XBox Not X-Rated

The Supreme Court ruled against a California law that banned the sale of overly violent video games to children. We think the majority got the ruling right but the reasoning wrong.

At any rate, the majority opinion, written by Antonin Scalia, relied on a correspondence between video games and other forms of media, such as books, movies, songs, etc. Scalia noted that the government has never previously regulated depictions of violence, so video games should not be subject to such regulation.

Now, when it comes to personal, privacy-of-one's-own-home issues, the Solipsist is pretty libertarian. If kids want to play ultra-violent video games, and their parents are OK with them doing so, who are we to judge? Unless of course we're judges. Like on the Supreme Court. . . . Wait, we just confused ourselves.

Scalia says violent video games shouldn't be regulated by the government because depictions of violence never have been regulated by the government. But just because something never has been done doesn't automatically mean it should never be done, especially if there is some compelling societal reason for doing it. Prior to last Friday, government officials in New York had never conferred legitimacy on same-sex marriage, but that, thankfully, didn't stop them from taking such action. And we suppose a case could be made that the government has a legitimate role to play in preventing children's exposure to insanely violent stimuli, especially if, as some fear, such games encourage children to behave violently.

We had different objections to the legislation.

For one thing, it's utterly pointless. The fact that a store can't sell violent video games to children will hardly prevent children from getting them. Again, if parents don't object to their children having such games, then parents could simply buy the games for them.

The more important problem with the legislation is its lack of specificity. The law in question

defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive,” appealed to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."

Who decides what is "offensive"? How does one know which of minor's interests are being appealed to? How "serious" does the literary, artistic, political, or scientific value need to be? These are terms that we would reject in a student's topic sentence. We strongly object to their presence as legal benchmarks.

We realize this puts us into agreement with Justice Samuel Alito, who suggested that a more carefully worded law might withstand judicial scrutiny. Rest assures, we are as troubled by this as you are. But even a paleoconservative clock is right once a Supreme Court term.

English teachers of the world unite! No vaguely worded statutes!