[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 59 (Friday, May 13, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 13, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                                VIOLENCE

  Mr. BRADLEY. Mr. President, let me begin my remarks today with a poem 
that I got from a 16-year-old in Camden, NJ. The title of the poem is: 
``RIOT at East Camden Middle.''

       The riot start after the basketball game--hallway outside 
     the East Camden Middle School gym. Unknowns fightin the Two-
     Eight Youngsters.
       An Unknown get up in a Two-Eight face. And then it's 
     knives. Razor blades. Black eyes. Busted noses. Blood all 
     over the halls. Girls screamin, cryin. People steppin on each 
     other to get outside.
       Fifty to a hundred people fightin.
       Crazy!
       War inside the school.
       An even fists an knives is not enough.
       Guns. Someone duck out to get the guns. Bullets sprayin the 
     crowd out on the parkin lot.
       Three girls, two dudes get shot that night.
       I carry my gun every day.

  Mr. President, the young African-American male who wrote me this poem 
is more likely to die in the violence he describes than in any other 
way. Murder is still the number one cause of death for young African 
males in America today.
  In thinking about violence in America, our goal has to be to keep 
these young people alive by reducing the level of gunfire and terror 
among the young in schools and in our cities.
  Mr. President, that has to be clear. But it would be a mistake to 
stop there, to think that it was confined there, for violence is not 
confined to street crime nor to urban America. Violence burns in many 
places. It is a blaze fed by many fires. Ask any corporate executive 
who never drives home the same way 2 days in a row. Ask any head of 
security at a suburban mall or a college campus. Ask anyone who uses an 
ATM machine at night. Ask any Japanese tourist if he would ever, under 
any circumstances, knock on a stranger's door in Louisiana. Ask any 
German tourist about getting off the highway in Miami. Ask Michael 
Jordan.
  Mr. President, violence, while present throughout our Nation's 
history, has of late taken some inexplicable turns. Somehow our times 
are different. Nancy Kerrigan and the Bobbitts are not a singing group 
of the 1960's, and the Menendez family is a far cry from Ozzie and 
Harriet. Gone are the TV days of Matt Dillon rounding up the outlaws in 
the Old West, or Elliott Ness and the boys always prevailing against 
organized crime. A Charles Starkweather or a Charles Manson used to 
come along once in a decade. Now it seems a Jeffrey Dahmer turns up 
someplace in America every year. And the more bizarre the incident, the 
bigger the news coverage.
  People seem to flock to TV competing to tell the most lurid story. 
There are days when, through ``the tube,'' it seems as if the country 
has taken the form of one big dysfunctional family. More and more 
people seem to be living on the outer edges, unsure how they are going 
to get back. We seem to be daring each other as if we were teenagers 
and taking risks that in another time and place would have been 
unthinkable, not realizing that unless we get things under control, the 
country will be the loser.
  And the remarkable thing is that too many people do not really do 
anything about it; they just take all this. Child abuse and muggings 
and murder all pass in a blur of recognition. Street taunts raise 
awareness of danger that triple-locked doors cannot lessen. Slowly, 
violence burns and eats away at our social fabric as if it were an 
acid, so that even when statistics show some improvement, we do not 
feel more secure.
  Mr. President, violence goes deeper and comes closer to many families 
in America than we would admit. Domestic violence, for example, is 
America's dark little secret.
  A few weeks ago, a woman told me the following story. She said that 
her husband used to beat her up regularly. She wanted to leave, but she 
could never imagine actually doing it. She feared the consequences for 
herself and for her children. Then one day, her 2-year-old daughter 
witnessed her husband strangling her. Finally, that incident was 
enough; it was the catalyst. She decided to seek refuge with her 2-
year-old and 4-year-old in a shelter for battered women.
  A few days later when she was in the shelter, the 2-year-old got mad 
at the 4-year-old. The mother turned see what was the matter and 
witnessed the 2-year-old going for the throat of the 4-year-old.
  Mr. President, I thought about that image of violence a lot, the 
image of that violence being passed on from one generation to another.
  ``The most dangerous place to be'', a policeman recently said, ``is 
in one's home between Saturday night at 6 o'clock and Sunday night at 6 
o'clock. He forgot to add, ``Especially if you are a woman.''
  One-half of all women who are murdered in America are murdered by 
their male partners; one-half. Three-quarters of all assaults happen in 
the family. Thirty percent of all women admitted to emergency rooms at 
hospitals are there due to family violence. Violence against women in 
the home causes more total injuries in America than rape, muggings, and 
car accidents combined. Sudden, stark, incomprehensible, family 
violence does not just happen. It builds into the cycle of aggression 
and forgiveness and blame until it explodes. And the battered spouse is 
almost never a man.
  When J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first nuclear explosion, he 
said that the nuclear bomb was ``a destroyer of worlds.'' In the homes 
of battered women and abused children, violence is a destroyer of the 
world of love.
  Few have observed this better than one of America's greatest 
novelists, Russell Banks, who, in his great novel, Affliction, wrote 
the following:

       Pop held Wade with one hand by the front of his shirt, like 
     Matt Dillon drawing a puny terrified punk up to his broad 
     chest, and he took his left fist, and swung it out to the 
     side, opened it, and brought it swiftly back, slapping the 
     boy's face hard, as if it were a board. Then he brought it 
     back the other way, slapping him again and again, harder each 
     time, although each time the boy felt it less, felt only the 
     lava-like flow of heat that each blow left behind, until he 
     thought he would explode from the heat, would blow up like a 
     bomb, from the face outward.
       At last, the man stopped slapping him. He tossed the boy 
     aside, onto the couch, like a bag of rags. . . .

  This kind of violence turns boys like Wade into men like Wade, who 
later in the novel becomes a cold, soul-less killer.
  Mr. President, violence not only destroys the world of love, it also 
destroys the world of trust--the world of trust that is essential to a 
humane public life. Ask any urban dweller who is afraid to go to a PTA 
meeting or to a church meeting at night, and they will tell you that 
the fear of violence strikes at the core of their individual liberty.
  Mr. President, liberty is the right to choose. It is often expressed 
as ``freedom from''--freedom from coercion or control. But it is also 
``freedom to''--freedom to make the best of our capacity and 
opportunities. One way you exercise liberty is through freedom of 
association. You must be able to associate with other people in order 
to learn and bend, communicate, organize, pass on values, practice 
democracy. Through association with other people, we pursue happiness. 
Security protects liberty, and this thus lets us readily create 
associations with other people through which we build community, which 
in turn will guarantee liberty.
  Mr. President, the genius of all of this is the interdependence of 
these ideas. They are meant to chase each other in a virtuous circle. 
None of them is ever fully realized, fully achieved--liberty, happiness 
or security. And the vitality of our democratic society is the 
incessant effort to achieve them, even though they are not ever fully 
achieved. We chase each other in a virtuous circle, providing more 
liberty, more security than we would have otherwise, and more 
happiness.
  Mr. President, in communities where violence prevails these ideals 
are lost. Violence clogs the arteries of a free society. It stops us 
from reaching out our hands to a neighbor. Violence robs us of liberty. 
It destroys the world of trust by turning a citizen into either a 
frightened, isolated victim, or a predator living off of other's pain. 
In America today, the blaze of violence is fed by many fires.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to be able to continue.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Pell). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. BRADLEY. In America today, the blaze of violence is fed by many 
fires. Television, CD's, and video games bring it into the open windows 
of our homes. By the time a kid reaches 18 they have witnessed as many 
as 26,000 murders on TV. But not all those murders are the same. Some 
can make a child pause at the consequences of violence, while other 
murders pile up in an empty litany of bashing and stabbing and shooting 
that creates a numbness that, in turn, requires ever crueler and gorier 
violence to induce just the flutter of shock. Murder pays, for the 
sponsors. Rap anthems that glorify gang violence and brutal abuse of 
women, sell.
  Often the corporate search for violent product gives us violence of 
such intensity that it has almost no context at all, either moral or 
biographical. There is a difference between, on the one hand, the 
fiction of Russell Banks and the news footage of the Bosnian war--both 
of which portray violence--and, on the other hand, a corporate product 
such as Mortal Kombat II that consists of nothing but violence, that in 
a sense is violence.
  George Gerbner, a communications professor at the University of 
Pennsylvania, draws a distinction between the symbolic and often tragic 
violence of Shakespeare and fairy tales, and happy violence which shows 
no pain or tragic consequences.
  Every year in New Jersey I do a high school seminar where kids 
participate from 500 high schools. We break up, and discuss things. 
This year we discussed violence in one of the seminars. In one of the 
seminars I spontaneously asked the following question: ``Anybody in 
here ever see anybody killed?'' Two hands went up. I said, ``Tell us 
about it.'' They could not tell us about it. They were too traumatized.
  At another seminar, I said, ``Anybody here see ever see anyone 
killed?'' One hand went up. ``Tell us about it.'' Then he described 
what it was like to see a person standing on the street corner, and 
somebody else come along with an automatic rifle and shoot him in the 
head. He described in vivid detail what happened to the victims head, 
how it looked as the person fell in a pool of blood. Mr. President, he 
then said, ``That is not the way it looked on TV.''
  The blaze of violence is fed by many fires.
  There are more gun dealers in America than there are gas stations or 
grocery stores. In 1991, 14,373 Americans were murdered with a gun, 
over 12,000 with a handgun. Every 14 seconds, somebody dies of a 
gunshot wound. Every gun injury that leaves the person hospitalized 
costs $30,000, 80 percent of which is paid by the taxpayer. There are 
71 million handguns in America. In 1992, 34,000 people applied to be 
gun dealers, and only 37 were denied. With only 240 inspectors to 
police 245,000 gun dealers, why is that a surprise to anybody?
  In a nationwide poll of teenagers, Lou Harris found that 15 percent 
of suburban teenagers and 17 percent of urban teenagers report having 
carried a gun in the last 30 days. Forty percent of all teenagers say 
they can get a handgun within 24 hours, ``if I wanted one.'' The same 
percentage--40 percent--say that the threat of violence has made me 
change where I go, where I stop on the street, where I go at night, 
what neighborhoods I walk in, and who I make friends with.
  Police officers point out that the change in violence over the last 
decade is that murderers are younger, the guns more high-powered, and 
the acts themselves are more and more random.
  The blaze of violence is fed by many fires.
  Native American reservations in South Dakota have a murder rate of 
more than double that of Los Angeles. The rate of poor rural counties 
in Mississippi equals that of Newark. The common denominator in all of 
these places is: Poverty, loss of hope, and vast segments of urban 
America are in economic depression. Lives are being wasted, shortened, 
demeaned, without a job, which can give dignity to each of them. At a 
time when our common economic future needs every able-bodied person, we 
see poorer, sicker, less well-educated, Third World enclaves emerging 
in our midst.
  Mr. President, I have spoken on native American reservations and at 
urban recreation school programs for over 25 years. A decade or so ago, 
there was always a distinct difference between the kids in the two 
places. On a native American reservation, the kids sat quietly, almost 
impassively, instead of asking questions or offering opinions. The toll 
of 200 years of neglect has settled so deeply that it had squelched 
hope. As I looked out into the audience, I stared into dead eyes--dead 
eyes. There was no response, no hope.
  In an urban community, the kids, a decade or so ago, seemed wired 
with energy, could not stop bobbing left, right, up and down. They 
asked questions, talked incessantly with each other, and did not often 
listen, but their eyes were alive with expectation. Today, I go speak 
in urban America and something has changed. Too often, I see dead eyes. 
Once hope is gone, everything is gone.
  The blaze of violence is fed by many fires.
  In Detroit, nearly 80 percent of the kids are born to single parents. 
In 1991, 30 percent of all children born in America were born to a 
single parent. Among black children, it was two-thirds. Many single 
mothers do a heroic job transmitting values, raising their children 
well against great odds. Many others are too young, too poor, too 
unloved, and their children, at birth, become 15-year time bombs 
waiting to explode in adolescence.
  If you think violence among the young is bad now, wait until this 
army of neglected, often abused, sometimes abandoned, street-trained, 
gang-tested, friendless young people reach age 15. Their capacity to 
have any kind of meaningful attachment will be gone.
  One recent study that surprised me was that the number of urban 
teenage boys volunteered that they had no best friend and no one person 
that they trusted. Mr. President, when only the gang gives meaning to 
life, death cannot be far behind.
  In America, the blaze of violence is fed by many fires.
  The emerging Federal crime bill is an attempt to counter rising 
violence. The architects of the bill have worked hard on it, and it 
does many good things. But its effect is uncertain. It appears to some 
as if it were a huge heap of ideas and proposals cobbled together by 
representatives of a Nation which is increasingly desperate about 
violence. In a way, it reminds me of what a group of anxious citizens 
would do as they threw furniture and household goods on a barricade to 
stop the invading hordes. Many of the provisions appear to have the 
following rationale: Maybe that will work, maybe that would help, so 
let us add it to the barricade. My fear is that the remedies come from 
so many different sources, and expand over such a wide area, it will 
have a limited impact, notwithstanding all of our good intentions.
  Mr. President, to some ears, this might sound like a criticism of the 
bill. It is not intended to be. It has more to do with how people hear 
the words, and with the complexity of violence generally. I personally 
think Chairman Biden has worked long and hard to confront violence and 
has spent more time thinking about it than virtually any person in this 
body, and he has had an outstanding staff researching it, more than 
anybody in this body. The Judiciary Committee crafted an excellent bill 
that took aim at violence, particularly among the young. It had my 
strong support because it reflected a good balance between prevention 
and punishment.
  Yet, some unfortunate amendments were added here on the floor. Not 
all of them, obviously, were unfortunate; some were good. But some of 
them were unfortunate. Many of them Chairman Biden opposed, some he 
accepted, knowing they were necessary to get a bill through this body 
and to conference. I doubt that they are going to emerge from 
conference.
  What is missing, Mr. President, is an overall national goal, and an 
admission that much of what must be done is beyond the reach of the 
Federal Government. What we need is a national rebellion against 
violence that sets a specific target for reducing violence over a 10-
year period.
  For example, I suggest a 75-percent reduction in our homicide rate 
which, if achieved, would place us about where England's homicide rate 
is today. A national rebellion against violence would be rooted in the 
knowledge that violence strikes at the core of our democratic freedom, 
the freedom to associate with each other as liberty-loving, free 
individuals. A national goal would also give us some way to measure 
progress. So often Americans, on the one hand, seem catatonic, frozen, 
paralyzed in the face of intense violence and, on the other hand, we 
seem ready to entertain the most radical solutions. Unless we have a 
way to tell whether what we are doing is working, people will always 
assume the worst and will believe the latest and worst anecdote they 
heard that will define what the threat is to them, notwithstanding 
declining violation rates, and we will be potentially caught in a 
spiral of extreme measures that could even endanger our rights 
permanently. We cannot simply replace a violent society with a 
repressive society. That would be a pyrrhic victory. The rebellion 
against violence must enhance our national example, not diminish it. We 
must always remember that the world is watching us and now more than 
ever before.

  Mr. President, like so many other issues in public life, in the 
debate about violation, people do not listen to each other. That side 
does not listen to this side. This Senator does not listen to that 
Senator. This outside group does not listen to that outside group. They 
are frozen, frozen in the old dichotomy of conservative or liberal; 
tough or coddling; causes or punishment. Those who believe the answer 
is gun control do not listen to those who believe the answer is the 
death penalty. Those who believe in severe punishment cannot see the 
necessity of controlling and limiting guns. And often neither gun 
control advocates nor tough sentencers see the connection between 
societal violence, on the one hand, and poverty, family disintegration, 
and exploitative media violation, on the other. Instead of confronting 
reality, more and more people look for the magic bullet that will stop 
violence dead in its tracks, do the one that will be there, will stop 
it and there will be no more violence.
  Mr. President, the truth is much harder.
  Truth No. 1: There is no miracle cure, and the answer lies closer to 
home than it does to Washington, DC.
  Truth No. 2: Violation will not be stopped by soft words. Every 
person who uses violence must pay the price in lost freedom, and doing 
time, essentially for the young, must be a memory that one does not 
ever want to repeat.
  Truth No. 3: We will never counter violence unless we restrict the 
handguns used by 80 percent of the people in America who commit gun 
murders. What is common sense to people of virtually every other 
country in the world becomes a constitutional crisis to us.
  Truth No. 4: There is no substitute for a job. If we can move those 
on the bottom rung of the economic ladder up just a few rungs, the 
efforts against violation will have acquired a powerful ally.
  Truth No. 5: Violation is a phenomenon caused by twisted values and 
the loss of self-control. The formation of values and self-discipline 
begins in childhood, and teaching them is the job of parents. Unless we 
instill them in all of our children, we have only ourselves to blame.
  Truth No. 6: We need to make it as unfashionable to sell violation in 
America as it is to smoke cigarettes. We do not need censorship; we 
need enhanced citizenship, particularly in the board rooms.
  Truth No. 7: Drugs and violation go together like gunpowder and a 
match. To ignore addiction as a national problem is to sentence many 
more Americans to death.
  Mr. President, those are the truths that we have to confront.
  A national rebellion against violence requires individuals, 
communities, and all levels of government working together. People do 
not live in isolation. Only the hermit out in the mountains lives in 
isolation. The rest of us live in communities where we go to church, 
play sports, pick up groceries, and raise our kids. And often we live 
in fear. What people do not realize is the power they possess if they 
work together. In the 1960's an aroused citizenry that focused on an 
evil--legally sanctioned racism--ended racial discrimination under the 
law and furthered the cause of justice. Today an aroused citizenry 
focused on an evil--violation--can bring order to our streets and 
further the cause of liberty. A street thug can intimidate an 
individual, but he cannot intimidate a unified, energized community.
  Mr. President, politicians--well, where do we fit in all this? We 
have to stop treating security like it is a product that government 
delivers to your home. We create security for ourselves in the same 
context where violation occurs--in our community and in our family. At 
the national level, we can set standards, set limits, spread innovative 
ideas, create uniform rules, gather data, and make sure those who 
commit federally prohibited violence pay for it by a swift loss of 
freedom and in some cases such as drug kingpins who murder by the loss 
of their lives. But the real battle against violate crime committed by 
the young and within the family will not be waged at the Federal level. 
Like education, where we have only 6 percent of the national resources, 
in crime the Feds have about 13 percent--that is all--13 percent of the 
Nation's crime fighting resources. The crime bill will be a false 
promise if we forget, each one of us forget our individual obligations 
as police officers, local officials, teachers, parents, spouses, and 
citizens. The Federal Government is not going to do it. It can help. 
But we each have an individual obligation and responsibility as well.
  Yet, Mr. President, there are some commonsense actions that the 
Federal Government can encourage that would I think, prevent youthful 
gun violence, challenge young people with the possibility of a future 
without violence, and raise awareness of domestic violence while 
providing women a way out.
  First, I know it is controversial, but I think it is the logical next 
step. I believe that everyone who buys a handgun should have a national 
identity card with a picture on it, just like a driver's license. Every 
transfer of a gun must be registered, with tough penalties for those 
who refuse. No one should be allowed to purchase more than one handgun 
per month, and gun dealers ought to pay $1,000 per year for a license. 
These changes, I think, will hasten the day when law-abiding citizens 
and only law-abiding citizens will have guns. Technology can help us, 
frankly, particularly in the policing process. If we can develop heat-
seeking missiles, certainly we can invent remote metal-sensing devices 
that will allow the police forces, augmented by the police corps, by 
the 100,000 police this crime bill provides, to seize more illegal guns 
and to disrupt the commerce of armed street criminals. Certainly, we 
can do that.
  Second, communities should have greater access to their public 
schools. Schools close at 3 in the afternoon in a lot of places in 
urban America, close on weekends, and are closed all summer long. With 
Federal support, schools should remain open in the evenings, on 
weekends, and during the summer for the community to use. The schools 
are the most underutilized assets in urban America. Churches, 
synagogues, mosques, and community development corporations should be 
allowed to provide the mentoring, safe haven, and guidance, the absence 
of which all too often contributes to delinquency. The availability of 
the school will also give the community a place to focus public and 
private resources to win back the minds and hearts that the streets 
have captured.
  Third, Mr. President, to counter domestic violence, we need to get 
the facts out of the closet and then help women find a way out of a 
brutal environment. Domestic violation is a problem at all income 
levels. It is more than a serious health care problem. It is a social 
sickness, a tragedy that is destroying families and an experience that 
spreads violence from one generation to another.
  Mr. President, every man's home may be his castle, but it is not his 
torture chamber, in which he can beat someone less physically strong 
time and time again without consequences. Many men will deny the 
impulse and the existence of the behavior. Like drunks that have not 
quite reformed, they promise their partners and the world that the 
latest episode of violence will be the last episode of violence. Too 
often they go back on their word, and the cycle of aggression, seeking 
forgiveness, blaming the victim, and committing aggression starts over 
again. The cycle goes on and on. We can wait no longer for universal 
personal reform.
  When a woman is the victim of domestic violence, she has to have a 
place to go. There should be a counseling hot line so that experienced 
professionals can guide her to an appropriate place. Above all, there 
must be enough battered spouse shelters with enough resources for 
relocation to give women some idea of where they can escape the fear of 
a threatening phone call or the knock on the door in the middle of the 
night.
  But we have to do more than give women a place after they are beaten. 
We have to prevent the violation in the first place.
  I suggest that every health professional--doctors, nurses, physician 
assistants, social workers, and others--be trained to recognize 
domestic violence and to ask female patients about it. Asking 
questions, hopefully, will free women from considering beatings as a 
family matter that they are not sanctioned to discuss, even with their 
doctor.
  Mr. President, domestic violence should not be treated as a 
preexisting condition to deny women health insurance in this country. 
And yet that happens every day, almost every day. I have seen the 
letters from the insurance companies.
  But it is not just up to health professionals. If we are going to 
stop domestic violence, each of us, in our own spheres of influence--
home, work, PTA, Little League--have an obligation to acknowledge it 
occurs, recognize it when we see it, and say something about it. It is 
so much easier to overlook it, turn the other way, regard it 
exclusively as a family matter, pretend we do not have any 
responsibility. But if we are going to prevent it, we all do.

  These three proposals will not end violence in America, but combined 
with the crime bill and, more importantly, with an energized national 
community prepared to cooperate with the police and with each other, 
they will take us further along the path toward greater security.
  Mr. President, a member of the Japanese Diet told me recently that as 
his two young girls were growing up, he looked forward to them coming 
to the United States as exchange students and he looked forward to 
visiting them and vacationing here with his wife. Now he says he is 
sending his kids to England, and he and his wife are vacationing in 
Europe. ``Why?'' I asked him. He replied, ``The guns, the drugs, the 
violence--unless you get control of them, you'll lose a lot more than a 
few tourists; you'll no longer be the model democracy for the world.''
  The only way to achieve our aim of a 75-percent homicide reduction 
within a decade and in a way consistent with our democracy is to assume 
individual responsibility, to enlist all who love their communities and 
Nation in a rebellion that is waged locally, neighbor by neighbor, 
building by building, and at the same time to build bonds of community 
that render violence moot.
  The world of violence and the world of trust must be provided with 
enough resources to fight the fires of violence. All who believe in the 
world of trust and the world of love must join that rebellion against 
violence. If we do not --if we do not join that rebellion, if we do not 
work to protect the world of trust and the world of love, if we turn 
away--Mr. President, the riot in Camden middle school will spread to 
more schools and the story of the 2-year-old going for the 4-year-old 
brother's throat will be just one of many chapters of future pain.
  The fires that feed the blaze of violence can only be extinguished 
when all of us act as citizens to achieve what everyone in a democracy 
deserves--the right to live a life without fear of unexpected, random 
violence, whether on the street, at school, or in the home.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. LOTT addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Bingaman). The Senator from Mississippi is 
recognized.
  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to proceed as if in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate is in morning business.
  The Senator may proceed.

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