NY Governer signs video game laws... "for the children"

Today, Governer David A. Paterson of NY signed a "Package Of Bills That Will Protect The Public Safety And Rights Of New Yorkers" including a bill that "establishes an advisory council to conduct a study on the connection between interactive media and real-life violence in minors exposed to such media," and will "require new video game consoles to have parental lockout features by 2010, and mandate that games sold at retail disclose the ratings obtained from the gaming industry's voluntary rating system."

Link to the press release HERE. (The relevent section is about five paragraphs down).

I'm not going to go into the insanity of making parental lockout features required for video game consoles but excluding TV service providers, DVD players, computers/web browsers, etc. I'm not going to go into the many reasons why I disagree with passing legislation on these matters in general. I'm not even going to go into the fact that the press release states that the advisory council will study "the connection," (not a possible connection), between interactive media and real-life violence, indicating that they have already decided that there is, in fact, a connection without the inconvenience of actual data.

Still, don't you think it would make more sense to create this advisory council and actually wait for the results of the studies before enacting legislation based on the assumed result?

P.S.- In order to add insult to injury, the section of the press release regarding videogames has been lumped into the same paragraph as sex offenders. Nice.