[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 6] [Extensions of Remarks] [Page 7833] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov][[Page 7833]] 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. ____________________