[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 59 (Wednesday, April 28, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E805]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             MEDIA VIOLENCE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. EDWARD J. MARKEY

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, April 28, 1999

  Mr. MARKEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with Rep. Dan Burton to 
introduce a joint resolution requiring the Surgeon General to prepare 
and issue a new Surgeon General's Report on media violence and its 
impact on the health and welfare of our children. It is by no means all 
we should do in light of the tragedy in Littleton, Colorado, but is it 
certainly the least we should do.
  Orignial cosponsors of this initiative include Represenatatives Jim 
Moran, Connie Morella, John Spratt, Joe Pitts, Jim McDermott, Greg 
Ganske, and John LaFalce.
  We join with every parent, school official, student, religious leader 
and every other American who is struggling to identify what has gone so 
wrong with the process of growing up in America that our kids can kill 
our kids without remorse.
  This is not a new subject. If the horror that unfolded last week at 
Columbine High was in any way unique, we could comfort ourselves with 
the fantasy that is was the product of one or two sick minds. But we 
know that violence has become as American as apple pie, and we are 
reaping a bitter harvest as we continue to tolerate a culture which 
teaches kids to kill and be killed.
  Our culture has become infused with violent images and messages and 
the methods of delivering those images has multiplied exponentially. 
Television shows that glamorize massacres, movies that pantomime 
violent school killing sprees, video games that teach children how to 
shot to kill their targets and Internet sites filled with vicious, 
destructive messages all function as desensitizing, conditioning 
mechanisms making it easier for our children to commit heinous crimes 
without understanding the finality and brutality of their actions.
  Violent TV and film images now have a new interactive digital face in 
video games and on the Internet. Guns are everywhere. Highly efficient 
assault weapons are available for sale on the street for the price of a 
pair of sneakers. More and more children are becoming alienated and 
depressed without the support structures needed to mediate their 
troubles, treat their illnesses, or protect them from themselves.
  This is a very deep and complicated mess we're in, but it is our 
mess, a problem we share across the land. There is no place to run to 
escape its effects. We are facing a monumental task, which I would 
liken in its scope to a Marshall Plan for America, where the challenge 
is to rebuild the social structure of a society while respecting the 
Constitutional freedoms which all Americans cherish.
  We can begin by examining the ways that children and young adults 
learn violence. The evil behavior that those young killers displayed at 
Columbine High School was not born in them nor learned from their 
parents.
  The strong correlation between violent messages delivered to our kids 
and antisocial behavior delievered by our kids to society is well-
documented. It was the fundamental finding of the Surgeon General's 
Report of 1972 and the Report by the National Institute of Mental 
Health in 1982. Both reports focused on television's impact on 
behavior. But since that time, the capacity of the entertainment 
deliver ever more graphic depiction of violence has vastly increased, 
and the outlets for delivering these images to children without the 
intervention of adults has multiplied many times. Moreover, the 
research community and the entertainment and interactive media has 
produced a vast compendium of research, polling, and analysis--much of 
it confusing and conflicting--but which is much more relevant to 
today's world than what was studied 15 or 30 years ago. The last 
government-sponsored review in 1982 includes the following introductory 
sentence:
  ``In view of the evidence that children are already attentive to the 
television medium by the age of 6 to 9 months, it is no longer useful 
to talk of the television set as an extraneous and occasional intruder 
into the life of a child. Rather, we must recongize that children are 
gorwing up in an enviromment in which they must lean to organize 
experience and emotional responses not only in relationship to the 
physical and social environment of the home but also in relation to the 
omnipresent 21-inch screen that talks, sings, dances, and encourages 
the desire for toys, candies, and breakfast food.''
  As the Information Age takes hold and as youth violence takes new and 
ever more disturbing twists through America's soul, we cannot afford to 
develop national policy on the basis of such a quaint view of the 
problem.
  Therefore, we are calling on the Surgeon General to provide the 
country with a new Surgeon General's Report that reflects our 
contemporary crisis, that takes into account both the promise and 
problems of interactive media, and that makes findings and 
recommendations regarding how to combat the sickness of violence and to 
rebuild our national spirit.
  Let me conclude by emphasizing my personal view that the President is 
correct to focus attention on the contributing factor of gun 
availability to children and the collapse of parental supervision with 
regards to dangerous weapons. Our response to the spread of guns into 
the hands of our kids has been as disproportionate as our response to 
the cultural glamorization of gun use.
  And while I expect to learn much from the dialogue and the research 
we are asking for today, I do not expect the front-line function of 
parenting to be found any less fundamental to raising healthy children 
than it has ever been.

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