On Thursday, President Trump held a meeting to discuss how and whether violent video games affect gun violence, particularly school shootings. Before getting into the details of this claim, perhaps we should take a step back and read a classic fairy tale from 1812, printed in the Brothers Grimm’s Nursery and Household Tales and titled “How the Children Played Butcher with Each Other”:
A man once slaughtered a pig while his children were looking on. When they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other: “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher,” whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into his brother’s neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in the tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child’s neck and, in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who had been the butcher. She then rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub, but in the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields and saw this, he was so distraught that he died shortly thereinafter.
The end.
Violent entertainment is nothing new, nor is the older generation complaining about it. In usual Trump fashion, he claimed to be “hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.” But it’s not true. People all over the world play video games, especially young boys, and there’s no resulting correlation to acts of violence. Actually, some studies have shown that violent video games might reduce crime by keeping young men off the street and glued to their TVs.
In 2011, the Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, holding that California’s 2005 law banning the the sale of “violent” video games to minors violated the First Amendment. Cato filed a brief in that case that documented the history of complaints about uniquely violent entertainment and the effectiveness of industry self-regulation–such as the MPAA movie ratings, the ESRB ratings for video games, and the Comics Code–over ham-handed government oversight. The Court cited Cato’s brief in its opinion.
Due to Brown, any federal law regulating violent video games is likely to be struck down by the courts. That doesn’t mean, however, that Trump and other government agents can’t make things uncomfortable for the industry. Most likely, we’ll just hear a bunch of complaining about “these kids today” from older generations. Everything old is new again, particularly when new forms of entertainment come around that are foreign to older generations.
Read the rest of this post →