“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim. Are you going to ban them too?” the Justice asked. Justice Sonia Sotomayor later added the example of violent rap music to the list of media that are currently protected by the First Amendment.

Morazzini argued that the level of violence in videogames was particularly high compared to other media.

Scalia retorted, “That same argument could have been made when movies first came out. They could have said, oh, we’ve had violence in Grimm’s fairy tales, but we’ve never had it live on the screen. I mean, every time there’s a new technology, you can make that argument.”

– Oliver Chiang, Forbes.

This is an interesting topic but one I’m not really qualified to weigh in on, since they didn’t start putting age recommendations on video games until after I was over 18 and since I haven’t purchased a video game in at least five years. I don’t even know how they currently restrict children from purchasing violent video games, and to be honest, I can’t really figure it out from the Internet. Is it a store-by-store thing? Are there no restrictions at all, like with music with the old “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” label on it?

In any case, I’d generally say the onus should be on parents and guardians to police what video games their kids are playing and to make sure everyone involved understands that video games are not real and video-game actions should not be reenacted in real life.

I only bring it up here because of a comment from Julie in South Carolina on a post I made a couple of months ago, in which I said I didn’t have any moral or ethical issue with hunting but didn’t think I could ever actually bring myself to shoot an animal. She wrote:

While one would not expect to change your mind about hunting, you probably don’t think twice about playing a video game that involves killing people.

And here’s the thing: She’s absolutely right. I don’t think twice about playing a video game that involves killing people, because I recognize that it’s a video game, and killing a little video-game person is very different from killing a majestic buck in the forest.

In fact, I played a good hour’s worth of Grand Theft Auto this weekend, and I didn’t even bother playing the missions or whatever; I just plugged in the cheat code for all the weapons then blew up as much stuff as I could, over and over again. At no point did I confuse the virtual world with the real one. And when I left to go home, I felt no temptation to stop a passing motorist, kick his ass, shoot him, and take his car.

Just like American Psycho didn’t make me want to become a serial killer and Reservoir Dogs didn’t make me want to torture someone while listening to Stealers Wheel.

Of course I’m a grown-ass man now so I’m hardly the person these bans would target.