Paul Waldman asks if violent video games -- the sale of which California has restricted to minors, a law that is the subject of a Supreme Court challenge -- actually harm kids. In the late 1920s, as Americans became more and more concerned about the effect "talking pictures" might have on impressionable youth, the Payne Fund commissioned a series of studies on the subject. Movies, the researchers reported, put children into an emotional state, affected their sleep patterns, and probably contributed to juvenile delinquency. Among the alarming findings was that movie scenes with erotic themes seemed to make teenagers highly aroused. If you can believe it. Over the last century, we've seen one moral panic after another about culture corrupting the young. Jazz, movies, comic books, heavy metal, gansta rap -- whenever a new form of entertainment seemingly more intense and involving comes along, adults fear young minds are being warped and twisted, that Beaver Cleaver is being transformed into Dylan Klebold. Which brings us to video games, pegged as a fertilizer of mayhem and murder when Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 of their classmates at Columbine High School 11 years ago. The Supreme Court last week agreed to hear a challenge to a California law that makes it illegal to sell a violent video game to a minor. Although similar laws have been struck down repeatedly in lower courts, this is the first time the Supreme Court will consider the question. In order to uphold the law, the Court must conclude both that the harm to children from violent video games is clear and substantial and that a legal restriction on the sale of these games is a reasonable answer to that problem. Both of those conclusions are hard to sustain. KEEP READING. . .
