Come Hear What Horrors Violent Games Hath Wrought

The following list of atrocities is from an amicus brief sent by the conservative Eagle Forum, founded by Phyllis Schlafly (left), to the U.S. Supreme Court in relation to their ruling on a 2005 violent video game law which banned violent games from being sold to minors. The document is authored by her son, Andrew Schlafly, who also founded Conservapedia (bizarro-world, right-wing Wikipedia), and links video games to everything from poor grades to porn to instant death. Observe:

“The First Amendment does not render our nation’s youth defenseless against the predatory, billion-dollar video game industry that churns out increasingly graphic blood and gore for impressionable minds to imbibe…

The corruption of our nation’s youth with increasingly deviant video games is a matter of national importance. Our nation’s youth is in crisis, by any measure. A calamitous 30% of our nation’s youth fail to graduate from public high school, and only 32% of those who attend public high school are ever qualified to attend a four-year college…

A substantial percentage of teenagers are hooked on these disturbing video games, and spend many hours each week playing them. Moreover, mass killings perpetrated by youngsters are frequently linked to addiction to violent video games…

The First Amendment does not forbid state legislatures from keeping this harmful material from children. The California legislature, not known to be conservative, protected its youth against the predatory video game industry. It was an error with national implications for the Ninth Circuit to invalidate the California statute…

Violent video games hurt children in two ways. Their increasingly realistic and disturbing images burn into children’s impressionable minds much as pornography does, and the role-playing inherent in a video game causes the child to buy into the rampages of murder and other heinous crimes that he is acting out…

The early market leader in video games was Nintendo, which adopted a policy against “excessive blood and violence,” but it was trounced in sales by a 3 to 1 margin by more gory material produced by Sega, and Nintendo learned the message that “violence sells video games to children…”

Numerous studies confirm the obvious: violent video games do cause addiction and harm… There has never been a full First Amendment right to flash highly objectionable and disturbing images specifically at children, or to entice them to participate in destructive role-playing behavior…

Displaying a shocking image to a child is conceptually identical to the utterance of “fighting words” to an adult, which this Court famously held to be out-side of First Amendment protection…

The stress attributed to violent video games can even be physically harmful. Eighteen-year-old Peter Burkowski, an avid video gamer, collapsed and died of a heart attack while playing games in an arcade…

Children who play violent video games have difficulty obeying authorities, treating peers properly, and succeeding in school…”

There’s honestly way too much to even address here, and there are more logical fallacies than complete sentences in this document (children play video games, children’s grades are dropping, therefore we can only conclude…), but my favorite is the part about Sega and Nintendo. This document must have been written in 1996, as if you recall, Sega is now long dead, and Nintendo is currently the market leader in video gaming by about a 1000% margin thanks to its huge stable of family friendly titles for the Wii and DS.

My protests with this piece aside, I honestly don’t have a problem with the “No M-Rated Games to Minors” law as I don’t think eight year-olds should be able to suffocate gangbangers with plastic bags in Manhunt. This is just an idiotic way to defend the law, and they should just be content it passed in the first place.

[via Gamepolitics]