An Illinois state lawmaker, Democratic representative Marcus Evans Jr., has introduced a bill that aims to ban the sale of violent video games to minors in an effort to reduce carjackings across the state reports The Chicago Sun Times.
His bill is an amendment to a pre-existing law banning certain video games from being sold to minors, specifically the ban would now include any game depicting “motor vehicle theft with a driver or passenger present”.
The amendment also changes the definition of a “violent video game” to one in which players “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.”
This would seem to be targeting the mega-selling “Grand Theft Auto V” which has dominated game sales charts for nearly a decade, but that ‘violent video game’ definition also covers a large swath of games from “Hitman” to “Assassin’s Creed”. The amendment has yet to be voted on, but claims of video games being a cause for violent acts in minors remains an old yet still a highly debated topic.
Carjackings among young people have gone up recently with approximately 218 in January alone in the area under the jurisdiction of the Chicago P.D. Evans Jr. tells the paper: “the bill would prohibit the sale of some of these games that promote the activities that we’re suffering from in our communities… I feel like this game [‘Grand Theft Auto V’] has become a huge issue in this spectrum. When you compare the two, you see harsh similarities as it relates to these carjackings.”
