FIRST BEFORE I START:  I did up vote your post.   I can see the thought behind it.

When has banning ever actually worked?   In everything I have looked at it seems to make something more alluring.     Sneaking a peek at dad's porn magazines while they are out of the house, getting people to buy alcohol (easy) and drinking a lot when they can pre-drinking age, smoking before they are of drinking age, getting excited they are getting into an R rated movie, etc.


My point.   I SEE the emotional reasoning behind this.  We are concerned, we want to fix it.   So we impose restrictions on everyone.

People do not like others telling them what to do.   Any parent will know this is especially true of children/teens when they reach a certain age.    You are not going to change this with technology.

I see no problem with labeling things so parents can have some guidelines to help them raise their children.

However, people making the guidelines are people with their own opinions.   They often ban things without doing any studies to justify why they ban things.

I know because I've been unfortunate enough to have an interest in many things that have become societal scapegoats with nothing to back the vilification.

***Heavy Metal*** - very likely saved my life, and made me LESS violent, as I poored any anger or aggression into the music.   It certainly did not make me foolish enough to believe in Satanism, it didn't make me do drugs, etc.      Mozart and others of his time experienced similar scapegoatism for their music.


***Dungeons & Dragons*** - Lots of crazy things about that.   Did some people commit suicide when something happened to their character?   Yes.   It was an extremely small number equivalent to people that have committed suicide for virtually any artistic or emotionally engaging content such as literature, movies, music, etc.   Perhaps even less than some.   A dispatcher I knew gave me a huge print out from a sheriff's office that was a collection of that information being passed to law enforcement around the nation.   I read it from cover to cover.   In the vast majority of the cases the person had D&D books along with a lot of other stuff on their shelves and it thus was D&Ds fault.

**Violent Movies/Video Games** - contrary to popular belief DO NOT make people that watch/play them more violent.    Recent studies have proven this to NOT be the case.   I have six kids.   I did not buy into this crap so I let my kids play violent games, watch violent movies, etc.    They ended up being some of the most friendly and non-violent kids around.   *I do have my suspicions why.*    Yet, another family that is friends of mine restricted all of this stuff from their children.   Their son was the most violent kid on the playground.   He was not the only case I have seen this.   I do have a **theory** and I am not in a position to test it and prove it.    What people refer to as desensitizing is NOT always a bad thing.    Violence and being around it can be scary, and cause an adrenaline rush.   It is easy to become an adrenaline junky.    My kids did not get as excited about violence as the kid that has had it forcefully withheld.   It becomes alluring.   When he does see it, it is far more exciting than for my kids.   It creates a rush.

So I realize this is a VERY long response.   You wrote about something I've spent YEARS thinking about, observing, reading articles on.

I am also a huge ***ANTI-BAN, ANTI-CENSORSHIP*** person though I can be that and still believe in responsible parenting.   I don't need some organization or government taking over that responsibility from me.   In fact, I do not believe they should have the authority to change how I raise my kids.    If you want to put rating labels on something so parents can CHOOSE to adhere to those things, I am fine with that as the element of choice is still there.