Having
all but failed in her ill-considered, poorly argued efforts to
ban assault weapons (the usual caveat: whatever “assault weapons”
are), now California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems ready to fail and
fail harder going after violent video games.
At a speech in San Francisco on Wednesday, she took her typical
aim against the National Rifle Association. But then she all but
joined the NRA in complaining about the
glorification of violence in video games. Via the Associated
Press:
Feinstein also encouraged the entertainment and video game
industries to take voluntary steps to produce products that do not
glorify big, powerful guns before Congress feels compelled to step
in. She mentioned that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old man responsible
for the Sandy Hook Elementary School slayings, practiced shooting
both at a range with his mother and on a video screen.Video games play "a very negative role for young people, and the
industry ought to take note of that," she said. "If Sandy Hook
doesn't do it, if the knowledge of these video games this young man
played doesn't, then maybe we have to proceed, but that is in the
future."
Well, we can all look forward to that future failure as well.
One: Just as with movies, the video game industry has a voluntary
ratings system that thoroughly documents a game’s contents and
recommends appropriate ages. Two: The Supreme Court has ruled that
the contents of video games are
constitutionally protected free speech in a case that
originated from Feinstein’s own state.
The idea of video games playing “a very negative role for young
people” is just unsupported nonsense without
foundation. Yesterday, when I wrote about film critic’s
Roger Ebert’s awkward relationship with the creative culture of
video games, I noted the gap between Baby Boomers and the younger
generations over the role of the medium in their lives. The
industry took Ebert’s dismissal of video games as a potential art
form as a challenge.
Feinstein’s poorly chosen words and vague threat will likely not
inspire much introspection. She doesn’t understand the medium at
all and clearly has no interest in understanding the medium. But
unlike Ebert, Feinstein has the power to shape government policy,
or at least try to, anyway. It would be interesting to see how the
heavily California-based video game industry would respond to
Feinstein actually trying to go after them.
Below, Reason TV highlights several extremely stupid
Congressional hearings where politicians presumed to justify
censorship against various forms of media:
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