America's efforts to curb violence: the anti-crime bill is not enough.

• Author: Bradley, Bill

VIOLENCE is not confined to street crime or to urban America. It burns in many places. It is a blaze fed by many fires. Ask any corporate executive who never drives home the same way two days in a row. Ask any head of security at a suburban mall or college campus. Ask anyone who uses an automatic teller machine (ATM) at night. Ask any Japanese tourist if he would under any circumstances knock on a stranger's door for help in Louisiana. Ask any German tourist about getting off the freeway in Miami.

Violence, while present throughout the nation's history, has taken some unusual turns of late. Somehow, our times seem different from the past. Nancy Kerrigan and the Bobbitts are not a singing group from the 1960s, and the Menendez family is a far cry from Ozzie and Harriet. Gone are the TV days of Matt Dillon rounding up outlaws in the Old West or Elliott Ness and the Untouchables always prevailing against organized crime. A Charles Starkweather or Charles Manson used to come along once in a decade. Now, it seems a Jeffrey Dahmer pops up someplace every year. The more bizarre the incident, the bigger the news coverage.

People flock to TV, competing to tell the most lurid story. There are days when, as seen on television, it seems as if the country has taken form as one big, dysfunctional family. More and more people seem to be living on the outer edges, unsure how they'll get back. We seem to be daring each other as if we were teenagers, taking risks that in another time and place would have been unthinkable, not realizing that, unless we get things under control, the country will be the loser. The remarkable thing is that too many people don't really do anything about it. Rape, muggings, and murder pass in a blur of recognition. Street taunts raise awareness of danger that triple locks can't lessen. Slowly, violence burns and eats away at our social fabric as if it were acid so that, even when statistics show improvement, we don't feel more secure.

Violence in America goes deeper and comes closer to many families than we would like to admit. Domestic violence, for example, is America's dark little secret, now thrust into prominence by media coverage of the O.J. Simpson case.

Recently, a woman told me the following story: Her husband used to beat her regularly. She wanted to leave, but feared the consequences for herself and her children. One day, her two-year-old witnessed her husband strangling her. Finally, that incident was the catalyst for the woman to seek reguge with her two-year-old and her four-year-old in a shelter for battered women. A few days later, the two-year-old got mad at the four-year-old. The mother turned to see what was the matter and witnessed the two-year-old going for the throat of the four-year-old. I've thought often about that image of violence being passed on from one generation to another.

"The most dangerous place to be," a policeman recently said, "is in one's home between Saturday night at 6 p.m. and Sunday at 6 p.m." He forgot to add, "Especially if you're a woman." One-half of all women who are murdered in America are killed by their male partners. Three-fourths of all assaults happen in the family. Thirty percent of all females admitted to emergency rooms of hospitals are there because of family violence. Moreover, this violence against women in the home causes more total injuries in America than rape, muggings, and car accidents combined. Sudden, stark, incomprehensible family violence doesn't just happen. It builds in a cycle of aggression and forgiveness and blame until it explodes--and the battered spouse almost never is a man.

When J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the first nuclear explosion, he said that the nuclear bomb was a "destroyer of worlds." In the homes of battered women and abused children, violence is destroying the world of love for these innocent victims.

It also destroys the world of trust that is essential to a humane public life. Ask urban dwellers who are afraid to go to a PTA or church meeting at night, and they will tell you that the fear of violence strikes at the core of individual liberty.

Liberty is the right to choose. It often is expressed as freedom from coercion or control, but it also is freedom to make the best of our capacities and opportunities. One way to exercise liberty is through freedom of association. An individual must be able to associate in order to learn, invent, communicate, organize, pass on values, and practice democracy. Through association, we pursue our happiness. Security...