Spilling a little red type. GamePolitics does quick work on an amicus brief filed by the Eagle Forum (“leading the pro-family movement since 1972”) supporting California’s video game law by highlighting the most problematic claims of the brief. As GamePolitics writes, “In the amicus brief, the Eagle Forum lays an array of societal problems at the feet of violent video games: bad grades, violent behavior, poor graduation rates, school shootings, game addiction and even sudden death.” As we’ve noted: these correlations are shaky at best.
Here is GamePolitics markup of the brief’s text:
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…
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…
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…
Download a pdf of the entire amicus brief here.