"You mean this game having the protagonist killing hookers that try to steal their money might not be appropriate for my five year old?"
This is a particular pet peeve. I can't say how many people allow their children to play rated M games. An M (as in, Mature), is the same as an R rating. Would you let your six year old watch a rated R movie? Well, apparently you'll let him play a game with the same gore.
I don't get it. Where did we screw up here? The most common scenarios of rated M sales to children involve the children tricking a relative or parent into buying it, the adult not knowing what the game is. Then the adult gets pissed off because Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas has you killing people with a big fricken purple dildo. Yeah, that's great for your small child. Killing people with a sex toy. That's another thing: I hate GTA: San Andreas. That game is dogshit. The graphics are crappy, and they made the game all about the African American and white boy-wannabe-black demographic. My, how "ghetto" you are for playing a black car thief on a game while you sit in the living room of your mother's house. Reeeeeal "ghetto".
What I hate more than stores not carding people is when parents don't CARE their kids play these kinds of games. One of my good friends caught her sister playing GTA: San Andreas, killing random cops with a large purple dildo. Hello? Is anyone even remotely considering the kind of exposure this is? The argument "They're just going to see it someday" isn't applicable if they're too young to understand it. The twelve year-old didn't even KNOW what the dildo was, granted, but she found out. Then parents wonder why kids know about sex and shit before they graduate grade school. It could be society, or it might be the fact you're a fucking moron that doesn't know how to read a game label.
I picked up one of these at work. Read it. Use it wisely. Or you can contribute to the already staggering amount of human trash in society. It's not like the kid might regret being exposed to this stuff at such a young age, right?