A California teen who helped kill his mother got the idea from watching horror movies. Gina Castillo's 16-year-old son and 14-year-old nephew said they plotted to stab her to death after watching the films Scream and Scream 2.

TOKYO  -- The Japanese government launched a panel aimed at protecting the nation's youth from violence and obscene material in the media. The move comes in the wake of copycat knifing incidents blamed on a popular TV series.

Over the past two years, the crime rate for Japanese youths has climbed by more than 60%. Since the start of the year, a junior high school student stabbed a teacher to death in between classes with a knife and another junior high school boy wounded a police officer with the same type of knife, while trying to steal the officer's pistol.

A UNESCO study said that "Terminator," the killer robot played by American actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is the most popular character among the world's children. The survey, billed as the first ever worldwide study of violence in the media, said a stunning 88 percent of children around the world know "Terminator." The survey said television was the strongest single factor creating a global culture, and the omnipresence of violence on the box was contributing to making the world more violent.

WASHINGTON -- Just for laughs, let's pretend. Say we wanted to create, in a relatively peaceful society, a nation of youthful killers, or at least just millions of aggressive young jerks.

How could we do it? We would have to start early. Analyzing infants, we would realize their desperate need for love and intimacy. We would also note that a baby's only real job is to study, digest and mimic everything he or she encounters.

Then we would go to work. We would create an economy in which, in most families, both parents needed to work outside the home to survive. Soon after birth, babies would be placed with caregivers who would tend to their basic needs but who, in most cases, would lack the time and interest to invest the same kind of love and attention as parents.

Working parents would remain on the job for ever-increasing hours. Their "free" time at home would be eaten up by bill-paying, cooking, cleaning, helping with homework and finishing tasks uncompleted in the workplace.

Many children would still receive considerable love and attention. To minimize that, we could design, say, an electronic box that beamed seductive, violent images into every dwelling.

The box would feature some uplifting programming--comedy, romance, educational shows. But it would also provide fistfights, beatings, rapes and murders.

Now a few troublesome kids would realize that such images are fiction. So we would invent "news" shows, highlighting real-life mayhem from local, national and even international sources. The box could also provide "talk shows" in which real people aired their problems before slapping, kicking and otherwise attacking each other as audiences cheered.

But this still might fail to make enough children violent. So what if we invented strikingly realistic visual computer "games"? Children could shoot, impale or beat to death lifelike images of people and monsters. Blood could splatter, "victims" could instantly revive to be killed again and again!

Some pesky parents would, of course, limit their children's exposure to the box and the games. To deal with that, we could create public living rooms, complete with comfortable chairs and popcorn! Here, children could share with strangers the thrill of experiencing, on gigantic screens and with sophisticated sound systems, vivid moving images of stabbings, garrotings, explosions and dismemberments.

Also, in certain parts of the country, rural and urban, we could glorify guns, make folks think they cannot live without firearms. Then we could make it relatively easy for anyone, even children, to get them.

Still not enough? We could do something with music. Kids love music, as anyone who has watched a baby react to a lullaby can attest. We could attach violent, materialistic or overtly sexualized images to music.

We could even persuade certain music-makers to celebrate guns, greed and irresponsible sex in their songs! They, too, could provide images for the box--of threatening-looking men and barely dressed women, all singing about the glories of instant, consequence-free gratification of every urge.

To be sure that children got the pro-violence message, we adults could pretend to abhor brutishness. Kids are natural rebels. So we could bemoan violence ceaselessly in the media, and--this is key--feign astonishment each time a youngster assaulted or killed someone.

So. If a society actually did those crazy things, would children--not every child, just way too many of them--behave in frighteningly aggressive ways?

Maybe. But what intelligent culture could be so stupid? Just thinking about the prospect is scary. Thank God it's just pretend.

In Paducah, Ky., 14-year-old Michael Carneal entered his high school during the pre-school hours carrying five guns. He found the room where a group of his friends were holding a prayer meeting and began shooting to kill. Three girls were shot dead. Another six were wounded. One is permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

How could a normal child commit such a despicable crime? How could he shoot down his friends in cold blood? While the absolute number of crimes is down, the nature of crimes committed, particularly by the very young, continues to shock and dismay us.

Normal teenaged girls have given birth in toilet bowls and then left their offspring in trash bins. Other normal kids have lured strangers to their homes--in New Jersey it was a pizza delivery man--for the pure pleasure of killing. In New York, two middle-class teenagers killed a wino they had met in Central Park and then attempted to mutilate his body so that police would be unable to identify him.

The streets of inner cities are pock-marked by the sites of casual murders; murders for sneakers, murders for clothes, murders over basketball games and murders because someone "dissed" someone else.

Michael Carneal says he was inspired by the movie "The Basketball Diaries," which features a dream sequence in which a kid who is teased gets revenge by killing his classmates with a shotgun.

Our kids are marinated in violence from an early age. The images they see and hear--from Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson--are so grotesque that they dull the senses.

Clearly, the causes of violence are complex. There have always been tormented teenagers. But only recently have they thought it reasonable to blow their classmates away with shotguns. If I were a Hollywood producer who put before the eyes of impressionable kids images that glorify violence, I would find it awfully hard to sleep at night.

A survey published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that 87% of surgeons and 94% of internists across the U.S. believe that it's time to consider gunshot wounds a public health epidemic--akin to AIDS, alcoholism and tobacco use.