Violence is nothing new. When I read Jared Blackford's post on the Supreme Court's decision to overturn a law banning the sale of violent videos to children under 18, I couldn't help but think that the justices knew waht they were saying. It's very easy to take the Jared's position on this subject and "protect the children" is an excellent flag to rally around, but does the virtual world really have a bearing on reality? He claims that because of video games, kids "lose their temper over the littlest thing", but there are other factors to consider when remarking on a population's personality change. A great number of social scientists have noticed that narcissism has been on the rise in America, a trait associate with short tempers due to a feeling of entitlement which is not satisfied as often as narcissistic believe. The fact is, we aren't all behavioral psychologists, and while it might seem intuitive to link violent video games to violence, there isn't one. While pathos based arguments like Jared's "I coulden't believe how it could change his mind, just killing everyone" might sound convincing at first, people like Texas A&M professor Christopher Ferguson have been been conducting research proving that there isn't any link between video games and violence. It just seems wrong to me to treat this as an ethical debate to be discussed with anecdotes when there are specialists in the subjects giving us empirical evidence to help form our opinions.
Furthermore, from a constitutional standpoint, video games deserve the first amendment protections as any other form of media, and just like movies already have systems in place to prevent children from accessing mature content. Ultimately it is up to parents to decide what their kids should be able to play with, and as someone who grew up with violent video games and has neither a temper nor intentions on killing anything, I say: keep it that way
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