Following a report suggesting the perpetrator of last year’s Sandy Hook massacre was trying to get some sort of ‘high score’, a pair of US politicians have renewed their campaigns against violent games.
“In today’s world, where kids can access content across a variety of devices often without parental supervision, it is unrealistic to assume that overworked and stressed parents can prevent their kids from viewing inappropriate content,” West Virginian Democrat senator Jay Rockefeller said this week, according to a Daily News report.
“The only real solution is for the entertainment industry to reduce the often obscene levels of violence in the products they sell,”
Three days after the Sandy Hook tragedy, Rockefeller introduced a bill for a National Academy of Sciences study into the effects of “violent video games and other content” on children. The bill failed to raise sufficient interest, but Rockefeller has since re-introduced it.
Meanwhile, Iowan Republican senator Chuck Grassley, has also raised questions about the impact of violent games on children.
“There are too many video games that celebrate the mass killing of innocent people — games that despite attempts at industry self-regulation find their way into the hands of children,” he said.
No peer-reviewed study has ever demonstrated a causative link between violence in video games and real world violence. In response to the events at Sandy Hook, US media went into hysterics over video games, but vice president Joe Biden met with video game industry representatives and later proposed a series of gun law reforms instead of industry regulation unequal to that imposed on film and literature.
Thanks, Polygon.
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