From the catastrophic bombing in Oklahoma City to shootings in workplaces, restaurants and places of worship, America has recently witnessed a number of extraordinarily dramatic crimes. The most alarming have been shootings by students at schools, culminating in the April 1999 multiple murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

Such crimes are extremely rare. "The chances [of a fatal school shooting] are literally one in a million," said Northeastern University criminal justice scholar James Alan Fox. One irony of the debate over violent media is that it occurs at a time when the violent crime rate has fallen dramatically. Violent crime is now at its lowest level since 1973. Nevertheless, violence remains a serious problem.

If tragedies like the Columbine shootings were to spur an honest national search for the deeper causes of violence and a true commitment to real prevention and child protection, this dark cloud would indeed have a silver lining. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. The Littleton shootings have occasioned a frenzy of sensationalist journalism and opportunistic politicking from both right and left. In the rush to assign blame for the alleged epidemic of youth violence, one supposed culprit has been repeatedly singled out: the entertainment media.

Relying on old and controvertible evidence, professional groups including the American Medical

Association and American Psychological Association have declared that TV, film, music and video games teach casual attitudes about belligerence and aggression toward others. The government has launched a fleet of study commissions, all starting from the same premise.' Unsupported and hyperbolic claims fly. "The entertainment industry gets away, literally, with murder," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-111.), introducing a far reaching violent-content regulation bill. Even some scholars have thrown away their customary caution and represented the link between media and violence as a scientific certainty. Testifying before a Senate committee shortly after Littleton, social psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann of the University of Michigan compared the "risk" of exposure to media to smoking in causing cancer. Of the evidence of a causal link between media violence and real violence, the American

Psychological Association's spokesman stated, "To argue against it is like arguing against gravity."'

Responding to what they claim to be the will of the people, lawmakers have proposed restrictions on a vaguely and broadly defined category of "violent" media content. In June 1999, Chairman Hyde proposed prohibiting the sale or distribution to minors of books, magazines, recordings, video games or Web pages with "obscenely violent" content, including "sadistic or masochistic flagellation" and "torture." Booksellers and other retailers could have been sentenced to ten years in jail for violating the ban. Hyde's was only one of 44 amendments on cultural issues brought to the House floor in three days. Another bill, also defeated, called for a rating and labeling system for all media under the purview of a committee of bureaucrats at the Federal Trade Commission.

It imposed a civil tine of up to $10,000 on retailers who broke the law. In the end, the House defeated both proposals. But they quietly approved many others and passed a resolution calling on Congress to "do everything in its power to stop these portrayals of pointless acts of brutality by immediately eliminating gratuitous violence in movies, television, music and video games." It remains to be seen what "everything in its power" will mean.

Although parents have told pollsters they want something done about violence in the media, they are often wary of governmental solutions. For instance, since V chip-equipped television sets became available in the summer of 1999, consumer response has been cool. "I don't know how the V chip works," one father said, "But I don't really trust that someone else is going to have better judgment than we will. "I As this father suggests, Americans may be less eager than they seem to let lawmakers whittle away our democratic freedoms and parental prerogatives on the dubious premise that laws restricting children's access to violent content will somehow protect them from future Littletons.

Before taking such drastic steps, it behooves us to re-examine the "incontrovertible" social-science data on media and on violence. We must also look hard at the problems inherent in such restrictive policies and weigh their hope for benefits against the costs they could exact on kids, families and the body politic.