[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 74 (Thursday, May 20, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H3447-H3449]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Gephardt) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GEPHARDT. Mr. Speaker, today is the 1-month anniversary of the 
tragedy at Littleton, Colorado. I hoped to come to the floor today to 
speak on what we as a Nation need to begin to

[[Page H3448]]

do to solve this epidemic of youth violence. I did not expect that we 
would have had another shooting at another high school, serving as 
another alarm, as if we needed one, prompting us to act.
  During the memorial service in Littleton, a singer, Phil Driscoll, 
sang a song that he wrote for the occasion. In the song, he sang a line 
that I cannot get out of my mind. The line was, ``This is a wake-up 
call. How many innocent have to fall.''
  Today we received another wake-up call coming from Conyers, Georgia. 
What a wake-up call it was. But what can be done to solve the problem? 
What can we do to address the concerns of students and parents?
  I think there is a lot we must do and a lot that we can do. I refuse 
to accept the defeatist attitude which says this is a complex problem, 
and, therefore, there is nothing that Congress can do about it. That is 
wrong, and that is unacceptable.
  We have a national security crisis in our schools. We have lost more 
American children in our schools than American soldiers in Kosovo. This 
is a national security crisis which requires the same kind of 
mobilization that we apply to any military threat abroad.
  Obviously attention must be paid to the accessibility of guns in our 
society and the frequent and intense images of violence in our mass 
media. Clearly, we can make guns less accessible to kids. We can try to 
give parents better tools to supervise what their children are watching 
or playing on the TV or the Internet.
  Legislation has been debated and passed on the floor of the Senate 
over the past week that tried to make progress on limiting the access 
of kids to guns. I favor effective legislation to keep guns out of the 
hands of kids and hope the House will take up this legislation before 
we leave for Memorial Day.
  This makes sense and should have no impact on law-abiding citizens 
who want to purchase and own guns for sporting use and their own 
protection. We are talking about passing common-sense, child-safety 
legislation to make sure that children cannot get easy access to guns.
  I hope the House can follow the Senate's lead and move this kind of 
legislation forward without loopholes.
  But child-related gun legislation is only one part of the puzzle. 
There is a lot we must do to make sure that our children are not 
exposed to inappropriate violent material in the media.
  The Vice President has begun a discussion with Internet companies to 
publish the same ratings for on-line gaming that most TV shows have 
already. The President has called on the movie theaters to better 
enforce the rating process that is already in place there. Newspapers 
must also do a better job of making the rating systems clear to 
parents.
  Even if we are able to make the progress we hope for in these two 
areas, we know that these steps alone will not solve the problem. We 
need to address the broader issue of the quality of our children's 
education and how to give them the attention they need to grow up to be 
healthy in both mind and body.
  At the President's meeting on school violence at the White House, 
various experts on violence repeatedly made the point that this problem 
of school violence is a problem with many layers. They also said that 
such a complicated problem demanded more than single simple solutions.
  One cause of the problem is that parents spend nearly one-third less 
time with children than they did a generation ago. With more single-
parent families and more parents working more jobs and more hours and 
spending more time in traffic, there is just a lot less time for 
parents to be with and communicate with and raise their children.

                              {time}  1745

  In many families today, the kids are left alone most of the time. And 
as we all know, kids do not raise themselves.
  When parents are home, they often do not spend as much time talking 
with their children. With television, the Internet, pagers, and other 
distractions, parents communicate less with kids even when they are 
able to be home. Before television, time around the dinner table was a 
time for family communication. Now if a family has time for dinner 
together, many families have the television on during dinner and nobody 
really talks to one another.
  Another factor that was mentioned was the amount of domestic violence 
and child abuse that some young people are exposed to today. We have 
always had these problems, but the problem is far worse now than it has 
ever been. It is obvious that children exposed to abuse are much more 
prone to resort to violence in their own lives.
  Another factor is the size of high schools. Most of our schools were 
built after World War II when we were trying to accommodate the baby 
boom. The schools were built large for economic reasons, and the size 
did not matter when families were intact and parents could spend more 
time with children. However, in today's world, it is unwise to have 
anonymous children in large schools.
  Another problem is the increasing diagnosis of mental illness among 
children. One of the experts at the summit said that mental illness is 
more prevalent than ever but health insurance covers these problems 
less than ever. Consequently, many kids have problems but cannot get 
the professional mental help that they need.
  One expert said that our problems stem from what adults do to 
children or do not do for children. The answers to our problems lie 
with adults and what we can do to raise children properly.
  We spend so much of our debate and our time addressing the symptoms 
of violence but not the causes of violence. We talk about guns or 
conflict resolution or school violence programs. And it is right that 
we do so. But we spend far too little time discussing how we can 
prevent these problems in the first place.
  It is obvious that the modern family needs help in filling the time 
holes that exist. The only institution, in my view, that can possibly 
fill these holes are our public schools. Schools have complained about 
the need to fill all these holes. But the truth is that only through 
the public schools can we achieve the scale that we need to solve these 
problems with all the children of our country.
  We need nothing short of a revolution in our public schools to deal 
with the modern problems that children face in the modern world. 
Nostalgia for the past, criticism of other institutions for not meeting 
these challenges, or finger pointing at institutions that are not doing 
enough will not get us to a solution of these problems.
  We must really begin to build the public will to do what is necessary 
to really solve these problems. Raising and educating children 
correctly is a huge task and will not happen without human will to 
achieve that goal.
  In World War II, everyone thought America was way behind and would 
not win. What critics misunderstood was the will of the American 
people. Once every American internalized the goal of winning the war, 
each one of them did what was necessary on a daily basis and the war 
was won. The same can be achieved with our children, but a similar 
effort to what took place in World War II must be achieved.
  All of us, whether we have children or not, has a responsibility to 
enter into this effort to educate and raise our children. It is in our 
deep self-interest to do this. Government at all levels must help, and 
local government has the major responsibility. I hope in the days ahead 
we will work together to find answers to this crisis.
  Before the memorial service in Littleton, I went with Colin Powell 
and Vice President Gore and the gentlewoman from Colorado (Ms. 
DeGette), other members of the Colorado delegation, to meet with the 
parents of the dead children. We met with them for an hour and a half 
before the memorial service. We hugged them. We cried with them. I told 
them that the whole country was there with us standing with them at 
this time of terror and sorrow.
  One of the mothers, after sobbing uncontrollably and shaking in my 
arms, pulled back with a picture of her child and she said, 
``Congressman, I hope you will lead in the Congress to make sure that 
my child did not die in vain.'' I will never get her face out of my 
mind.
  And now we have more fathers and mothers in Georgia who today are 
saying, ``I hope my child was not injured in vain.''

[[Page H3449]]

  How many more children have to go down for all of us to accept the 
responsibility that we have to see that children are cared for and 
loved and respected and disciplined so that this does not happen again?
  We may not be able to agree on much here, but we owe every parent who 
has lost a child to violence our best, honest efforts to work together 
as a Congress to solve some of these problems.
  I am not so arrogant to think that we have the power to single-
handedly solve these problems. But we need to start the process of 
reaching out to one another for comprehensive, meaningful, effective 
solutions. We need an honest discussion of the profound changes that 
are happening in our society and what we can agree will begin to change 
our culture so that all of our children, every one of them, is raised 
to be a productive, law-abiding, contributing citizen in this great 
society. If we cannot somehow do that, we will be consigned to more and 
more Littletons and more and more Conyers, Georgia.
  Every day in our country we lose 13 young people to suicide and 
violence. Every day there is a Littleton. And it has to come to an end. 
If we cannot act on something as important as our families and our 
futures, then we will fail in our most basic duty to promote the safety 
and well-being of all of our people.
  We must do it now, not a month from now. We must do it before the 
next breaking news on CNN about another school shooting. We must do it 
before we see the pictures of children running across the lawns of 
schools trying to find safety. We must do it before we get another 
wake-up call and another specter of death among our young people in our 
schools.
  We have already waited too long. We have overslept. It is time to 
wake up. It is time to hear the wake-up call and to say, this must 
stop, this must end.
  And as another parent at Littleton told me, ``Surely,'' as tears 
rolled down his face, ``we can do better.''
  This is the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth. We have 
a national crisis. The crisis is among our young people and it is in 
our schools. And surely we can summon the goodness and the greatness of 
our people and all of us to face down this death and to bring it to a 
final and lasting conclusion.

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