The San Diego Union-Tribune

July 06, 1999, Tuesday

SECTION: OPINION Pg. B-8

Leaving kids out of our discussions

SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST

BYLINE: Geneva Overholser

It's hard to imagine, but try: Picture a Senate committee room decorated with posters of the goriest video games around. Then picture our chief national moralist, Bill Bennett, showing video clips of the very vilest moments from movies like "Scream." Picture women gasping, senators covering their faces in dread.

This, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Henry Jenkins, is the scene Jenkins encountered in May when he testified before Congress on the topic, "selling violence to our children." To read Jenkins' lengthy account of his day on Capitol Hill -- in an e-mail he sent to the students in the dorm he serves as housemaster, an e-mail then printed by Harper's magazine -- is to understand how desperate we've become for answers to tragedies like Littleton.

The feeling has been around for a while. Consider this 1995 opinion piece by Connecticut's Sen. Joseph Lieberman, talking about "disgust over the parade of pathologies that trash talk TV has been marching into our homes," and continuing:

"Concern about talk TV is just the tip of the iceberg, however. There is a swelling sense in America that our entertainment culture has become a threat to the well-being of our children and the moral health of our society. That threat is so pronounced in the eyes of many Americans that they often watch TV or movies or listen to music with the fear that their sensibilities will be assaulted and the values they are trying to teach their children will be attacked."

"RIGHT HERE IN RIVER CITY!" is the next line that occurs to me, as a good Iowa mother (Iowan for most of my kids' growing-up years, that is). Still, for all Lieberman's hyperbole, he's right: We are afraid. We're afraid of making the wrong decisions about what to permit our kids to do, afraid of what is happening to them when we're not with them, afraid that our influence and control over them are insufficient -- and waning.

Jenkins, too, talks about fear. In his testimony to Congress, he says that what he calls "the current media fixation on the role of popular culture in the shootings" comes from our fear of adolescents and their culture, from the increased visibility of that culture, and from our fear of technology.

Noting that youth culture seems always to have been unsettling for adults, he says: "So far, the media response to the Littleton shootings has told us a great deal more about what (the symbols of that culture) mean to adults than what they mean to American youth, because for the most part, it is the adults who are doing all of the talking and the youth who are being forced to listen.

"Most of the conversation about Littleton has reflected a desire to understand what the media are doing to our children. Instead, we should be focusing our attention on understanding what our children are doing with media."

We do seem to be dwelling on "the awful stuff" our kids are exposed to, rather than trying to figure out, with them, what it means to them to be exposed to it. We also seem to be giving the awful stuff in the media too large a role in our thoughts, underestimating everything else in kids' lives. In fact, as Jenkins said in his e-mail, "Real life trumps media images every time."

Fearfulness is the enemy of thoughtful responses. It's hard to reach kids in a voice raised hysterically. I'm reminded of how newspapers, alarmed at losing young readers, have schemed sometimes to attract them with a trendy half-page or saucy tabloid in pseudo-hip language. It's like the effort to reach Spanish-language readers by giving them the same old news about all the rest of us -- rewritten in their own language. The idea of actually putting the names and faces and words and interests and activities of teen-agers (or Hispanics) into the newspaper somehow didn't occur to us at the time.

It sometimes seems, when we talk about kids in American culture, that we're talking about Martians.

I'm reminded of a wonderful old Iowa woman who for years nurtured the city's neediest kids in her day-care center. One summer, years ago, some kids in a housing project were involved in some violent incidents. Television news filled with talk of "roving gangs of youths," and citizens gathered to decry the violence. Before this crowd of fearful, shouting people, the loving old woman stood:

"These are our children," she said. "We mustn't be afraid of them."

Exactly.

Overholser can be reached via e-mail at overholserg@washpost.com

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The Buffalo News

June 8, 1999, Tuesday, CITY EDITION

SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg. 3B

WE'RE STILL PLAYING THE BLAME GAME

By BILL THOMPSON; Fort Worth Star-Telegram

It's been seven weeks since the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., but the hysterical scapegoating continues unabated. Politicians have responded by demanding anti-gun legislation or by lashing out at Hollywood for its promulgation of violent entertainment — or both.

President Clinton has been pushing for more extensive gun control but has also taken a potshot or two at the show-biz folks who dish up excessive violence in movies, TV shows and video games. According to news reports, the Hollywood elite were so shocked by their friend's criticism of their product that they howled in protest.

They were reportedly most indignant about the president's announcement that the Federal Trade Commission will spend $ 1 million studying the entertainment industry's use of marketing techniques that target youthful consumers. It would appear that Hollywood is only now discovering what so many Americans ascertained long ago: With a friend like Clinton, you don't need an enemy.

You don't have to be a card-carrying Clinton-hater to know that the life span of Slick Willie's loyalty to any individual, group or point of view must be calculated in terms of its political usefulness. Since Clinton is loyal only to himself, it stands to reason that people and ideas have value to him only as long as they impart benefits to him.

Now that the country is in a fever about Hollywood violence -- and now that Clinton is a lame duck who doesn't need Hollywood's campaign contributions -the president is free to double-cross his pals in the show-business community.

The movie folk, meanwhile, continue to single out the American people's historic and cherished right to bear arms as the cause of schoolyard violence. Everyone has surely heard about talk-show host Rosie O'Donnell's rude and irrational attack on Tom Selleck, who thought he was appearing on her TV show for the purpose of plugging a movie. Seems that Selleck is on record as supporting the National Rifle Association's efforts to preserve and protect the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and therefore is beneath contempt, in O'Donnell's view.

Never mind that O'Donnell is a national spokeswoman for a discount-store chain that rakes in big bucks through gun sales; hypocrisy has never been an impediment to mindless rants by bleeding-heart liberals, in or out of show business.

Now comes actress Mia Farrow, who seems to be making a career out of bashing Woody Allen and his curious union with one of Farrow's adopted daughters. Let's at least give her credit for changing the subject when she appeared on "Larry King Live" the other night to propose that Congress repeal the Second Amendment. After Farrow delivered a prepared and detailed diatribe about the evils of firearms, King reminded her that owning a firearm is a constitutional right in America.

"Maybe it's time we rethink that right," Farrow said, and then urged viewers to contact their representatives in Congress in support of a constitutional amendment that would do away with the Founding Fathers' guarantee of gun ownership.

Would it be fair to say that some of these people have gone off the deep end on this subject?

And so it goes -- the politicians blaming Hollywood and Hollywood blaming the Constitution, and virtually no one attempting to answer the most relevant question about the school shootings in Colorado and elsewhere: What made those kids so angry that they transformed themselves into homicidal maniacs?

We could pile up guns and pipe bombs and hand grenades in front of well-adjusted youngsters, and not one of them would consider using those devices to slaughter teachers and fellow students. What has happened to kids who would do such a thing? But nobody wants to deal with that because it's too difficult. It's much easier to lambaste moviemakers or scream for new gun laws. Given the choice between difficult and easy, we Americans will go for easy every time.
 
 
 

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The Washington Post

May 19, 1999, Wednesday, Final Edition

SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A23

Making Sure They Matter

By William Raspberry

Two distinct categories of lessons are supposed to have been gleaned from Littleton. The first is obvious and largely useless. The second is subtle, far too easy to forget and immensely important.

In the obvious category are all the signals that supposedly should have told us something awful was about to happen. I don't mean the after-the-fact discovery of the stash of pipe bombs and gun purchases, but rather the fascination of the young killers with violence-packed video games and the Internet, their cliquish behavior and, of course, their distinctive long, black trench coats. If only school officials had been alert to

these telltale signs, we tell ourselves, the slaughter at Columbine High might have been averted.

The subtle category consists mainly of the youngsters' sense of themselves as "outcasts."

To grasp the uselessness of the first category, imagine yourself the parent of a teenager who spends a lot of time online or playing video games (you don't know how much time, or which games or Internet sites, and you couldn't know without some serious snooping). What would you do? Ground him? Limit his recreational use of the computer to your old Pac-Man? Take away his rights to the Internet (which he also uses for school assignments)?

The odds are you'd try to get the kid to talk about his habits and then give up in frustration. Anyway, you know your boy is no killer.

Or imagine you are principal of a school where six or eight kids wear nearly identical green raincoats (or yellow windbreakers or whatever) and also keep to themselves. What would you do?

Again, probably not much -- unless your school is in Columbia, S.C., where (according to the Associated Press) police searched three high school students who were sent to the principal's office for wearing all black, or Brimfield, Ohio, where 11 students were suspended for putting an allegedly threatening satirical essay on their personal Web site.

What about the fourth-grader in a Virginia elementary school who was suspended for waving around a drawing of a long-barreled pistol? Silly overreaction to an obviously harmless piece of paper? I thought so. But suppose a student had been shot the day after he found a drawing of a handgun taped to his locker, and then suppose a few days later another student was seen brandishing a paper "gun." Would it be overreacting to take action in that case? But what action?

That's the trouble with the obvious lessons we're supposed to glean from signs and portents of danger. We end up substituting ritual for judgment -- suspending children for possessing over-the-counter medicine or ordinary implements that might conceivably be used as weapons, imagining that we're doing something about drugs or violence.

The subtle lesson? It is the sad fact that there are people who, for too many of us and often for themselves, don't matter. There are people — in our schools, in our offices, on our streets -- who know they don't matter to the rest of us, who exist, if at all, as objects of ridicule and derision: as nerds, ne'er-do-wells and nobodies, as fatties, shorties and blackies, as crips, free-lunchers and dummies.

Probably all of us spend some small portion of our lives not mattering, though most of us have refuge in places (home, workplace, church or social group) where we matter a great deal.

But some of us have no such refuge apart from our fellow non-matterers. And of that sad group, some will make sure they matter in the time-tested way of mattering: through violence.

The tendency is for the rest of us to respond to the violence (or the threat of violence) and think we've dealt with the problem. We construct our ineffectual little defenses, pass anti-gun legislation, institute new rules and dress codes, remind ourselves of the signs to be watched out for — and forget that there are still people who don't matter.

The hardest point to absorb is the need to start paying attention to those who see themselves as "outcasts," not just because it may prevent violence but because there simply should not be human beings who don't matter.
 

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The Houston Chronicle

May 13, 1999, Thursday 2 STAR EDITION

SECTION: YO; Pg. 3

Video games, TV face scrutiny as cause of student violence

 

SOURCE: Fort Worth Star-Telegram

By KELLY DEGARMO

By the time teen-agers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris finished their rampage last month at Columbine High School in Colorado, they ranked among this country's worst mass killers.

During the last three weeks, everyone has asked why would they murder fellow classmates? What made them do it?

The phrase "desensitized to violence" has come up over and over. This buzzword "desensitized" is one youths will be hearing a lot. It means to become so accustomed to violence that it no longer upsets you. It means students can sit by and watch a fellow classmate get beaten up and have his $ 100 tennis shoes stolen, and do nothing about it. Perhaps not even tell their parents.

"Young people are becoming more used to violence. Kids are becoming exposed to it at a younger age. They see Power Rangers fight the bad guys; it's fantasy violence, but it's still violence," said high school student Megan Carroll. "If you've watched Mortal Kombat: Conquest on Saturday mornings, it's some pretty violent stuff."

President Bill Clinton addressed America with a speech about "desensitization."

"We must face up to the fact that these school shootings are more than isolated incidents," Clinton said in a recent weekly radio address.

"They are symptoms of a changing culture that desensitizes our children to violence," he said. He emphasized that most teen-agers have seen hundreds of killings on television, in movies and in video games before they graduate from high school. Do violent video games teach kids how to be sharpshooters?

Police said the Columbine High killers had the precision of sharpshooters. And they played hours and hours of violent video games - the same games that the military uses for training its soldiers to fight wars. A recent episode of CBS's 60 Minutes reported that the military uses Doom, among other video games, in military training.

"These violent visual images have a profound and powerful influence on them," said retired Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. He spoke during a juvenile justice conference last month in Dallas.

Grossman said the growing violence among teens is directly related to television, video games and movies. Children who view violence in the movies and on television are more prone to say "cool" in the face of real-life violence than to express horror, he said. In the case of video games, game players aren't just passively watching - they're shooting back with guns. The rating system, to most kids, "is a joke," Megan said. Is Hollywood responsible?

Parents are taking Hollywood to court. The parents of the students killed by Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old freshman in Paducah, Ky., are suing several entertainment companies for $ 130 million. They're charging that computer games and the Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Basketball Diaries made Carneal do what he did. The movie is about a student who kills his fellow classmates.

Research has found that children who spend the most time playing violent games have the lowest self-esteem. They see themselves as less popular, less skilled academically and less athletic, says child psychologist Jeanne Funk.

Some of the responsibility does fall on the games industry, but some of it must fall on the parents, Megan said.

"Parents need to stay informed, monitor what their kids are watching and reading and playing," Megan said. "I think if parents paid a little more attention to their kids, these things wouldn't happen."

Children must learn right from wrong. And it's wrong to hurt people.
 

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THE KANSAS CITY STAR

May 10, 1999 Monday METROPOLITAN EDITION

SECTION: NATIONAL/WORLD; Pg. A1

Public 'fed up' with TV violence

Summit will focus on effects on youth

By AARON BARNHART, The Kansas City Star

When representatives of the gun industry join religious leaders, parents, educators and entertainment executives at the White House today, they could be in for a mild shock: For once they may not be the biggest pariahs in the room. Public anger directed against the entertainment industry has matched or exceeded that directed against the gun lobby since two teen-agers went on a rampage in Littleton, Colo. Politicians, in turn, are mulling several initiatives aimed at the purveyors of violent TV shows, movies and video games.

"You can really sense that since Littleton the scene has changed," said Sen. Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, who planned to attend today's White House summit on youth violence. "People are fed up."

At the youth violence summit in Washington, the entertainment industry will be represented by the leaders of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Cable Television Association and the Interactive Digital Software Association. The chief executive of America Online also is expected to attend.

Although gun industry representatives are planning to participate, the National Rifle Association will not be at the gathering. The NRA issued a statement saying it was not invited. In the weeks since the Colorado siege, much criticism has focused on television, even though Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the gunmen, were noted more for their tastes in rock music and video games. What sets television apart is its pervasive role in American life. It is on seven hours a day in the average home, and the typical child watches it four hours a day.

"None of us wants to resort to regulation," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat and one of the entertainment industry's most outspoken critics, told a Senate hearing Tuesday. But if nothing is done about the current level of media violence, Lieberman said that the government will act.

In a "town meeting" April 29 on MSNBC, Vice President Al Gore said that if a TV network "persists in putting out gratuitous and explicit violence, I personally believe that boycotts of advertisers ought to be fully available."

Gore also called for expediting the V-chip, a device that blocks certain programs. It is not expected to go into mass production until late this year. In response, Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin told a media gathering, "I can't help but think that television is an easy scapegoat."

Steve Brenner, an executive at cable's top-rated USA Network, endorsed Levin's remarks in a trade magazine. Echoing a refrain heard throughout the TV industry, Brenner said, "How two deeply disturbed kids in a small town in Colorado acted - who knows what went into that? "We may know more than most TV executives care to admit. "The question, 'Does television make kids aggressive? ' is a dead issue in academic circles," said psychologist Madeline Levine, author of the book Viewing Violence. "It would be like continuing to ask, 'Do cigarettes cause cancer? ' "

More than 3,000 studies have been done on the effects of television on children, making it one of the most researched topics in psychology, and the findings are unequivocal: a heavy diet of television reinforces aggressive tendencies. Long-term studies, some conducted over two decades, found higher levels of criminal activity, domestic abuse and alcoholism among adults who watched excessive amounts of television as children.

Even allowing for different household incomes and education levels, the link holds up, according to L. Rowell Huesmann of the University of Michigan, one of the foremost authorities on media violence and youth.

The case of Harris and Klebold, Huesmann said, was a "convergence" in which rage-filled teens were drawn to entertainment that supplied them with "scripts of retaliation. " As they became further alienated from their peers, Huesmann said, Harris and Klebold would have found comfort in these scripts.

Televised violence does not even need to be gory or graphic; so long as it is depicted as fun or satisfying, it can reinforce aggressive tendencies in viewers. Huesmann said this effect, known as justification, is well-documented in the literature on youth and television.

"We don't need another long-term study to know we need to do something," Huesmann said.

But do what? Brownback, who led a Senate hearing on media and youth violence last week, wants the entertainment industry to stop peddling violent content to minors. But he emphasized in an interview that he does not want to resort to legislation.

Brownback thinks media companies can be shamed into voluntarily raising their standards.

"Too many times we try to solve something. We pass a little bill and think we've solved it," Brownback said. "These kids in Littleton that did this - they had a depraved heart. There were a lot of factors involved, and we're looking at just one facet."

Some groups are pressing for more media literacy training to help children and parents understand the potential effects of violent media on their own behaviors.

MediaWise, a Kansas City-based media literacy group, has reported a sharp increase in calls from parents and educators frustrated about media violence and wanting their children to know more about it. But simply teaching children to recognize and avoid violent media won't have much effect, say psychologists who compare media literacy to the failed approach of anti-drug campaigns.

"My concern with media literacy is that it shifts the onus onto the viewer," said Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education in Washington. "Yes, you have to be responsible as a viewer, but companies have to be responsible too." Increasing credence has been given to the idea of boycotting television altogether. Last month an estimated 6 million Americans took part in TV-Turnoff Week, according to the group that sponsored it. The campaign also secured a key endorsement from U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher.

But experts doubt such a tactic would work for most parents. "It is very hard to control your kids' viewing habits," said Stuart Kaplan, director of child psychiatry at St. Louis University. "Television is set up to create temptation for kids that override parental prohibitions."

Most parents don't even try. Carol Rothwell, community relations director for Time Warner Cable in Kansas City, holds regular "critical viewing" seminars with parents. Although most say they are concerned about what their children watch, only about one in 10 actually monitors the family's TV habits. And only a small percentage of parents understood and used the on-screen ratings that accompany TV shows, according to a 1998 poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. So it is likely that young viewers will continue to see violence on television unless the networks reduce their reliance on violent programming.

Twenty-five years ago, a group called the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting monitored TV shows for levels of violence. The committee, led by former Federal Communications Commission member Nicholas Johnson, then published a list of the "10 Bloodiest Corporations" - companies that advertised most often on violent TV shows.

Johnson, now a law professor in Iowa, said violence levels measurably declined after that list came out. He recalled one company receiving 300,000 letters as a result of making the list. "Ad agencies were telling their clients that they were losing as much as 5 percent of their market share as a result of our doing this," Johnson said. "Companies don't care about violence. They care about not looking bad for any reason."

- To reach Aaron Barnhart, television writer, call (816) 234-4790 or visit the TV Barn web site at www.tvbarn.com

Minding what kids watch

Things parents can do to help reduce the impact of media violence, according to child advocates and medical experts:

Discuss TV shows and movies children watch. Even if the adults have not seen them, talking about the violent or scary scenes can
reduce their adverse effects. Don't ignore content ratings. Read the warning labels on video games and music CDs. Watch the on-screen ratings that accompany TV shows. Consider buying a TV set with a V-chip. Children under 12 are the most vulnerable to negative messages in the media. Know exactly what they will be seeing before allowing them to attend a movie rated PG-13 or higher.
- The Kansas City Star
 

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The San Francisco Chronicle

MAY 5, 1999, WEDNESDAY, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. B1

NEWS ANALYSIS;

Video games, Net Unfairly Blamed For Kids' Violence

By Jon Swartz, Chronicle Staff Writer

Screaming newspaper headlines and talking heads on TV suggest that the Internet and crimson-stained, shoot-'em-up computer games Doom and Quake are culpable for the massacre at Columbine High School.

But blaming the newest form of mass media for mass murder is a simplistic explanation for deeper cultural problems, say media pundits, academics and Net-savvy teenagers. "This is so crazy and hysterical," said Jon Katz, media critic for Rolling Stone and the Slashdot Web site.

"The real issue should be how teenagers get their hands on machine guns and bombs -- not about a Web site and video games," Katz said.

"These are issues of parental guidance, gun control and why high school is such a nightmare for kids who are different. But for many it's easier to blame the Internet."

The problems run deeper; they involve issues like gun control, parental supervision and teenage peer groups, experts say. Still, violent media images reflect the nation's preoccupation with aggression.

"America is an extremely violent society," acknowledged John Stauber, executive director for the Center for Media & Democracy in Madison,

Wis. "The Internet and video games in particular have introduced an added dimension of graphic images."

Seizing on pipe-bomb-making tutorials and hate-filled invective that appeared on teenage killer Eric Harris' Web site, social commentators were
quick to demonize technology after the Littleton tragedy.

But individuals who are steeped in Internet culture say that's too pat an answer. Anna Everett, an assistant professor in the department of film studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said she was "struck by the rhetoric of Internet culpability peppering news reports" after a Web page was linked to Harris.

"My fear is that the Internet will be scapegoated in our national rush to indict the media for this tragedy," Everett said. "As the newest mass medium that threatens many vested interests and strikes terror in the hearts of many technophobes and neo-Luddites, the Internet is especially vulnerable to knee-jerk reactions."

It has become fashionable for self-proclaimed experts to blame the Net and video games, and the press has lapped up the half-baked theories
verbatim, media critics say.

"It starts with one crank, and one TV news director who's willing to give the crank a five-second sound bite," said Bob Rossney, a computer consultant and writer in Boulder, Colo. "From that point on, the stupid idea is in the media sphere, and the story about the stupid idea practically writes itself. And who can resist a story that writes itself?"

Unfortunately, those who are most likely to suffer are teens like Bandy, a high school student in New York who revels in Quake and Doom but is now treated with suspicion. "I (play) till 3 a.m. every night," she said in an e-mail. "I really love it. But after Colorado, things got horrible. People were actually talking to me like I could come in and kill them."

The Littleton fallout has affected teenagers nationwide. Many school administrators have singled out nonconformist high school students for anti-social behavior -- which can be as innocuous as wearing black T-shirts or identifying as Goths. Many are being sent home to change clothes if they're similar to what the killers wore.

"It's made the lives of outsiders, misfits and oddballs that much harder by making them suspects for the next great tragedy," Katz said. "It is a national witch hunt; I call it geek profiling."

Katz said he received 6,000 to 7,000 messages from disaffected youths in an "outpouring of pain and misery" after an online essay he wrote on technology and Littleton.  The crackdown started as soon as the gunmen, Harris and Dylan Klebold, were described as outsiders associated with the Goth subculture and linked to the school's anti-clique, known as the Trench Coat Mafia.

Harris' Internet page describes how to build pipe bombs and muses, among other ghoulish thoughts, about wanting to go "to some downtown area in some big (expletive) city and blow up and shoot everything I can."  According to other accounts, Harris and Klebold were ardent players of Doom and Quake, video games that feature wholesale slaughters of digital enemies.

"No one in their right mind can deny that the media has an effect -- both good and bad -- on us," said Jan LaRue, senior director of legal studies
at Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. "It is pretty well proven that children with a regular diet of violent programming become
desensitized to graphic gore and killing."

But many incidents comparable to the Littleton crime predate the World Wide Web. Many cited Charles Whitman, who gunned down 45
people, and killed 14, from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966.

"When the Son of Sam said his dog made him kill people (in the 1970s), should we have banned dogs back then?" said Steven Johnson, editor and founder of Feed magazine in New York. "Of course not. The argument is silly."

"Instead of asking why, why, why?, we should be asking what, what, what can we do to stop this?" said actor Robert Urich, former star of the TV cop show "Vegas" and co-founder of Computer Sentry Software (www.sentryinc.com), a maker of security software. "A little regulation,
and a lot of parental supervision and self regulation, is a good idea."

"It's easy to take an isolated incident and blame it on video games," Feed magazine's Johnson said. "Yet over the last four years, we've
experienced the greatest drop in violent crime in the United States in 40 years. If anything, video games have little effect on kids. Twenty million kids play video games."

Juvenile arrests for violent crime are down 10 percent since 1995, an FBI report said. The FBI is not investigating the Internet's limited role in the killings, spokesman Gary Gomez said.
 

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The Columbus Dispatch

May 2, 1999, Sunday

SECTION: NEWS - INSIGHT , Pg. 7B

IT'S TOO EASY FOR CHILDREN TO GET THEIR HANDS ON GUNS

Trench coats. Music. Television. Video games. Mass media.

The nation is looking for something, anything, to blame after the killings in Littleton, Colo.

If only we could find that one horrible thing that caused this and put it in a nice little box that we could bury beneath our outrage and guilt, we would all feel a bit better. But it's not that simple. One song didn't cause two high-school students to go berserk and shoot their teachers and classmates. One video game or violent movie didn't send them over the edge. No one -- no psychiatrist, newspaper columnist, Washington pundit or angry parent -- will find that one reason. It's a combination of these things and more that created these teen-age monsters, and we as a society need to work on all of them.

But one thing is clear. The weapons these teens used to act out their sick fantasies were guns.

Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association can rant and rave all they want about the degradation of society, but when the smoke cleared from the hallways of Columbine High School, the executioners chose guns to snuff out these lives.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, 13 children die daily in the United States in gun-related homicides, suicides and accidents.

Because they don't all die at once in the hallways of a school, this statistic seems to be lost on Americans. We are too quick to say that it couldn't happen to our children in our neighborhoods.

Wake up and smell the gunpowder, Ward and June -- this is happening to your children today.

From 1994 through 1998, Children's Hospital alone admitted 103 gunshot victims 21 years old and younger. Eleven victims died.

Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics again called for a ban on handguns, air guns and assault weapons.

"This isn't about the right to have a gun,'' said Dr. Joel Alpert, the academy's president. "This is about the right of every child not to fear for their life after they take a step into school to learn.

"If these children never had access to these deadly weapons in the first place, this tragic event could have been prevented and innocent victims could have been saved.''

This horrific event isn't anything new. The killings in Littleton only illustrate that this kind of violence can occur anywhere and at any time.

Every few hours, kids are shot in the streets or in their own homes.

It is too easy to obtain a gun. And efforts by legislators to make it harder have failed.

If you really wanted a handgun, you could get one within hours. You could buy one, steal one or have someone else get it for you.

Do you feel safer carrying a gun or keeping one under your pillow? Does your 6-year-old know where you keep this gun? Does your 14-year-old know where you keep the bullets, and that this gun is in the house strictly for protection?

As long as these types of guns are readily available, tragedies will continue to occur. There is no need for the millions of these guns in our homes, streets and schools.

And as we question the cause of this insanity, and look at how children and society have changed over time, remember the end result. Guns killed those people in Colorado, just as they will kill the kid down the street tomorrow.

Mark D. Somerson is medical reporter for The Dispatch. He can be reached at 461-8521 or msomerso@dispatch.com

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The New York Times

April 26, 1999, Monday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section C; Page 4; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk

 TECHNOLOGY: Digital Commerce;

All those who deny any linkage between violence in entertainment and violence in real life, think again.

By Denise Caruso

BY producing increasingly violent media, the entertainment industry has for decades engaged in a lucrative dance with the devil.

Over the years, parents and consumer groups have continued to sound alarms about the effects that violent films, television and ever- more-realistic video games are having on their children and society at large. The response -- from what may be the most influential industry in the world -- has consistently been a kind of indignant shock that anyone would think a silly old movie or game could have a measurable effect on anyone.

"Kids can tell the difference between fantasy and reality," these executives have repeatedly asserted. "Why can't you?"

But a growing body of evidence suggests it is the producers who may be having a hard time telling the difference between their apologist fantasy and grim reality.

The evidence, say those who study violence in culture, is unassailable: Hundreds of studies in recent decades have revealed a direct correlation between exposure to media violence -- now including video games -- and increased aggression.

This is not because people cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy, but because ultra-violent media systematically employ the psychological techniques of desensitization, conditioning and vicarious learning.

Dave Grossman, a former Army officer and professor at West Point and the University of Arkansas, says these are the same techniques that were used to great effect during the Vietnam War to increase the "firing rate" -- that is, the percentage of soldiers who would actually fire a weapon during an encounter -- from the 15 to 20 percent range in World War II to as much as 95 percent in Vietnam.

Mr. Grossman has written "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" (Little, Brown, 1995), in which he discusses how conditioning techniques were used to teach Vietnam-bound soldiers to kill automatically in battle encounters, yet respect authority and make split-second distinctions between friends and enemies.

The difference, he says, is that today these same techniques are not tempered by such respect or distinctions. What is worse, he adds, they teach us to associate violence with pleasure.

America's adolescents spend countless hours watching action or horror movies -- the exquisitely detailed suffering and killing of human beings -- on television and in movie theaters, places we associate with entertainment, pleasure, favorite foods and the intimacy of dating.

And interactive video games, Mr. Grossman asserts, are even more directly connected to behavior. Addictive, increasingly hyperreal in their effects and long since shed of the goofy monsters that were targets in the old days, contemporary video games often are what he calls "operant conditioning firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers in modern armies."

As a result, Mr. Grossman wrote: "We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the inflicting of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment; vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it."

The two boys apparently responsible for the massacre in Littleton, Colo., last week were, among many other things, accomplished players of the ultraviolent video game Doom. And Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old boy who opened fire on a prayer group in a Paducah, Ky., school foyer in 1997, was also known to be a video-game expert.

Michael Carneal had never fired a pistol before stealing the gun he used that day. But in the ensuing melee, he fired eight shots, hit eight people, and killed three of them.

The average law enforcement officer in the United States, at a distance of seven yards, hits fewer than one in five shots, Mr. Grossman asserted in a interview in the current issue of Adbusters magazine.

"When Michael Carneal was shooting, he fired one shot at each kid," Mr. Grossman said. "He simply fired one shot at everything that popped up on his screen."

Mr. Grossman's sentiments are echoed by Joel Federman, co-director of the Center for Communication and Social Policy at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In his former job as the research director of Mediascope, a nonprofit policy organization that promotes media responsibility, he published an annotated bibliography called "The Social Effects of Interactive Electronic Games"

(www.mediascope.org/vidbib.htm).

Although he says that only seven or eight studies specifically focused on aggression in interactive games, the majority of them showed that aggressive games increased the likelihood of aggression just as certainly as violent television did. "In games," he said in an interview, "aggressive behavior is not only seen as appropriate, but you're rewarded for doing it well."

Mr. Federman drew a parallel between producers of violent media and the tobacco industry, which denied causality in the face of irrefutable evidence of a direct correlation between smoking and cancer. A study proving that TV or video games cause violence would mean that at least one study participant would be inspired to commit murder -- clearly an untenable ethical situation for the entertainment industry.

"Same as the tobacco industry, the evidence is there," Mr. Federman said. "These effects do exist, and everyone from the American Psychological Association to the Surgeon General has acknowledged them. But since not every kid experiences the extreme effects, people can continue to deny them."

What, then, to do? The industry's attempts at self-policing were never intended to stem the creation or distribution of ultraviolent games; in fact, despite their superficial intent to protect, every producer knows the best way to guarantee a best seller is to give a movie or video game a "restricted" rating.

Nor is censorship seen as a solution.

"There's a very legitimate First Amendment concern," Mr. Federman said. "And because of freedom of speech, because there's a value that we don't want to compromise, then it really comes down to the people creating these games. That's where the responsibility lies."

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The Toronto Star

April 23, 1999, Friday, Edition 1

SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT

TIME TO LOOK FOR REAL LINKS BETWEEN MEDIA AND VIOLENCE SHOOTING PROMPTS USUAL FINGERPOINTING

BYLINE: Geoff Pevere

BODY:

Time

Analysis

MOVIE CRITIC

Not 48 hours had transpired since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made their killing way through the halls of Littleton, Colo.'s Columbine High School and we were offered a menu of potential media influences on the tragedy.

For the Globe & Mail, the likeliest suspect was the 1989 film Heathers, a dark satire of the high school gulag in which pistol-packing outsider Christian Slater - in black trench coat - attempts to blow up his school. For the National Post it was 1995's The Basketball Diaries, in which Leonardo DiCaprio, as a fantasy-prone high-school-hating junkie poet, imagines wandering the halls of his school with a concealed

firearm. On this paper's pages the same day, the leading contender was The Matrix, the current blockbusting cyber-fantasy in which a heavily armed, black-trench-coated Keanu Reeves wreaks apocalyptic retribution against the suit-and-tie forces of oppressive technocracy.

So which is it, anyway? Heathers? The Basketball Diaries? The Matrix? Or, as suggested variously elsewhere, was it Goth culture? Rammstein? Marilyn Manson? Video games? And while we're at it, how about Jerry Springer, Stone Cold Steve Austin, gangsta rap or police car-chase shows? What form of lethal amusement pulled those triggers in Colorado?

It must be something, mustn't it? Otherwise we wouldn't be so determined to find a pop-cultural culprit. We wouldn't be seeing scenes from these movies repeated endlessly on news programs and networks, and we wouldn't be watching Al and Tipper Gore worrying about negative media influences on Larry King Live, or listening to pundits fret about too much Internet or too little God in our children's lives.

Otherwise we'd have to look somewhere else.

The rush to point fingers, to try and pull something resembling reason from the bloody carnage of Tuesday's events at Columbine High is perhaps only natural. It's the way a society struggles to impose a sense of communal order over something that rocks its very foundations. As such, it's an

act of simultaneous affirmation and denial: affirmation of the triumph of reason over chaos, but also denial of any causes which might threaten this process of spontaneous healing.

No matter how often the unthinkable happens or the unimaginable erupts, we reassure ourselves by insisting that it was unthinkable and unimaginable, a freak rupture of an otherwise intact social fabric.

We ask ourselves what could have led people like Harris and Klebold to do it, despite the fact that it always seems to be people like Harris and Klebold who do it. We wonder how it could happen in quiet, law-abiding communities like Littleton, when it always happens in quiet, law-abiding communities like Littleton.

We begin to repeat certain responses so often they begin to take on an almost incantatory power, less declarations of objective fact than perhaps expressions of subjective fear: ''If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.'' ''Nowhere is safe.'' ''We've lost our innocence.'' ''What has happened to our children?''

So quickly and so often do we hear these responses, one begins to wonder if - despite the surprise, shock and horror of incidents like the massacre at Littleton - we don't already have a script in place for just such occasions, a set of responses that work to instantly contain the otherwise uncontainable in a manageable and, therefore, comforting set of cultural conventions. Like a movie, in other words.

Indeed, blaming movies - and pop culture generally - is by now as common a convention of the tragedy aftermath script, and specifically the one about children and teenagers who do the unthinkable in the least likely places, as innocence lost. Ever since people started talking about teenagers as a separate social and economic class, and ever since the discovery of that class was met with mass marketing of targeted forms of mass culture - comics, movies, magazines, TV shows, music, video games, Web sites - we've wanted to make causative connections between the culture kids consume and the horrors they commit.

In the '50s we condemned Elvis, Salinger, the Method, horror comics and The Untouchables, and in the '60s we worried over West Side Story, Lenny Bruce, the Stones, Bonnie And Clyde and the Vast Wasteland. And so on, from A Clockwork Orange through American Psycho, Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson, Black Sabbath to Rammstein, Dukes Of Hazzard to South Park, roller derby to Quake, goth to gangsta, the tube to the Net.

It's a perpetual loop of incident and cause, cause and effect, effect and outrage. The characters and setting may change, but the script itself never seems to.

Which is not to suggest that there is no relationship between popular culture and social behaviour (for what is advertising if not a multi-billion dollar industry based on that very premise?), but that there's a pattern in the way we insist on these relationships, a pattern that may reveal more about our need to find comfort in times of crisis than the reality of those crises themselves.

Take the incident at Columbine High. While the rush to point to pop-cultural influences is distinct only by its frenzied intensity (which in turn reflects a crime distinct only by its chilling scale), so far it's pretty well sticking to the script.

Maybe it's time to write a new one. The problem with the old one is that it keeps getting remade, until each subsequent event becomes indistinguishable from the one that preceded, like a series of movie sequels going through the same narrative motions except on a bigger budget and splashier scale.

The old script prevents us from expanding our thinking outside of the established narrative program. And that impedes us from arriving, as a culture, to any new understanding of what is clearly a type of event that, far from being a rupture of the social fabric, is by now part of the fabric itself.

Besides, if we do write a new script, we may be closer to posing those questions about media influence that the current script simply does not permit, and which (uncomfortable as they may be) might well bring us closer to understanding, and possibly even doing something about, the kind of horrors perpetrated by people Harris and Klebold in places like Littleton, Colo.

Instead of wondering whether it was The Matrix, Heathers or The Basketball Diaries that provided the pop-cult blueprint for their despicable rampage, we might more profitably ask why these boys did it the way they did it: why they dressed up for the occasion, why they picked the date and time of day they did, why they took their time as they did.

We might asks ourselves about the role the school's television monitors played in the boys' enterprise, whether they could watch the televising of the reaction to their actions as they carried them out. Moreover, we might wonder how much attention Harris and Klebold had paid to other such rampages in recent years - rampages, it seems only reasonable to suggest, that were likely every bit as influential to the events at Columbine High as The Matrix or Heathers.

We might wonder, in other words, if they killed the way they did, and in the record-breaking numbers they did, because they knew they'd wind up on TV, pioneering perpetrators of mass murder as a form of home-made blockbuster media event.

There's no question there are connections to make between the events of last Tuesday and current state of popular media. What is questionable is whether the connections we're making are the right ones. If they're not, I fear we can expect to hear the same old story sometime all too soon.

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