A significant gun-rights victory in the U.S. Supreme Court is being interpreted almost exclusively as a free-speech victory. Actually,
Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association is both, and the mistake is understandable. But it would be a shame to deny encouragement to Second Amendment advocates.
Brown revolved around California’s 2005 ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to anyone under 18.
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Brown is important to gun rights because the state used a key decades-old argument developed by anti-gun zealots in an attempt to expand unprotected speech to include videos and thus create a new category of law based on experts and studies that have been widely called into dispute.
The argument is known as the Weapons Effect: Guns cause ordinary people to commit acts of violence and therefore they should be banned from the general population. In their essay
“Trigger-Happy: Re-thinking the ‘Weapons Effect’” (pdf), Paul Gallant and Joanne D. Eisen explained:
The weapons effect hypothesis dates back to a 1967 article by psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage…. [It] summarized the results of their experiment on 100 male undergraduate psychology students at the University of Wisconsin. Berkowitz and LePage proposed that the mere sight of a firearm could trigger aggression from an already angered person because of the learned association between violence and guns.
With violent videos, proponents of the Weapons Effect claim a causal link between images and actual violence that turns otherwise protected speech into incitement or obscenity.
The dramatic expansion of the Weapons Effect argument from guns to images does not merely threaten freedom of speech but also gun rights. Any legal credibility the theory acquires in First Amendment cases is likely to carry weight in Second Amendment ones. Happily, the opposite occurred in Brown. The Supreme Court discounted the argument not merely with reference to free speech but in general, and thus weakened its impact on all cases.
