After Rash of Carjackings, State Lawmaker Pushes to Ban Violent Video Games

Stephen Silver

Politics, Americas

It seems that video games will remain an easy target for some policymakers.

There’s a long history of video games being blamed for real-life ills, with various school shootings, especially the Columbine massacre in 1999, often laid at the feet of first-person shooter games.

And now, following an uptick in carjackings in recent months, there’s a push in one state to ban violent video games altogether.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, a state lawmaker in Illinois, Rep. Marcus Evans, has introduced legislation to ban the sale of violent games. The bill would actually amend a 2012 law that prevented some games from being sold to minors in Illinois. Evans represents the South Side of Chicago, which has seen many such carjackings.

The text of the bill “changes provisions that restricts the sale or rental of violent video games to minors to prohibit the sale of all violent video games, while changing the definition of “violent video game” to “a video game that allows a user or player to control a character within the video game that is encouraged to perpetuate human-on-human violence in which the player kills or otherwise causes serious physical or psychological harm to another human or an animal.” The bill goes on to define “serious physical harm” as “child abuse, sexual abuse, animal abuse, domestic violence, violence against women, or motor vehicle theft with a driver or passenger present inside the vehicle when the theft begins.”

The bill was filed February 19, received a first reading February 22, and was referred to the House’s Rules Committee the same day.

While much media coverage has referred to Evans’ push as an effort to directly ban “Grand Theft Auto”—a game associated with carjackings and other urban street mayhem—neither GTA nor any other specific game is mentioned in the text of the legislation.

However, per the Sun-Times, local activists see a connection between the popularity of the “Grand Theft Auto” games and the rash of carjackings in Chicago, many of which have been carried out by young teenagers.

The “Grand Theft Auto” series has been around since 1997 and led to numerous sequels and spinoffs. There have been multiple lawsuits filed against the game’s makers following real-life violent incidents—many of them brought by the controversial attorney and anti-video game activist Jack Thompson—but none were successful. Also, the last new “Grand Theft Auto” game came out in 2013, and the game is far past its cultural heyday, although a new one is reportedly in the works.

It’s unclear how much support the bill has in the Illinois legislature, but it faces both constitutional hurdles and practical ones. There would appear to be First Amendment concerns about such legislation, and none of the previous pushes to ban video games had any success. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that video games were protected speech under the First Amendment, in relation to a California law that banned the sale of violent games to minors.

Furthermore, video games, unlike when the 2012 bill passed, are often played online these days, and acquired through downloads rather than from in-person purchase at stores. So such a ban would likely require banning app downloads as well.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.