Politicians are inherently lazy when it comes to problem solving so instead of actually dealing with all the underlying issues would rather pursue a easy one step "fix".
The most obvious counter claim is that every time a political body has tried to restrict "violent" video games, it's been overturned and the court costs come out of the tax payers pocket. 1st Amendment Freedom of Speech is a bitch isn't it.
The same can be said about your Senator Feinstein's proposed ban on assault "style" weapons. The problem is what she actually wants but won't say, besides the extreme of banning all guns (pesky 2nd Amendment), is banning semiautomatic and/or magazine fed weapons. Problem is nobody will go for allowing only pump/bolt/lever action rifles and revolvers. Because that's the "solution" to their arguments about ammo capacity and rate of fire. I say that because their current proposed "solution" is a list of model numbers of specific weapons, general classification (so Senator, what defines an AR-15?) or a list of mostly cosmetic features that turns a rifle into a "assault style" rifle. Yea, while you're at Senator define "European style luxury sedan".
Circling back to games where do you draw the line to define violence? Remember the games that were force to change blood to green or people to zombies or aliens (or Nazis ... or zombie Nazis from space) to get around local government bans. It's easy to point at games like Postal or Twisted Metal but what's the difference between a Halo or CoD? Is it context? CoH was labeled with "Violence" on the extended ESRB T rating, so is it automatically bad?
It goes back to people in positions of power politically who aren't into some non-mainstream activity deciding that activity is bad. It doesn't matter if it's video games, comic books, hunting, competitive shooting, porn on the Internet, gambling on the Internet, these activities don't fit into their world view so it's okay to strictly regulate up to the point of banning these activities, "for the sake of the children". Guess what? The world is an unsafe place and always will be. Some places in the world are less safe than others but you can not make it totally safe. For you, your children, your spouse or your pets. Learn to live with it.
Children are fat today not because of video games but because the paranoia of parents who won't let their kids to go out to play anymore because they believe that child molesters/snatchers are as common as mosquitoes. It's so bad that school buses in my area stop at every house so the parent can escort their child from front door to the bus. In my case since I live at a condo complex parents drive to the entrance (which is at worse case 150 yards from any unit) to catch the bus with the kids waiting in the car. When I was six I had to walk 1/4 mile to the other end of my street to catch the bus with all the other kids on my street. If I missed my bus after school I would have to walk 3/4 of a mile home (a few years later when I was 9 or 10). Yes it was suburbia but if anything it's more like the neighborhood I grew up in where I live today. Why this paranoia? Because every night on the news a sensational story about a missing child makes it seems like there's an epidemic is going on because people simply don't connect that few if any of those stories are near them. I digress but a good piece about this can be read
here (NYT), but I obviously digress.
With all the archery media in 2012, Arrow, The Hunger Games, Brave, it's only a matter of time until some nut job with a crossbow or longbow loses it and pegs a dozen or so individuals before being taken down and then it's going to be the next items to restrict.
