Law, Business and Society 11th Edition by Tony McAdams

Exercise 9

Americans were shocked and searching for answers when Adam Lanza, 20, shot and killed 20 children, six Sandy Hook Elementary School staff members, his mother, and himself in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. One of the initial areas of concern was the video game industry. Lanza reportedly was "enthralled" by violent video games, including one called School Shooting, although the state's official investigation of the shooting was unable to establish a motive for his behavior.
Even though video games are subject to an industrywide rating system, a number of states have also legislated restrictions on minors' access to violent video games. California, for example, approved a 2005 Jaw forbidding the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. The video game industry sued to block the law; that challenge reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2011 where the California law was struck down as a violation of free speech rights. The Court ruled that the statute was a content-based restraint on speech requiring California to establish a compelling reason for the Jaw; a standard the state could not satisfy. Studies linking violent video games and harm to children have not established a clear causal relationship between the two. The majority further reasoned that video games are like books, plays and other forms of protected expression. Video games, they said, communicate ideas and even social messages. While the state has the power to protect children, that power does not extend to restricting the ideas children can receive. Some justices pointed specifically to the vagueness of the law that left uncertainty about which games would have been restricted by the law.
Video Game Addiction
Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's conclusion that California was unable to show a sufficient link between violent video games and damage to children, some of the evidence about video game use generally is disquieting. For example, a 2009 Iowa State University study found that almost one in ten American children, ages 8 to 18 are addicted to video games (the study was not limited to games) in much the way some people are addicted to drugs or gambling. And a 2013 Iowa State University study of 227 juvenile offenders in Pennsylvania found a strong association between violent video game use and juvenile violence and delinquency, even when controlling for a history of violence and for psychopathic traits among those studied. [For the Entertainment Software Rating Board, see www.esrb.org/index-js.jsp ]
Daniel Akst asks, "Part of the fun of video games is the chance to inhabit an exciting fictional world. So do people who play these games feel free to behave immorally toward the characters on screen " Answer Akst's question. See Daniel Akst, "In Playing Video Games, Morality Rules." The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2012 [ http://blogs.wsj.com/ ].