The mighty video game industry rejoices. The Supreme Court yesterday rejected, by 7 votes to 2, the Californian law which since 2005 has prohibited the sale or rental of violent video games to minors: now that measure is unconstitutional. The prohibition, of course, could be circumvented: the boys still obtained copies of the popular games. But culturally it was a significant bulwark.
The teenage audience is the largest consumer of video games: boxing, martial arts, gangsters, war and various fights are a large part of the sector's consumption. The powerful Entertainment Software Association had been fighting for the rejection of the Californian law for years. The pronouncement of the highest body of US justice relies on the undemonstrable cause-effect link between exposure to violent video games and aggressive behavior by young people.
The debate in the States has been very lively for years. In 1999 the massacre in the Columbine school revived the arguments of those who are in favor of the ban: the killer was an avid consumer of "Doom", where the player must shoot wildly at everything that appears in front of him. At Columbine High School, something like this happened, but the lead and the corpses weren't virtual.
