“Like television, our cinemas are full of movies that glamorize bloodshed and violence, and one need only listen to popular music radio . . . to see that our music . . . [is] similarly afflicted.”

Orrin G. Hatch, U.S. Senator

“The scientific evidence does not support the view that exposure to media violence causes aggression.”

Jonathan Freedman, psychology professor

In 1997, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal fired a .22 caliber handgun at an informal prayer group in his high school in West Paducah, Kentucky, killing three students and wounding five. In 1998 in Pearl, Mississippi, sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham first killed his mother, and then went to school and shot nine students, killing two. In the same year, fifteen-year-old Kip Kinkel shot and killed his parents and two classmates and wounded twenty-three others. In 2000, a first-grader in Michigan shot and killed another six-year-old after a schoolyard quarrel the day before.

Events such as these...