A rampage of mass shootings in a matter of months has prompted legislative proposals to study whether video games are linked to real-life violence. Such efforts have been stalled by gaming-industry and media-advocate campaigns to crush such efforts.
The Entertainment Software Association (which includes members such as Microsoft and the U.S. subsidiaries of Sony and Nintendo) has fought such bills in in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey this year and in Oklahoma last year. The measures either died or are locking in legislative committees.
The ESA now is taking aim at a similar federal bill. State lawmakers have unsuccessfully tried to limit sales of violent video games to minors, failing on First Amendment grounds. Legislatures have proposed panels to study the potential impact of violent video games on behavior, since shooters like Newtown gunman Adam Lanza (who killed 20 children and seven adults) played violent war-simulation video games. After the 2012 movie-theater rampage in Aurora, items removed from the alleged shooter’s apartment included video games with violent elements. Another shooter who killed 69 at a youth camp in Norway in 2011 testified he had trained for his attack by playing “Call of Duty.”
Watch Your Language, Senator
There is currently no research that directly links playing violent video games with perpetrating real violent crime. Massachusetts Sen. William Brownsberger proposed legislation last month to create a special commission that would investigate the influence of violent video games and its connection with real-world violence.
Critics of the bill lined up fast, accusing Brownsberger of using “inflammatory language” in his bill such as “killing games” and “rampage killing,” thus prejudicing any potentially-meaningful study of the issue. Media advocacy groups criticize that the commission could become politicized and that the bill has conclusions built into the language to begin with. Targeting “killing games” for special study and scrutiny violates the fundamental First Amendment principle that government may not target expression, “because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”
The Unique Nature of Video Games
Thus far, all attempts to try to regulate the sale or content of games have failed, even at the Supreme Court level.
A 2002 report by the U.S. Secret Service on school shootings said that more than half of the studied perpetrators showed some interest in violent media — but this media included movies, books, and video games. One wasn’t more prevalent than the other.
Global video game sales soared above those of music and grew faster than movies in 2011. Game sales are expected to climb to $82.9 billion annually by 2017 from the expected $65 billion this year. Critics of violent games accuse the industry of trying to discourage scrutiny of their booming business.
In 2011, the Supreme Court struck down a California law imposing special restrictions on teens’ ability to buy video games deemed “violent” by the state. A major win for free speech advocates, the ruling in Brown v. EMA made clear that video games are protected by the First Amendment just like books, movies, and other media. Therefore, laws imposing special restrictions on video games must be justified by data showing that they’re uniquely likely to cause violence — that, for example, video game depictions of Revolutionary War battles have profoundly different effects than book or movie depictions. While psychological studies seemed to agree than violent media caused violent behavior, a direct link between violent video games and harm to minors couldn’t be proven.
Future Studies
While multiple studies have warranted varying and hotly-debated results on the effects of violent video games, no study has focused specifically on firearm violence as a specific outcome of violence in the media. In January President Obama ordered the CDC to examinee existing information on the cause of gun violence, including the role of violent video games, if such a role exists. The CDC claimed there wasn’t enough to go on and that more research is needed. The CDC currently claims to lack funding to undertake its own study.
In the U.S. Senate, a bipartisan bill would direct the National Academy of Sciences to study both violent video programming and video games, including how games affect aggression-prone children. Introduced in January, the bill was unanimously passed by the Senate Commerce Committee in July. At the end of the day, the hope is that parents will help children select appropriate games and use time limits to avoid unhealthy gaming obsessions. That might be a bit easier than messing with the Constitution.
