Al Gore recently announced a plan to ban all advertising of violent movies, video games and music unless the industries stop aiming their advertising at children. I see a number of problems with this: Children are legally allowed access to all these things. It’s hardly fair to punish companies when they haven’t broken any laws, nor encouraged others to do so. The only precedent for this sort of thing is the restrictions on advertisement of hard liquor and tobacco. Those are products which children cannot legally possess, and their advertising is merely restricted, not abolished. Even if you ignore laws, kids are still supposed to be allowed to have this stuff with their parents approval. I would think that aiming advertising at minors is a legitimate practice. Most of the “children” in question here are young teens in the 13 to 16 range. How does one distinguish between advertising aimed at young teens and advertising aimed aimed at immature older teens? How violent does something have to be before you can’t aim your advertising at minors? You can’t just go by ratings as high ratings aren’t necessarily for violence. Movies get Rs for swearing and nudity all the time. “Metal Gear Solid” only had a T level of violence. It was the adult themes that pushed it into M. You don’t want Joe Lieberman to make this sort of judgment, as he previously has criticized the “Hercules Action game” (based on the Disney movie) for excessive violence and “San Francisco Rush” for depicting illegal and dangerous activity (speeding in a racing game). Then there are the issue of music. Music is violent in a completely different way than video games and movies. In fact, it’s violent in much the same way as books, which are curiously missing from the list of endangered forms of entertainment. This brings up all kinds of gray areas, like the movie “Office Space.” It was not a violent movie, but had soundtrack which could be considered violent. This was more for irony than anything. Where does this fit in? It hardly seems fair to punish three entire industries for something only some people did. The way I read the proposal, if it turns out that Universal is aiming violent movies at the young’uns, then Columbia and Miramax will no longer be allowed to advertise violent movies at all. Isn’t that prior restraint? At any rate, I have full confidence that the Supreme Court will strike down any such law that makes it through due to that pesky First Amendment, but I’m mad that anyone who doesn’t respect the Constitution more than that would make a play for the presidency. Dan Rudolph

Freshman

Computer science