BERLIN — Responding to the deaths of 16 people in a school shooting last month in Erfurt, the German government has said it wants to give regulators the right to ban violent computer games. The proposal has been added to a long-planned youth protection bill and follows announcement of a plan to toughen gun control laws approved just before the killings.
The changes would give authority over computer software to a federal agency that already regulates the distribution of written material. The government said it was also seeking ways to extend its control to the Internet.
The new regulations would allow the agency to create a blacklist of material deemed seriously dangerous to children, especially material depicting extreme violence. According to a government press statement, any electronic source that "glorifies war, represents people in a way detrimental to their human dignity or shows children in a sexually suggestive physical manner," will be subject to distribution and advertising bans.
The legislation would also create a computer game rating and age-labeling system, similar to those already in place for films, in order to make it easier to control distribution of games to children and allow parents to make informed choices.
The government was clearly eager to get new legislation on the books before federal elections in September, and in a country deeply shocked by the school killings, the law is expected to pass in the upper house in July without objection from the main opposition parties.
There has been little public objection over freedom-of-speech issues stemming from the proposed legislation. The German Constitution allows for broader restrictions on free speech than the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution would permit. The proposed legislation would also restrict the advertising of tobacco and alcohol and would ban the sale of tobacco to children under 16.
Although the proposal reflects a vigorous reaction to the public outcry, the government sought to emphasize to parents that they were ultimately responsible for protecting their children.
"The protection of children is not solely the task of legal regulation," Family Affairs Minister Christine Bergmann said in a statement. "Young people need support to solve conflicts and frustrations without violence. That begins in the family through a violence-free upbringing."
On Tuesday, the government and leaders of the 16 states agreed to tighten new gun laws by raising the minimum age for gun ownership to 21, from the current minimum of 18. This would update a gun control law approved by the German Parliament hours before the shootings in Erfurt.
Calls for change grew out of the revelation that Robert Steinhauser, the teen-ager who opened fire in the Erfurt school and then killed himself, had owned violent videos and computer games. His parents have said that he was obsessed with violence.
The German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, has also expressed support for restricting violence on television. The government said in a statement that Schroeder had met with officials of public and private television stations to discuss limiting violent content.