Parenting & Family Quote by Herb Kohl

Kohl’s line is a politician’s tightrope walk: pledge fealty to free expression, then pivot to a comforting promise of control. “We cannot and will not” signals constitutional respectability and inoculates him against the culture-war charge of censorship. The rhetorical trick is that the sentence doesn’t end with freedom; it ends with a workaround. If you can’t ban the speech, you regulate the audience.

The intent is less about games themselves than about positioning. By staking out a “reasonable middle,” Kohl speaks to two anxious constituencies at once: civil libertarians and parents primed by headlines about youth violence. The subtext is a familiar move in American moral politics: when a medium becomes the scapegoat of the moment, lawmakers reframe a hard problem (social violence, mental health, access to guns, family instability) into a manageable one (retail enforcement, age gates, labels). “Disturbing” does a lot of work here, smuggling in a value judgment without having to define what counts as “violent” or who decides.

Context matters: this comes from an era when Congress routinely hauled the entertainment industry in for hearings, and violent games were treated as a new, uniquely corrosive technology rather than part of a longer history of panic over comics, rock music, and rap. The line’s power is its parental appeal: it turns a contested claim (“effects can be negative”) into an almost self-evident premise, then offers a policy lever that feels direct and doable.

It’s also a statement of limits. Kohl concedes the First Amendment while trying to salvage a sense that the state can still protect children, even if it can’t fix the culture.