Where Politics And Video Games Collide

I posted this in a yahoo discussion on the topic.

"The fear of these video games stems from media fear- a fear that 1 out of a U.S. population of 300 million is going to kill 20 people, and that it's going to be nobody else but you. Most teens are aware of the fact that there is fact, and there is fiction- adults going around trying to preotect them from these games may mean well, but they unnecessarily and unintentionally insult a teen's intelligence by putting forth that they don't know the difference when it's obvious that they DO know the difference. They further insult everyone else's intelligence by claiming to be in the right when they have a huge misconception of what the game is about in the first place, and ambulance-chasing lawyers like Jack Thompson, who simultaneously wants to "protect" children and slanderizes gamers, help nothing at all.
The general fear in this is that some kid will go out and shoot up a school based on something he played in a video game, based on the pretense that if they die, they'll respawn again like a video game- but most kids are too intelligent to fall for that kind of crap, and the ones that do need their parents to tell them "If you try to pull this off, you're not going to live through it, and you'll regret it." But what do we do instead? Rather than not reading books that are harmless but we think are heathenous like Harry Potter, we instead choose to ban them or burn them so that others who don't think the same way are forced to live under someone else's ideals.
The same is true from video games- I personally find that Bully isn't harmful in any way, and if a kid DID try to emulate it, there was something wrong with him in the first place, or their parents weren't educating them, like the kid who tried to jump off a roof and fly because he thought he was a Pidgey from the game series Pokemon. But if we have to ban an admittedly fun game on the grounds that others find it offensive or don't want their children to play it, then we're forcing others who don't think the same way to be denied of the game and are therefore restricted with another person's ideal- and that's not right. I personally think that Smallville is the stupidest show in existance, but I'm not going to try to have it banned because of my ideal.
At least 100 popular games are released EACH YEAR, and only a handful of them, 12% as surveyed by the ESA, are rated 'M' for mature, and are suited for the older gamer- yes, there are older gamers, and before you tell them to go get a life, tell your hunting husband, or fishing uncle, that there are better things to do- or let them decide how the hell they'd like to spend a weekend. Rather than focus on the fact that there is a movie called Kill Bill, why don't you look away and find a sequel to Bambi for your kid instead of bringing attention to something you don't like? "

As for the Neural Pathway comment... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_pathway

Proof that she doesn't know what she's talking about.