LANSING – Continued concern for the state’s youngest video gamers may lead to an appeal of a federal judge’s ruling on Friday striking down laws meant to keep violent video games away from children. However, the appeal, as well as any attempt to rewrite and introduce new legislation, would likely be pointless said one lawmaker.
U.S. District Judge George Steeh, has made permanent an injunction he issued in November, saying that the state failed to support its claim that “ultra violent” video games lead to violence in society and that the growing judicial consensus is that the free speech provisions of the First Amendment protect the games from censure.
The law, which would have taken effect on December 1, would have criminalized the sale of violent games to children younger than 17, a move supporters said was critical to keeping sexually explicit or graphic images out of the hands of minors.
The bills that formed the video game laws are: SB 416, which prohibited and outlined penalties for dissemination of violent video games to minors and SB 463 and HB 4702, which included video games under the law that prohibits selling sexually explicit materials to minors.
Steeh said the law was also unenforceable because the language of the provisions was too vague and would force retailers to determine which games were included under the ban.
The state is discussing the chances of winning an appeal but hasn’t yet made any decisions, said Nate Bailey, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office.
“This is a package of bills that (Governor Jennifer Granholm) pushed for and her office is a stakeholder and several legislators are stakeholders, and we’ll talk to them during this process,” Bailey said.
Although now was the time to strike against an industry that legislators have said promotes “violence as commonplace,” an incensed Sen. Alan Cropsey (R-Dewitt), sponsor of one of the bills in the package, SB 416, said he wouldn’t be willing to reintroduce new legislation because the outcome would likely be the same.
Calling the ruling “a blow to the values of our society,” Cropsey said: “The liberalism in the judiciary and in the media won out and if the laws were passed again, they’d go to the same liberal judges with the same outcome.”
He added that although there are about 30 studies to show the link between violence in video games and an increase in youth violence, there were none to contradict the theory.
“The problem is that by the time you have enough science to show a correlation, society is coarser and the video games are such a commonplace that when you try to get rid of them people say: ‘What’s the problem?'”
The senator called the argument that it’s up to each household to decide which games make it through the front door a “copout.”
“These people don’t believe anybody else in society has a responsibility for the children,” he said. “Anybody who raises kids knows how hard it is to keep your kids away from the violence that’s everywhere in the media.”
“Everybody knows that children are the future and when you start to feed violence into children, you get violence back. If (the video game industry) truly wanted to make sure that violent games didn’t get into the hands of children, they would’ve supported this legislation.”
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