Vietnam Cracks Down on Violent Games. Is There a Middle Ground?
Vietnam has reacted to a small but disturbing series of crimes committed by young teens by sharply limiting access to online games that contain violence or pornography. These young people, who line up outside storefronts offering online game access for a fee, evidently committed robberies and assaults -- and in a few cases, murder -- to get the money to play the games.
In the United States, that particular problem doesn't exist but we certainly have a problem with a significant amount of violent and property crimes being committed by drug addicts looking for money with which to purchase their next fix. So we make the drugs illegal even though it's not clear that does a bit of good and certainly doesn't seem to have curtailed crime very much if at all.
In both cases, governments attempt to regulate a behavior by outlawing what is perceived as the underlying cause. Outlawing drives the cause underground where addicts -- whether of video games or drugs -- are prey to reprehensible "private enterprise" conduct that further exacerbates the problem.
In both cases, it seems to me the governments involved could address the problem more completely and effectively with a two-pronged approach of legalizing and regulating the perceived source of the problem while simultaneously offering free treatment programs for those addicts who want to get free of the economic and physical burdens addiction brings. Vietnam is apparently at least looking at the first step as it has ordered game parlors to close at 11 p.m. and has restricted access to such games on the nation's Internet nodes pending a review of the best way to cope with the problem. In the U.S., on the other hand, any attempt, however slight, to legalize even marijuana is met with a public hue and cry from the morally superior who think legalizing is equal to condoning.
On the surface, at least, it seems our former enemy's approach is more enlightened than ours and perhaps one from which we could learn.
