Do You Agree With the Supreme Courts Ruling That Struck Down Banning the Sale of Violent Video Games to Minors? [POLL]

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that states can't ban the sale or rental of violent video games to minors yesterday. The video game industry applauded the move while others disagreed strongly. The ruling also put two justices on the same side that you wouldn't normally see. According to the AP:

The high court, on a 7-2 vote, threw out California's 2005 law covering games sold or rented to those under 18, calling it an unconstitutional violation of free-speech rights. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia, said, "Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply."

Scalia, who pointed out the violence in a number of children's fairy tales, said that while states have legitimate power to protect children from harm, "that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

Justices Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision, with Breyer saying it makes no sense to legally block children's access to pornography yet allow them to buy or rent brutally violent video games.

"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?" Breyer said.

Video games, said Scalia's majority opinion, fall into the same category as books, plays and movies as entertainment that "communicates ideas — and even social messages" deserving of First Amendment free-speech protection. And non-obscene speech "cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them," he said.

Do you think the court made the right decision? Do you think violent video games harm children? Let us know and vote in today's LFN Poll of the Day.