[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 173 (Friday, November 3, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S16686]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           KIDS PAY THE PRICE

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, we still are not doing what we 
should to control the proliferation of weapons in our country, despite 
the overwhelming evidence of the need to do that.
  The Bob Herbert column in the New York Times recently was powerful 
evidence once again of the need to face up to these problems.
  I commend him, I commend Oprah Winfrey, I commend Paul Newman, and 
anyone else who has played a part in putting together what, apparently, 
is a powerful, two-part program on ``The Oprah Winfrey Show.''
  I ask unanimous consent that the Bob Herbert column be printed in the 
Record at this point.
  The column follows:

                [From the New York Times, Oct. 30, 1995]

                           Kids Pay the Price

                            (By Bob Herbert)

       Paul Newman, in the 30-second television spot, is reading 
     from a newspaper: ``Matilda Crabtree, 14, jumped out of a 
     closet and yelled `boo' to scare her parents.'' He pauses 
     very briefly before adding, ``And was shot to death when her 
     father mistook her for a burglar.'' Mr. Newman continues: 
     ``Matilda was supposed to be sleeping at a friend's house but 
     decided to sneak home and play a joke on her family. Her last 
     words were, `I love you, Daddy.' ''
       This is followed by a stark message displayed full-screen 
     against a black background: ``A gun in the home triples the 
     risk of homicide in the home.''
       We then hear Mr. Newman say, ``Before you bring a gun in 
     the house, think about it.''
       The Newman spot is one of many compelling moments in a 
     special two-part Oprah Winfrey program devoted to the 
     terrible toll that gun violence is taking on young people, 
     especially children. The first part airs today.
       The program opens with Ms. Winfrey standing in front of a 
     blackboard that says 15 children are killed by guns in the 
     United States every day, and that a teen-ager commits suicide 
     with a gun every six hours. ``If we were to build a 
     memorial'' to the kids killed by gunfire in the last 13 
     years, Ms. Winfrey says, ``the names on that memorial would 
     outnumber'' the American lives lost in Vietnam.
       The program uses the terms children and kids in the 
     broadest sense, so that they cover the entire period from 
     infancy through the teen years. In 1992, the last year for 
     which complete statistics are available, 37,776 people were 
     killed by firearms in the U.S. Of those, 5,379 were 19 years 
     of age or younger. Those are extraordinary number, and they 
     have risen since 1992.
       And yet we pay very little attention to the problem of guns 
     and children, in part because of denial, and in part, as Ms. 
     Winfrey points out, because ``the frequency of death has 
     numbed us to what the death of one child really means.''
       Today's show takes a step toward remedying that. For 
     example, we see glimpses of the exuberant life of Kenzo Bix 
     from home videos and a photo album and the comments of his 
     mother, Lynn. We see him as a toddler, and in that angelic 
     guise peculiar to the first grader, and romping as a teen-
     ager,
       ``He was kind of whimsical,'' his mother said. She shows us 
     a Mothers Day memo he posted: ``Do not go in the kitchen. 
     Your gifts are in there.''
       ``That was actually the year just before he died,'' she 
     said.
       When he was 14, Kenzo was accidentally shot and killed by a 
     friend who was playing with a gun.
       One of the things that comes through in Ms. Winfrey's 
     program that is usually missing from news accounts of 
     homicides and suicides is the sheer suddenness of the absence 
     of the one who dies. Those who knew the child, were close to 
     the child, loved the child, cannot believe that he or she is 
     gone, and gone for good--gone irrevocably because of the 
     absurdity of the pulling of the trigger of some cheap and 
     deadly mechanism, usually for some cheap and stupid reason.
       Larry Elizalde, 18, was a high school track and football 
     star, and Olympic team hopeful, who was shot to death on the 
     street in Chicago by gang members who mistook him for someone 
     else.
       Mr. Elizalde died in the arms of a young seminarian, a 
     stranger named Doug Mitchell, who happened to have witnessed 
     the shooting. Mr. Mitchell, in an interview with Ms. Winfrey, 
     said he did not want ``the hatred of the gun, the violence of 
     the gun'' to be the last thing that mortally wounded youth 
     would experience, but rather the love and concern of another 
     human being.''
       This was clung to as a blessing by Mr. Elizalde's anguished 
     mother, Lynette, who at first had harbored the desperate fear 
     that her son had died alone.
       Throughout the program, Ms. Winfrey offers us evidence of 
     the humanity that is sacrificed--not just the lives lost, but 
     the humanity in all of us that is sacrificed by our 
     acceptance of the mass manufacture, mass sale and mass use of 
     firearms in this country.
       She tries to lift at least a corner of our blanket of 
     denial to disturb and maybe even awaken us.
       After all, she seems to be saying, children are 
     dying.

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