Supreme Court Debates Violent Video Game Ban

[Bilge_Rat]

WASHINGTON — 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.

They tried analogies — to books, films, cartoons, comic books, fairy tales and rap lyrics. They argued about what the drafters of the Bill of Rights would have made of an extremely violent game like Postal 2.

“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?”

But Justice Scalia said there was nothing in the tradition of American free speech that would allow the government to ban depictions of violence. The thought, he said, would have been foreign to the drafters of the First Amendment, drawing a needling comment from Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the lone dissenter in the Stevens case.

“What Justice Scalia wants to know,” Justice Alito said, “is what James Madision thought about video games.”

“No,” Justice Scalia responded, “I want to know what James Madison thought about violence.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/us/03scotus.html?hp

I rarely agree with Justice Scalia, but I do on this, Government has no business regulating the content of video games.