by Orrin G. Hatch

About the author: Orrin Hatch is a Republican senator from Utah.

Editor’s note: The following viewpoint is excerpted from Hatch’s May 1999 testimony before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, at a hearing entitled Marketing Violence to Children.

There is a sense among many Americans that we are powerless to change our culture and that this feeling of powerlessness has restrained our ambition for solutions in the wake of the Littleton tragedy. As Dr. William Bennett said recently on a national talk show, if the two students who committed the murders at Columbine High had “carried Bibles and [said] Hail the Prince of Peace and King of Kings, they would have been hauled into the principal...