Remarks in a roundtable discussion with students on violence in schools at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, April 26, 1999

But I agree with you, it's going to be one of the big challenges we face, because there's been a lot of talk about - if you've seen in the last 3 or 4 days - about whether the Internet plus having very young people play very violent video games and where they learn to shoot people and stuff, that those two things have added an extra element to an otherwise already pretty violent culture. And I think we're going to have to take another look at it.

It's not easy. I don't want to pretend that it's easy. If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, webpages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications. And it presents us a great challenge.

[A student stated that it would be very hard for the Government to control the information on the Internet in a society with a free press and free speech. He believed the responsibility rested with parents and teachers to monitor what children access on the Internet.]

The President. Well, I do think it's important that in all these discussions, we no! take the focus away from the home. I agree with that. If you look at all the facts that we know from the incidents that happened last year - all the school violence incidents - it appears that there were some cases in which the parents were - to go back to what you said about how other kids knew and they didn't call in - there appears that there were some cases in which the parents knew that the kid had a problem, including an obsession with guns and bombs, and there were other cases where they didn't know and might not have been able to know. But I do think that we shouldn't minimize that.

The only thing I want to - to go back to what you said about the Internet - I agree with that. You don't want me to choke off the Internet. It's one of the greatest things that ever happened. But we've got to figure out a way to apply the ordinary restrictions of the criminal law in that context, just like you would any other. I think that's all you're saying, is we need to - if somebody's doing something illegal there, we should. But the problem is, how do you - how do parents limit their children's access to something they shouldn't be able to see? And I do think that the role of the Internet, and the way it's bringing everything into the home, has made a parent's job much more difficult. And it's harder to know what to do and how to do it. It's much, much harder. And I think we ought to just fess up to that.

But I'm sympathetic with you. We don't want to destroy what's great about the Internet. It's revolutionizing the American economy. It's opening up opportunities for people, opening up educational opportunities, bringing whole libraries to homes of people who could never afford them. I mean, it's doing a lot of good. But we've got to figure out a way to deal with these downside risks.

[A student stated that it appeared administrators and students in Littleton knew there was a problem, and thought administrators should have contacted the parents. Ms. Finney said she heard another Littleton student say on the news that he heard the suspects planning the attack last year and she believed he should have taken the initiative to tell someone.]