For my ninth birthday, my dad got me a copy of the video game Mortal Kombat. Since then, I’ve become a raging sociopath. In my home, I keep portly women I’ve abducted at the bottom of a well in my cellar, where I force them to apply the finest in topical moisturizers before I skin them and add them to my never-ending quest for my very own ‘woman suit’.

Actually, not so much.

Granted, my copy of Mortal Kombat was the sanitized version. In 1993, the national news media would have had you believe that parents everywhere were in sheer hysterics over the blood and guts flying at your local arcade. On home console versions of the game, when it came time to pull heads off, Nintendo replaced the digital blood with digital sweat, and decided immolation was much less icky than, oh, tearing someone’s head off with his spinal column still firmly attached.

Mortal Kombat, and a god-awful game called Night Trap for the SEGA CD, served as the catalyst for the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board. Politicians called for everything from regulation to outright bans. Cooler heads prevailed, and the ESRB and its now-ubiquitous game rating system were born.

Before video games were targeted, a Tipper Gore hissy fit led to the ubiquitous advisory stickers slapped on CDs. All but the hippest of ’90s parents wanted the music encoded on those CDs to stay out of the ears of their little snowflakes. Towards the end of the decade, the U.S. Congress, in conjunction with the FCC, PTC, the Clinton Administration and electronics companies, implemented a new television ratings system and the technology to block programs based on their ratings.

Apparently, this isn’t good enough for the hippies out in California. Lacking anything better to legislate against — that pesky insurmountable debt crisis and crumbling infrastructure of theirs being of no significant governmental interest — politicians on the best coast are insisting upon everything from warning labels “citing the health risks of excessive exposure to violent media” to reintroducing the same damn legislation that got shot down in this week’s 7-2 decision. This time, however,  the proposals will be rendered in fancy, slightly different words, so as to circumvent the evil bureaucratic machine.

Folks, there’s nothing I can stand less than people concocting completely unwarranted, unsubstantiated “values-based” legislation.

I could geek out for the rest of the column about how the average gamer is beyond the typical age of a college student, how the FTC just said the video game and retailing industries are doing a hell of a job self-regulating, or how studies suggest the proliferation of violent video games may be responsible for the decline in violent crime, but you can Google that.

What I want to say in the following 600 words is plain and simple: state and federal legislators need to find something to do with their time besides playing nanny from their respective chambers.

This ratings system garbage is not the end-all, be-all of parenting. My parents avoided R-rated movies like the plague, to the point where I’d have to flat-out leave the room if one was on the screen, no matter where we were. I managed to catch most of “Terminator 2” when I was seven years old. I don’t think they ever found out.

We didn’t even have a video game console until after my mom passed. Hell, she was completely against them. Cartoons, “Sesame Street” and “Wheel of Fortune” were all the only TV shows I ever got to watch. We got all of four broadcast stations in rural Underwood, and until 1993, I was raised on Legos, GeoSafari, Speak’n’Spell and books.

Honestly, by the time video games entered the equation, I think my old man figured watching ovarian cancer suck the life out of my mom for two years beat the pants off of 16-bit blood-and-guts on the f*ck-me-up-o-meter. He was probably right. 

Let me jump ahead to a few weekends ago. I work as a brand ambassador for a large company in big-box electronics stores in the greater metropolitan area. A distraught mother came in, wanting to purchase a program that allowed her to monitor what her 13-year-old son was doing online.

After a few minutes, I found out she’d learned how to search his Internet history from Oprah, only to discover it had already been cleared. She was wondering what he could have possibly been doing.

On the Internet. At two in the morning. When he’s 13 years old.

I tried to explain — delicately — what most males with an Internet connection and a ten-minute window of complete privacy are liable to do. She’d already resigned to that, but wanted to know … specifics. I managed to convince her otherwise.

She expressed concern over him visiting “chat rooms” and “video chatting” with sexual predators masquerading as 14-year-old girls, and I explained to her that nobody uses chat rooms or Chatroulette anymore.

I also enlightened her that, with most programs offering “parental controls,” the best she could do is outright block the content, and that if Oprah was the one telling her how to check her son’s search history, he’s probably got a leg up on her in the technology wars.

Then it came out that his dad had recently passed, he’d been hanging out with “those kids with the Slipknot shirts and the BMX bikes,” and that she caught a message on his cell phone asking if he “was still dry.”

I suppose it’s not easy being a single mom and finding out your 13-year-old is smoking pot and watching porn. I can’t imagine raising kids. I’ve got a dog, and if I manage to get him to poop anywhere besides inside the house I’m thrilled. 

Ultimately, I told her to get him into something besides hanging out with the local hooligans. Martial arts programs, school sports, even finding the kid a “mentor.” I’m sure hearing the clean-cut college guy tell her that doobies and porn are a rite of passage wasn’t reassuring, but she must have come into the store knowing she was fighting an uphill battle. For what it’s worth, she thanked me for making her feel better. 

Legislation is not going to solve this woman’s problems.

You can’t legislate societal woes away any more than you can wish them away. I’ve always thought prohibition-style laws functioned less like deterrents, and more like frameworks for punishment.

In other words, criminals don’t peruse their local legislation before committing an illegal or violent act. Declaring some place a drug-and-weapons-free zone does not create an impenetrable force field that keeps drugs and weapons out. I’m not going to play psychologist, but I’m inclined to think the criminal psyche doesn’t weigh consequences particularly well. Crime tends to revolve around impulse, not rationale. 

Ultimately, the cure for our problems isn’t this faith-based garbage pushed upon the state legislatures by “family values” organizations of all shapes, sizes and acronyms.

People are the product of their parenting, not their governments.

Penalizing retailers for selling violent video games won’t prevent the next Columbine or Jonesboro. Nor will penalizing video game companies. Psychopaths are psychopaths. Bans on weapons only make it harder for your average citizen to obtain firearms. Criminals seldom have such problems, since they tend to circumvent legal means of acquisition altogether.

We’ve got crumbling infrastructure, predatory lending practices, enormous public and private debt, and more personal health problems than we know what to do with, not to mention a few hundred thousand armed service members we need to get home.

Let’s quit worrying about the whores killing their babies, the naughty words on the television, the warning labels on cigarette packages, and whether or not so-called Intelligent Design is included in the science curriculum.

We need to stop voting for politicians based on our social issues and our faith-based initiatives. We need to quit voting for the folks content to squabble over special interests to the point of deadlocking budgets and pointing fingers.

We’ve been playing the blue state/red state game for the last decade. It’s time to get shit done.