Good intentions aren’t always enough to get a law to pass a constitutionality test. Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, the primary sponsor of the violent video game law that passed the Legislature last summer, faced this fact again two weeks ago when the bill was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.
The bill would have made it a civil infraction with a $500 fine for a retailer to knowingly sell mature video games depicting violence against law enforcement officers to kids under the age of 17. Unfortunately, even such a specific law with narrow intent couldn’t escape the Constitution.
After two previous defeats, this may represent the last time that Dickerson will dip into the legislative well to address the problem of violent video games and their impact on children.
Despite the brutal and nauseating content of these games – which includes beating bloodied, incapacitated police officers, singling out women and minorities for killing via shovels, gasoline, and sniper rifles and urinating upon the victims while shouting sexist and racist epithets at the corpses – it seems legislation isn’t the right approach anymore to the issue.
Dickerson is doing other things besides pushing legislation to confront these video games, including educating parents and lobbying the industry to begin to self-regulate the sales of video games with gruesome content.
And that’s where most of the effort should be focused now – convincing the industry that they must self-regulate to protect children.
Years ago, the movie industry realized that movies with adult content aren’t appropriate for children. Their effectively-enforced movie ratings have protected children from sex and violence in movies. But with the dawn of increasingly realistic video games in which children can literally become characters who pursue mass murder and gratuitous sex, inappropriate content has found another way into our children’s lives.
The video game industry should follow the lead of the film industry and refuse to sell games with “mature” ratings to children without parental consent. There is a ratings system in place, but it is most often ignored in pursuit of the industry’s bottom line: profits.
Admittedly, persuading the industry to self-regulate its sales to children will be difficult, considering video game sales, especially those with mature content, would decrease exponentially if sold exclusively to adults. But something must be done, and it is the burden of the industry to protect children if the Legislature cannot.
The industry has promised a thorough, albeit strictly internal, review of its sales practices, increased monitoring, and improved efforts to halt sales of violent games to children.
These promises may be empty, but there are plenty of people watching to make sure they aren’t.
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