May, 1998

The newspapers are littered with calls to action. Gotta do something now that we're seeing this strange youth culture of vioence played out across the high school campuses of the nation. Gotta run out and put some new controls on Internet sites. Gotta insist on the censoring of movies, magazines, books and video. Gotta mount a new assault against the NRA and the flip-side of that, in some school districts gotta arm the teachers. You bet, gotta make laws.

They will all be well-meaning, these demanders of something to be done. Their near hysteria will be heartfelt. They will be wrong.

Certainly gun control is an issue. We've been so long frustrated by the National Rifle Association pressure on our legislatures that a sweep is coming that will come down hard on what could have been sensible lawmaking. You can bet they're fanning their perspiring little faces. But that's another issue. Connected no doubt about it, but another issue.

This issue, this gotta-do issue of censoring and rating and preventing are on the front burner. All feel-good suggestions that make us feel we're doing something other than sigh and hold our heads in our hands. Ratings for movies and TV programming let everyone off the hook. We gotta do more rating. Blocking devices put responsibility elsewhere and elsewhere is where we want it, because we haven't the faintest idea of how to control what needs to be controlled. In the name of the Constitution the killing has gotten away from us.

So I have an idea. You may like it, you may not. But it's an idea that hasn't gotten much press and it has the benefit of nailing down the responsibility upon those who are responsible. To begin with, it presumes that certain things are benign and others are not. It further presumes that law is a better arbiter of what is benign than you or I might be.

So if a kid comes to school with an assortment of weaponry and opens up on his fellow students, the aftermath of that event is sure to concentrate on how he's been spending his time. If it comes out that he owns a videocassette of Natural Born Killers and watched it forty-two times with his friends and each time brought him to a frenzied state of stimulation, I'd say there's a legal link between that movie and the event. A cause and effect that argues the movie is not benign. Wasn't made to be benign, but to cause a frenzied state of mind. I think the producers of such a movie, rated or not, supposedly withheld from those under eighteen or not, is liable for damages linked to the slow-motion carnage.

Maybe too tough. But maybe not.

If a young person is addicted to violent video arcade games, those games are no longer benign. If hate literature is found to have triggered a particularly violent act, then that literature is not benign. There is precedent.

Drunk drivers kill people. Distillers have never been found liable so far as I know. But bartenders have. Dram Shop Laws have held that a bartender who knowingly serves up drinks to a patron who's already had enough can be held contingently liable if that patron gets in his car and kills someone. Makes the bartenders think twice. Perhaps instead of ratings or censorship, the producers of violent movies and video should be made to think twice. Nothing makes someone think as clearly as legal liability.

Legal liability has brought the cigarette companies to the bargaining table. Legal liability has forced safer gas tanks in cars. Legal liability might go a long way toward reducing the 50,000 or so violent deaths our children see on TV by the time they're sixteen years old.

Or we can arm the teachers. That ought to be interesting.

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today