[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 26, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: January 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                          VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, last fall, Rabbi Herbert Bronstein 
gave a sermon at the North Shore Congregation Israel on the problem of 
violence in our country.
  First, he properly went after the proliferation of weapons in our 
country and said we have to do something about it.
  I applaud his emphasis.
  Then he took on the question of television violence.
  At one point in his speech he says:

       I have never been able to understand how the television 
     business can deny that violent television influences behavior 
     and then turn around and charge millions of dollars for a 
     minute of commercial time with the equal argument that 
     television will influence the behavior of masses of viewers.

  He also adds these words of wisdom:

       Sometimes television can be a tremendously positive force 
     in our society. But during one week last year in which 
     tremendously significant events were taking place in the 
     world, on television three events dominated: One, the 
     retirement of Mike Ditka as the Bear's coach; two, the 
     tremendously earth-shaking news of the issuance of the Elvis 
     Presley stamp; but more than any other the Amy Fisher story. 
     Most disturbing was that this empty, shallow, good-for-
     nothing who had allegedly engaged in an extramarital affair 
     with a Long Island auto mechanic and had murderously 
     assaulted his wife with a gun was, with tremendous bally-hoo 
     and hype transformed by all three major networks into a 
     national figure in three full-length Amy Fisher stories, two 
     of them at the same time. Psychologists all over the country 
     began to criticize the networks for getting a twisted message 
     across to teenagers all over the country as to what kind of 
     person is important and can be made into a star and for the 
     appeal to the most prurient instincts of people and lowering 
     of the public taste.
       And then reporters went after the television producers. The 
     most revealing comments were made by the senior vice 
     president of NBC in charge of programming, Ruth Slawson. 
     Surprisingly, she lamented the whole matter. She said that 
     she had serious reservations about the process and how Amy 
     Fisher's story became the hottest thing on American 
     television: ``All of us perpetuated this,'' Ms. Slawson, 
     said. ``It became a media phenomenon. Overall, I'm not happy 
     about the state of the movies on television. It's crazy'' she 
     said. ``It's self-perpetuating.''
       That made me wonder. She was the vice president in charge 
     of programming. Then why does she do it? She goes on to say: 
     ``We all don't want to keep on doing these true-crime movies 
     but then these numbers--the ratings come in and what choice 
     do we have? (New York Times, January 3, 1993).
       Numbers, ratings, of course, means money. No matter what 
     other issues are involved, it is as if this is the ultimate 
     justification for everything: The money, the ratings come in 
     and then you have no choice. But if the numbers, the 
     ``ratings'' are the ultimate justification, the Mafia too can 
     say exactly the same thing: ``We don't like selling drugs, 
     prostitution, pornography, putting corpses into trunks but 
     the ratings come in, what choice do we have?'' ``What choice 
     do we have?'', the drug gangs can say that shoot up people 
     including innocent children. ``What choice do we have?'' say 
     the people who market guns for profit. ``What choice do we 
     have?'' the congressmen can say, ``The lobby comes in and 
     what choice do we have?'' And the people who make the violent 
     films which affect the mentality of millions of children can 
     say ``the ratings come in and what choice do we have?''
       I wrote to that vice president of programming and said: 
     ``You do have a choice. You may not make as much money as you 
     now do, but you do have a choice. And worse, you are choosing 
     for us. You are choosing the destruction of the public sense 
     of the sanctity of life.''

  I am grateful to Rabbi Bronstein, and I ask that these remarks be 
entered into the Record at this point.
  The remarks follow:

                          Violence in America

                      (By Rabbi Herbert Bronstein)

       The violent death of Michael Jordan's father struck a nerve 
     in the American psyche. While he was only one of many 
     thousands of victims of murder in America this year, his 
     prominence made him a symbol of random violence in the United 
     States.
       But there is a far more excruciating symbol of violence in 
     our society, a bell of mourning and warning that tolls 
     ominously for all of us. It is the radical rise in the number 
     of violent deaths of children in our society:
       At play in the public streets, in parks, on their porches, 
     in their homes, at birthday parties, as innocent bystanders 
     of gang wars or petty teenage scuffles once settled with 
     fists and now with guns more easily obtainable by many of our 
     children than books, or in drive by shootings that have 
     replaced (as a pastime among teenagers) the innocent 
     automobile cruising of the 1950's, or in accidents with guns 
     that are to be found in the households of half of the 
     American public. Only decades ago any of these deaths would 
     have been considered a bizarre anomaly evoking astonished 
     horror. They are now as common-place and routine on the daily 
     news, day in, day out, as the daily morning and evening 
     weather reports.
       Over the summer I read with sad irony that yet another 
     scholar\1\ has agreed that the story of the binding of Isaac 
     was, in the first instance, intended as a strong protest 
     against human violence, a marked step toward the rejection of 
     general human aggression which in ancient days took the form 
     of the ritual murder of children. Abraham, with whom the 
     Divine voice pleads, ``Lay not your hand upon the child'' 
     represents a new emerging consciousness moving beyond 
     violence.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
     \1\Bergmann, Martin, In the Shadow of Moloch.
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       But how much more than in ancient days do we need a Divine 
     voice pleading with us to make our stand, each of us in some 
     way, against the violence with which our society has become 
     more heavily saturated than the fields and towns of the 
     flood-engulfed Midwest; and whose ghoulish sign is the murder 
     of children. As the Tribune of January 3, 1993 put it: the 
     tale of the violent deaths of children every year in Chicago 
     alone is a tale of epic proportions, the tale of a society 
     that is unable to perform its fundamental duty, the 
     protection of its most vulnerable members; and which has 
     yielded its claim to the term ``civilization''.
       And children are a tragic symbol of violence in yet another 
     way because of the radical rise in numbers of children who, 
     in our society, become killers. The annual rate of arrest for 
     youths under twenty years of age in Chicago has risen between 
     1965 and 1990 by three hundred and thirty-two percent. 
     Between fifty and sixty percent of violent crimes, usually 
     with firearms, are committed by young people, many as young 
     as ten years of age.
       In many a perfectly maintained working class upright 
     section of our country ``the boy and his gun'' as Time 
     Magazine has put it has replaced ``the boy and his dog''. 
     With shotguns available for twenty-five dollars, sawed off 
     and turned it into automatic weapons, teenagers now repay 
     their petty vengeances by shooting up cars as entertainment 
     or the homes or front porches of people they do not like. A 
     young woman whose life-long ambition was to teach 
     kindergarten (only one of thousands of such stories) is shot 
     while playing softball, by a teenager from a passing elevated 
     train. Why? ``like he saw in the movies''. About a month ago 
     in El Monte, California, two young men riding a bicycle, one 
     on the handlebars, shot two people dead and wounded a third. 
     In Kansas City, a few weeks ago, a fifteen year old pulled 
     out a gun in the movie house and shot his mother to death. 
     Two girls, of what is for us Bat Mitzvah age were apprehended 
     in a serious plot to murder their teacher. One man in 
     Washington, D.C. recently shot five people because someone 
     had bumped into him on the dance floor. In the same area a 
     young man pulls up to another car, shoots the person in the 
     driver's seat because he did not like the music. Friends, 
     this reveals an abnormal pathology written large in our 
     society.
       In Washington, D.C. a survey of first and second graders in 
     all schools has revealed that thirty-one percent had 
     witnessed shootings; thirty-nine percent had seen the dead 
     bodies of those murdered.
       I want our children to know that these conditions of 
     violence in our society are not natural. It was not always 
     like this; it does not have to be like this. In the depth of 
     the depression, when I was a child, a time of far more 
     economic duress, far more unemployment but infinitely fewer 
     guns or commercialized violence, even for me as a child it 
     was safe to walk or play in parks in the evening. You could 
     welcome, can you imagine, a poor person into your house for a 
     sandwich or a cup of coffee!
       Over the summer, in Louisiana, a Japanese youth with poor 
     English comprehension, simply knocking on the door to ask 
     directions is shot and the perpetrator totally exonerated on 
     the grounds that the young man was on his private property! 
     Friends, this is the justice of Sodom! It is the justice of a 
     violence-ridden society in which paranoia has replaced the 
     most elemental civility.
       And that is the other great symbol of violence in our 
     society. The loss of civil space. It is no longer that we are 
     not safe in certain parts of the city. We are not safe in 
     parks, on the expressways, in our own driveways, in the 
     malls; we are taught how to get out of our cars, how to enter 
     and leave banks. In the emergency rooms of our hospitals, 
     trauma from gun violence has become a huge financial 
     burden on the American public but emergency rooms 
     themselves have become scenes of violence. And the two 
     places which every society considers its ultimate, 
     absolute places of refuge have also been breached by 
     violence. The first is expressed by a cartoon in which a 
     mother pleads: ``I can not let my child go, I am afraid of 
     the guns, the killing, the terror.'' And a man responds: 
     ``Madam, you have to send your child to school.'' 
     Counselors and therapists are regularly called into 
     schools all over the country to help mourning children 
     deal with the emotional trauma of the violent death of 
     their school mates.
       And that other absolute redoubt of law, order and safety, 
     at least until the past decade, the American courtroom? As 
     the New York Times of January 26, 1993, put it: ``For two 
     centuries American courtrooms were sanctuaries relying more 
     on calming ritual, even than on guards, to restrain violent 
     outburst.'' But the spell, criminologists say, snapped in the 
     1980's when unlicensed guns proliferated and the courts 
     became tinder-boxes exploding with violence, with murder. 
     Attorneys-general and judges give testimony to their near 
     escapes. The courts of New York State two years ago installed 
     metal detectors. And, are you ready for this, in one year 
     over one hundred thousand guns and knives were confiscated.
       On a scale of one to ten in numbers of violent random 
     murders per capita, the United States, of all advanced 
     societies is just under ten. But on this scale not one other 
     country even reaches the number one! Someone has estimated 
     that you are fifty-five times more likely to suffer from 
     violent assault in the United States than in Great Britain. 
     And at least we should start to listen to what Europeans and 
     Japanese are beginning to say, we do not like it, that 
     America is not a safe place to live. It is, as the American 
     Medical Association has put it, a public health problem of 
     major proportions. Violence in America is a national 
     disaster. Violence is a plague. I am convinced that violence 
     is the number one problem of American life today and that 
     nothing should be higher on the national or local agenda or 
     on the public consciousness and we have not really begun to 
     address this issue as a nation.
       Obviously, the causes of such a calamity are complex: the 
     break down of the justice system, jails so over crowded that 
     they are mere non-rehabilitative holding pens with revolving 
     doors, a lack of seriousness about punishment of crimes with 
     guns; a society willing to fork-over an average eighty 
     thousand dollars a year it costs to incarcerate a criminal 
     but unwilling to pay the eight thousand per person per year 
     to prevent someone from becoming a criminal; all the decades 
     of the neglect of the social infra-structure.
       But two factors are so gross, so glaring that we ignore 
     them at our peril and they are the very factors about which 
     each and every one of us can do something.
       First and foremost, the insane, virtually unlimited, 
     avalanche of guns of all kinds in our society. Every other 
     industrial nation strictly limits gun sales. Every other 
     advanced industrial nation has a virtual ban on handguns. But 
     here any criminal, the mentally ill, right-wing fanatics, 
     cults which build huge armaments, anti-semitic, anti-black, 
     the white Aryan nation armed to the teeth, anyone, can get 
     almost any gun at will from the deadly handgun to semi-
     automatic assault weapons used previously by terrorists and 
     in war, now the favorite weapons of choice by criminals: Two 
     hundred million guns of all kinds flooding this society, 
     manufactured and distributed every week by the tens of 
     thousands as compared with the exactly thirty-three hand guns 
     legally licensed and registered to the public in all of 
     Japan. Police departments are out-gunned everywhere by the 
     criminals.
       Put this together with the tinder-box conditions of 
     unsolved problems in our society, the abnormal family life, 
     poor education, and you have a society which in its gun 
     policy could be certified as deliberately suicidal! Every 
     couple of years in this country more people are killed in 
     random violence than all the soldiers killed in all of the 
     Vietnam War years. Over twenty-three thousand Americans 
     murdered by handguns alone last year. A new handgun is 
     produced for sale in America every twenty seconds and every 
     two and a half minutes someone is shot. More than one hundred 
     thirty-five thousand students, it is estimated, carry 
     handguns to school every day. One lone gunman took an AK-47, 
     bought without any background check or waiting period, to a 
     Stockton, California elementary school and gunned down 
     thirty-four children and one teacher in less than two 
     minutes.
       It is clear that a majority of Americans, and virtually all 
     law enforcement agencies, want strong steps taken to limit 
     the flow of guns in this country. So what is stopping it? The 
     answer is clear.
       There are many people in this country for whom money is 
     more important than the lives of children, and than your life 
     or my life. I am not only talking about the mafia, the 
     cocaine and heroin business. I am talking about the gun 
     business in this society that has been brainwashing, 
     hustling, conning the American public for decades against any 
     kind of limitation on gun sales with all kinds of stupid non-
     sequitur arguments about constitutional rights and freedoms 
     or that we will use gun control to take away guns from 
     hunters, target shooters and collectors. I am talking about 
     the most powerful lobby in the United States, the National 
     Rifle Association with its marble six story palace in 
     Washington, D.C., eighty-nine million dollars annual budget, 
     many lobbyists walking the halls of Congress, a huge 
     campaign treasury before which our congress has for 
     decades cravenly cowered in the dust because, apparently, 
     to many of our august congressmen getting re-elected is 
     also more important than the lives of human beings.
       The gun business, through the NRA, has fought every and any 
     kind of limit on guns in this society including the minimal 
     sensible step of the Brady Bill which would impose a five day 
     period on the purchase of guns and without which any mentally 
     ill person or criminal can purchase multiple guns at will. It 
     will not make a big dent but it is a first step. It will 
     raise the black market prices of guns; it will help keep guns 
     out of the hands of teenagers. Since the California fifteen 
     days wait law, roughly six thousand people were turned away 
     from buying guns and possibly we could save thousands of 
     lives in this country. Is it not worth it?
       The NRA has fought a ban on mail order machine guns, 
     plastic pistols, police killer bullets specifically designed 
     to pierce bullet-proof vests. They have fought limitations on 
     advertisements in gun magazines, directed particularly at 
     criminals, for guns whose finish is impervious to finger 
     prints. They are battling in the Illinois Legislature against 
     a simple gun safety law which would mandate only the safe 
     storage of guns and make it a crime to leave a gun within the 
     reach of children.
       A study by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and 
     Firearms discovered that one of every four guns in New York 
     City and one of every three guns used in violent crimes in 
     Washington, D.C. had been purchased in the state of Virginia 
     where gun-runners could buy weapons literally by the car 
     load, no questions asked, haul the guns to other cities, 
     including Chicago, and sell them on the streets in the black 
     market for profits of three to four hundred percent. As a 
     result, the Governor of Virginia called for a very mild law 
     that would limit sales to only one gun per customer per month 
     and the tightening of record keeping on guns. Who fought it? 
     The gun lobby.
       And wanting even more to expand their markets, the gun 
     business has begun very successfully marketing expensive guns 
     as stylish accessories for status-conscious women. But unlike 
     most status symbols, guns can kill. Handguns purchased for 
     home protection are forty-three times more likely to kill the 
     owner, or a family member, or a friend than to be used 
     successfully in self-defense.
       We have to begin step by step, first with the cornerstone, 
     the Brady Bill, to roll back the number of guns in this 
     society, get guns out of the hands of children, ban hand guns 
     and assault weapons, eliminate multiple purchases of guns and 
     institute much stricter legal procedures against anyone, 
     including teenagers,involved with violent crimes and crack 
     down on the black market in guns with harsh punishment for 
     drive-by shootings. We have to begin a national educational 
     program in our schools, and in the media, about violence and 
     guns.
       We need a national program on violence. It is seemingly 
     overwhelming because we have let things go so far in this 
     society. But it has to be done and technically it can be 
     done. We just blew away many billions of dollars on the 
     failed expedition to take pictures of Mars: But this is here 
     on earth, our life's blood.
       And we have to let Congress know that there should be no 
     shilly-shalling when it comes to violence in our society, 
     that the limit on the manufacture, sale and distribution of 
     guns in this society is a high priority for us. We have to 
     let the Congress know that in the conditions of our society 
     those who support the policies of the NRA, kow-tow to it, are 
     a national disgrace and should be considered morally and 
     spiritually, if not legally, accomplices to murder.
       There is another element glaring and gross in the rise of 
     violence about which we can do something. Once I watched with 
     horror two boys fourteen years of age who were killers. When 
     asked if they felt any remorse or sorrow, they manifested no 
     feeling at all. But this is not surprising in a society whose 
     children are increasingly desensitized to hurt or death of 
     others, to the point that it means nothing. For our society, 
     to the mixture of poverty, a jobless underclass, poor 
     education, gangs, guns, the absence of family life, our 
     society, deliberately, to this devil's brew adds one more 
     element deliberately, repeatedly, forcefully, incessantly: 
     The explosive element of repeated images in all the media of 
     killing, violence, murder to the extent that the taking of 
     life seems normative, normal. Violence is depicted as a means 
     of resolving all disputes. We do it through all the media 
     but, above all, through the daily abomination of television 
     violence which is the most powerful of the media because the 
     most available and continuous, in fact, the most potent ever 
     invented for the transmission of behavior patterns. But in 
     our society people make money on the sale of violence.
       Every society that has ever existed has tried to 
     acculturate its children to the values it has chosen by the 
     stories it tells, the scenes it shows. The Jewish tradition 
     has literally tens of thousands of stories which glorify 
     tenderness, compassion, service. But through slick technique, 
     television cultivates a taste for violence and then sells it 
     at huge profits. The result is that we are deliberately 
     inculcating in children pathologically anti-social behavior. 
     According to many studies (these studies run into the 
     thousands), by the age of sixteen our children see two 
     hundred thousand acts of violence and thirty-three thousand 
     murders minimally on television. Roughly, three thousand 
     research projects and scientific studies between 1960 and 
     1992 have repeatedly confirmed the connection between this 
     diet of violence in entertainment on the one hand and 
     aggressive anti-social behavior on the other. Even the 
     magazine Television Guide has pointed out: ``the 
     overwhelming weight of scientific opinion now holds that 
     televised violence is responsible for much of the rise of 
     violence in our society''--according to the American 
     Psychiatric Association, as much as fifty percent of 
     violent crime in society. I have never been able to 
     understand how the television business can deny that 
     violent television influences behavior and then turn 
     around and charge millions of dollars for a minute of 
     commercial time with the equal argument that television 
     will influence the behavior of masses of viewers.
       Like guns, television violence is an abomination about 
     which all of us must and can do something.
       And this brings me back to the final problem and it is a 
     case of ``we have met the enemy, and it is us.'' At this 
     stage of violence in America, whoever contributes to it, 
     whoever does not react to it, whoever accepts it is also 
     responsible. Do not consume television or media violence 
     yourself! Do not allow your children to do so! If you do, you 
     are supporting violence. There are excellent organizations 
     which work to diminish television violence and for the 
     control of guns in our society. They are effective but need 
     much more support. Let the networks know immediately that you 
     will not watch programs featuring gratuitous violence as an 
     entertainment. Let the makers of the products that advertise 
     through violent programming know your feelings. Do not use 
     their products. Beginning within ourselves, let us begin to 
     develop a zero tolerance towards violence in this society. 
     Let us create, as we did with the environment, an anti-
     violence consciousness in this society.
       I conclude with an incident that sums it up. Sometimes 
     television can be a tremendously positive force in our 
     society. But during one week last year in which tremendously 
     significant events were taking place in the world, on 
     television three events dominated: One, the retirement of 
     Mike Ditka as the Bear's coach; two, the tremendously earth 
     shaking news of the issuance of the Elvis Presley stamp; but 
     more than any other the Amy Fisher story. Most disturbing was 
     that this empty, shallow, good-for-nothing who had allegedly 
     engaged in an extra-marital affair with a Long Island auto 
     mechanic and had murderously assaulted his wife with a gun 
     was, with tremendous bally-hoo and hype transformed by all 
     three major networks into a national figure in three full 
     length Amy Fisher stories, two of them at the same time. 
     Psychologists all over the country began to criticize the 
     networks for getting a twisted message across to teenagers 
     all over the country as to what kind of person is important 
     and can be made into a star and for the appeal to the most 
     prurient instincts of people and lowering of the public 
     taste.
       And then reporters went after the television producers. The 
     most revealing comments were made by the senior vice 
     president of NBC in charge of programming, Ruth Slawson. 
     Surprisingly, she lamented the whole matter. She said that 
     she had serious reservations about the process and how Amy 
     Fisher's story became the hottest thing on American 
     television: ``All of us perpetuated this'', Ms. Slawson said. 
     ``It became a media phenomenon. Overall I'm not happy about 
     the state of the movies on television. It's crazy'' she said. 
     ``It's self-perpetuating''.
       That made me wonder. She was the vice-president in charge 
     of programming. Then why does she do it? She goes on to say: 
     ``We all don't want to keep on doing these true-crime movies 
     but then these numbers (the ratings) come in and what choice 
     do we have? (New York Times January 3, 1993).''
       Numbers, ratings, of course, means money. No matter what 
     other issues are involved, it is as if this is the ultimate 
     justification for everything: The money, the ratings come in 
     and then you have no choice. But if the numbers, the 
     ``ratings'' are the ultimate justification, the Mafia too can 
     say exactly the same thing: ``We don't like selling drugs, 
     prostitution, pornography, putting corpses into trunks but 
     the ratings come in, what choice do we have?'' ``What choice 
     do we have?'', the drug gangs can say that shoot up people 
     including innocent children. ``What choice do we have?'' say 
     the people who market guns for profit. ``What choice do we 
     have?'' the congressmen can say, ``The lobby comes in and 
     what choice do we have?'' And the people who make the violent 
     films which affect the mentality of millions of children can 
     say ``the ratings come in and what choice do we have?''
       I wrote to that vice-president of programming and said: 
     ``you do have a choice. You may not make as much money as you 
     now do, but you do have a choice. And worse, you are choosing 
     for us. You are choosing deterioration for our society and 
     death for us. You are choosing the destruction of the public 
     sense of the sanctity of life.''
       On our high holidays we read, ``I set before you life and 
     death, the blessing and the cruse! Choose life! Jews have 
     always felt that we have a choice. We are in this room 
     because Jews made a choice to stay Jews despite ``the 
     ratings'', despite economic pressure, despite the exclusions 
     and persecution. If we want to maintain a fairly liveable 
     society for us, for our children (and it is getting worse for 
     our grandchildren) we have to make choices. Life is enhanced 
     for others, people are healed, people are saved because some 
     people are willing to make choices.
       In the face of the plague of violence, we have to make 
     choices. Some of you will not act, you will go away and not 
     do a thing. But you are making a choice. And its not for 
     blessing, not for life. Some of you will work actively for 
     gun control and media free of gratuitous violence. And you 
     are making a choice for blessing and for life. Choose life, 
     that you may live, you and your children.

                          ____________________