Wild man Julian Sanchez on the coming regulation of video game content:
It's been a good week for the digital descendants of Thomas Bowdler. As we all know, the best sweeping public policy is guided by our reactions to manifestly insane people who commit acts of violence as extreme in their rarity as their brutality. So as the bones of the Virginia Tech victims are picked thoroughly clean for political red meat, it's no surprise to find violent video games joining an ever-expanding list of whipping boys, from obvious candidates like deinstitutionalization and the gun culture to (yes, really) feminism and atheism. Killer Cho Seung-Hui may have played Counter-Strike in high school, you see. National Review's Peter Suderman predicts the flurry of cursor-pointing will prompt renewed focus on the Video Game Decency Act, a spectacularly redundant law whose main function would be to entangle the federal government with the software industry's highly effective private ratings board.
Whole thing here
