First Amendment Trumps California in Supreme Court Battle Over Violent Video GamesYeah, Shady, it seems we have more to worry about from violence than from porn. Just goes to show that public officials have their priorities all screwed up! There's more evidence that violence is bad for children than that porn is bad for children. And yet obscenity laws remain and this doesn't pass. Go figure! I'm for the government not censoring anything and allowing citizens to decide for themselves what they consider to be obscene or violent. That would be what you'd expect living in the "Land of the Free" but obviously that's just a fairytale! So, I guess I agree with this decision and would like it extended to other forms of expression.
The debate about video games' effect on kids has raged since the '80s and intensified in the '90s with the creation of Doom and a spate of school shootings. After the turn of the century, states across America, including Illinois and Michigan, attempted to criminalize the sale of violent video games to minors. But each of these laws, usually promoted by Democrats, was found by the lower courts to violate the First Amendment, running afoul of the country's Constitutional protection for free speech. California's attempt to criminalize violent games got further than others. The law was written by California assemblyman and child psychologist Leland Yee and signed into law by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Yee's law borrowed the language of the Miller Test, a set of criteria established by the Supreme Court in 1973 for determining if forms of speech are obscene and therefore not protected by the First Amendment. Short of establishing a class of obscene video games that would be illegal for any American, Yee's law would build on the Supreme Court precedent for allowing states to make the sale of certain kinds of pornographic content—adult magazines, for example—illegal when sold to children, while remaining legal if sold to adults.
LINK:
http://kotaku.com/5795472/video-games-defeat-california-in-supreme-court-battle-over-violent-video-games