there is a strong argument to be made as to how the First Amendment applies differently to children and violence than it does to adults.
At issue is a California law that would punish stores that sell exceptionally violent games to those under 18 years old. The law imposes a $1,000 fine and applies to games that depict the “killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.”
In order to fall under the auspices of the law, a reasonable person would have to find the game appeals to a “deviant or morbid interest” of minors, that it’s patently offensive to community standards and that the game lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
The law did not prohibit a minor’s parents from buying such a game for their child.
The descriptions of the games that fall under the ban are stomach-turning. One of the games outlined in the litigation involved the shooting of police officers, women beaten with a shovel who then can be decapitated, people shot in the leg, who then can be doused with gasoline and set on fire.
The player also has the option of urinating on them.
We’re talking about some pretty seriously sick stuff.
California argues — and we agree with this position — that very violent video game sales to minors ought to be treated in the same way as selling sexual materials to minors.
The state contends that excessively violent material sold to children deserves no protection under the First Amendment.
Such a holding would add to the power of parents in determining whether their children should have such material, since presumably minors could get it only through their parents.
The opposition in this case, video game trade associations, contends that video games are a “modern form of artistic expression,” comparing them to great literature and Greek mythology.
We admit that we are not intimately familiar with the violent video game genre, but the descriptions we’ve read seem like a far cry from Homer’s Iliad.
We hope when Supreme Court justices contemplate the issues, they find that when it comes to minors, seriously sick and violent games deserve the same treatment as sexually explicit materials.
