Governor Christie: Setting The Same Standard On Violent Games As R-Rated Movies

Bergenfield Town Hall, 4-23-2013 (Transcript Below). Question: I would like to know what your views are on violent videogames affecting the youth of our nation. Governor Christie: Well thank you for bringing it up because I have some pretty strong views about it and I talked about this just this past Friday. I've suggested legislation to the state Legislature that says that if young people under the age of eighteen want to go in and either buy or rent a videogame that's rated either mature or adult only that they have to do it with their parent or legal guardian, just like if you want to go to an R-rated movie. You want to go to an R-rated movie and you're under eighteen years old you've got to have your parent or guardian. These videogames are so graphic and violent that you cannot tell me that children who sit there on HDTV in their basements playing these things for hours and hours don't run the risk of being desensitized to the real effects of violence, and so it seems to me that it's reasonable. I'm not saying don't sell them; they have a First Amendment right to sell them. But parents should know what these games are really all about, and if they have—imagine though if you're a kid and you're going to buy a game like Call of Duty, right, which is a pretty violent war game. If you go in and you buy Call of Duty and you're a kid you can just buy it right now. You buy it, you bring it home, and your parents go hey, what's Call of Duty about? It's just a game about soldiers. OK. All right, and they just throw the high hard one by you, and if you're not really looking real carefully and you don't go down and watch them you don't know. But how about if you go home and you say to your parents hey, I'd like Call of Duty, and you have to go to the store with me if I want to buy it. Well all of a sudden you go the gig's up now, right? If I have to go to the store to buy it there's something about this game that I should know, and I think this is a way to help parents, because listen, we're all busy and we all have things that we need to attend to and maybe we don't know and maybe our kids, like I was saying before, kids are good at throwing the high hard one by you every once in a while, right? But if they have to bring you to the store to buy it or rent it then you know maybe this is something I really need to be looking for, so I think that's something we need to do. I think it protects people's First Amendment rights to put these games out there and to use them, but if you're under eighteen years of age and you want to play games that are rated—and these games are rated by the companies themselves, not by the government. The companies rate them as mature or adult only. If they rate them at that level then I think a parent should have to go in or a legal guardian should have to go in with you to be able to buy it or rent it. Then at least we know that parents are plugged into this and hopefully are trying to control and manage it. Remember that all the stories out of Newtown tell us that that young man, who obviously was disturbed, spent hours and hours and hours playing these type of games alone in his basement. You can't tell me as a parent that that didn't desensitize that young man who was disturbed to begin with into some of the acts of violence that he was obviously thinking about and then ultimately executed on.