On Monday September 18, I had the privilege of taking part in the Second Annual Hamilton County Safe Schools Summit in Chattanooga.

As a parent and public servant, I know that there is no more important challenge we face as a society than curing the plague of violence that is hurting and killing too many of our people, especially our children.

As a member of the House's Bipartisan Working Group on Youth Violence, which spent months studying this problem, I learned there is no one single cause for what Lt. Col. David Grossman has called "a virus of violence." Grossman, who has studied the subject extensively, pinpoints violent video games, movies, tapes and music as a key cause. But he - and anyone who has considered the problem seriously - knows that there are many reasons why kids kill and injure other kids.

To begin with our society is far more violent than it was 50 years ago. The per-capita murder rate doubled between 1957 and 1992. And figures like that actually dramatically UNDERSTATE the problem. Grossman notes that if it were not for two key factors the death rate would probably be much higher. One is that tougher sentencing laws have put many more violent criminals behind bars where they cannot harm innocent people. Secondly, medical advances in the last 60 years mean that assaults and wounds that would have resulted in death - and hence murder charges - 60 years ago, now produce lesser charges, such as assault."By a very conservative estimate, if we had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder rate would be 10 times higher than it is," Grossman writes.

He makes a convincing case that vastly more graphic and pervasive violence in our media plays a major role. Simply put, Grossman argues that this violent material desensitizes children to mayhem and killing in much the same way that military basic training teaches recruits to kill despite the normal human aversion to killing one's fellow-man. The difference is that recruits, who are at least 18-years-old, are taught to kill under the rules of war and within the discipline of a military organization. The small children who learn the lessons of violence through the media are, of course, too young to fully understand what they are absorbing. And all too often they are living in environments where there is little or no discipline or order of any kind.

Because I believe that media violence DOES play a role in the culture of mayhem that has engulfed too much of our society, I joined a bipartisan group in sponsoring the 21st Century Media Responsibility Act of 1999, to establish a uniform system of labeling media products so parents can know what their children are getting. Other cosponsors of this legislation include U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Of course, Sen. Lieberman is now Vice President Gore's running-mate on the Democratic ticket. It's also good that, partly because of the recent Federal Trade Commission report showing that the media specifically market their

violent wares to children, we are now hearing candidates for Senate and president speaking out about this issue.

But we would be fooling ourselves and failing to solve the problem if we pretended that media violence is the only reason for what is happening. Clearly, there are other areas where we must focus. Here are a few key issues:

• Better parenting: All adults with children need to be a major presence in their lives, providing a loving but ordered and disciplined environment. We must read to our children, serve as role models for them and "be there" in every sense.
• Eliminate violent environments: We must make sure that children are not left in violent and abusive situations. Children who are abused are much more likely to become abusers as adults. We must begin a national effort to remove violence from the lives of children.
• Guns: We need better enforcement of existing gun laws and improved education on gun safety for both children and adults.

It's clear that there is no simple, easy "cure" for this "virus of violence." But that is all the more reason for us to mount a unified effort across many fronts to address this problem. At stake is the most precious asset our society - or any society - possesses: our children.