I’ll keep the legal lingo in this post to a minimum, but this article caught my eye. California Attorney General, Jerry Brown, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger are petitioning to the U.S. Supreme Court to have a law re-instated that bans minors from buying or renting violent video games. Apparently the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals scrapped the law and threw out numerous studies linking violent video games to ant-social behavior.

This blows my mind. In fact a part of me hopes I’ve just got my facts wrong and I’m talking a load of nonsense here.

Wait a minute before you think I’m getting on my anti-violence-high-horse here, I’m not talking about shielding our little ones from every little misdeed portrayed on screen; I grew up on He-Man, Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe and it didn’t make me into a gun-crazed psychopath with a penchant for pizza, but come on, a line has to be drawn here.

I don’t have a problem playing violent video games; I loves me a little bit of GTA Vice City now and then, but would I want my eleven-year-old cousins to get hold of it? Of course not. I need a new sofa because they’re always jumping on it, imitating the last thing they saw on television that day. Why would games, as graphically advanced and immersive as they are nowadays be treated any differently?

Incidentally, I was working out at my local gym yesterday afternoon and one of the multitude of TV’s they have there was showing the movie, The Punisher. Another screen had an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter on. The former showed some poor guy getting his eyebrow piercings ripped out by a torturous mobster, whereas Dog’s wife, Beth, had her cleavage pixelated. Yes, yes. I’m from Europe, and we’re all supposed to be cool with the human body, yada yada yada, but seriously, which of the above scenes is more offensive to you, or more importantly to children? Am I just looking at this the wrong way? I’d like to know.