Blogger Hates Violence, Yet is Against California Law

A discussion between two writers on the Perpetual Post website caught our eye because one of the scribes, even while expressing an aversion to violent videogames, doesn’t think the government should be in the business of limiting a child’s access to them.

In her part of the article, Molly Schoemann says that she “can’t really stomach violence of any kind—even videogame violence,” and recounted a previous experience playing Army of Two in which she was reduced to being “huddled in a pile of rubble,” where she “refused to shoot anyone.”

Schoemann also believes that violent games do have some sort of impact on youngsters, writing, “Can you really tell me that the experience of playing a videogame in which you rampage around shooting other people happens in a vacuum and has absolutely no influence over the way in which a child thinks of violent behavior and its consequences?”

But even with those two feelings in the back of her head, she is not looking for government intervention. As she wrote:

Granted, I am not sure that I am particularly in favor of laws restricting these games from being sold to minors either. For one thing, I don’t think this would really do much in the way of keeping them out of the hands of children. For another, a child who is otherwise well-rounded and grows up in a loving and supportive home is ideally receiving enough positive influences in his or her life to combat any tendencies toward violence that might be awakened through videogames or other media sources.

Ultimately, it is the children who do not grow up in loving and supportive homes whose potential for violence we need to worry about – and their access to violent videogames is among the least of our concerns in that case.