Should Stores Sell Violent Video Games to Minors?

The Supreme Court is currently debating this question and trying to determine “what the drafters of the Bill of Rights would have made of an extremely violent game like Postal 2.”

In “Justices Debate Video Game Ban,” Adam Liptak writes in The Times:

 In a lively and sometimes testy Supreme Court argument on Tuesday over a law banning the sale of violent video games to minors, the justices struggled to define how the First Amendment should apply to a new medium.

… The law would impose $1,000 fines on stores that sell violent video games to people under 18. It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that is “patently offensive,” appeals to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

“What’s a deviant violent video game?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, who was the law’s most vocal opponent on Tuesday. “As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?”

“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”

Justice Stephen G. Breyer took the other side. He said common sense should allow the government to help parents protect children from games that include depictions of “gratuitous, painful, excruciating, torturing violence upon small children and women.”

What do you think about this? How violent, “deviant,” “offensive,” or “morbid” should a game have to be to make it unsuitable for people under 18? How would you draw the line? And how do you think violent video games affect young people in general? Why?

P.S. New videos at the top of the screen!  Check them out.  They are great discussion points!

(This week's blog post is courtesy of The New York Times Learning Network.)