From Steve Allen's Vulgarians at the Gate
Published 2001

Anyone interested in the connection between violence on television and films and violence in real life should read Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence (Crown Publishers, 1999) by David Grossman, a retired army lieutenant colonel, and Gloria DeGaetano, a media literacy consultant. At a time when spokespeople for the film and TV industry have the nerve to issue flat denials that there's a connection between their product and crime on the streets, Grossman and DeGaetano deal with hard realities. In our country per capita aggravated assaults are up almost sixfold since 1957. In Canada the rate of the same assaults are up fivefold since 1964. The same general patterns have been discovered in Norway, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden. Commented Grossman in a "Perspective on Violence" he wrote which was published in the Los Angeles Times in October 1999, "The major new factor responsible for this is the marketing of visual media violence to kids. I sat beside Surgeon General David Satcher on Meet the Press after the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado. He was asked if he could do a report on the link between media violence and violence in our kids. 'Sure, I can do another Surgeon General's Report,' he said, 'but why don't they start by reading the 1972 Surgeon General's Report?'"

The nation owes a debt to Colonel Grossman for pointing out that same Surgeon General who issued the now-famous report on the long-denied link between tobacco and cancer also issued a report on the link between media violence and violence in society. Getting right to the crux of the modern conflict, Grossman has pointed out that everyone now knows that for generations the tobacco industry lied about the link between its product and cancer, which continues to kill hundreds of Americans each year. Comments Grossman, "If you ask media executives about the link between their product and violent crime they will do exactly the same thing--and they control the public airwaves." He points out that a review of almost 1,000 studies, presented to the American College of Forensic Psychiatry in 1998,

found that all but 18 demonstrated that screen violence leads to real violence, and 12 of those 18 were funded by the television industry.

As recently as 1992 the American Psychological Association concluded that forty years of research on the link between TV and real live violence has been ignored, stating that the "scientific debate is over" and calling for federal policy to protect society.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has said, in a January 5, 1999, formal report, "Children don't naturally kill. It is a learned skill and they learn it most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video-games."

Concludes Grossman, bluntly,

Congress must provide what Americans have been pleading for: regulation to restrict the marketing of violence to children. Forget the Federal Communications Commission. It is a toothless watchdog, made up mostly of people with past associations with the electronic media. It is like having tobacco farmers in charge of the Food and Drug Administration.