WHY NOT JUST MAKE PARENTS RESPONSIBLE?

If nothing else can be said, this topic has legs.

Gilda Radner took the stage on "Saturday Night Live" in the role of Miss Emily Litella, a social activist in her own fashion whose comprehension of modern issues never seemed to catch up with her good intentions.

Her televised commentary began this way: "What's all this I hear about violins on television?"

She would proceed for a minute or so to advocate more, not less, violins on television, to support the arts generally and symphonic music specifically, and to ponder what frustrated souls would rail against such beauty.

A newscaster next to Miss Litella would then interrupt her in mid-tirade to suggest that the national debate she referred to concerned violence on television, not violins.

"Oh, well that's different," Miss Litella demurred. "Never mind."

Interesting about this is the fact Miss Litella displayed her confusion about televised violence some 17 years ago. This week, a congressional hearing proved confusion over the issue (not the word) has not subsided.

Various lawmakers, perhaps wanting to display a legislative range that reaches beyond tax increases, believe violence on television has an adverse effect on their constituents. They want something done about it.

Parental advisories on television programs with high levels of violence have seen suggested. A more high-tech approach is also under consideration, a so-called "V-block" aimed at allowing viewers to stop shows electronically coded as violent from appearing on an individual television set.

The freedom-of-expression crowd, who believe the "good" violent shows will be discarded, baby-with-the-bathwater style, along with the "bad" violent shows, are rather down on the "V-block."

Network executives told members of the House Energy and Commerce telecommunications subcommittee Thursday that such a device would punish "quality" violence as opposed to all the run-of-the-mill mayhem.

My belief is that lawmakers might raise an eyebrow at this supposedly ascertained link ~between television violence and the real-life variety.

Do television programs induce people to act violently? Do people who watch "Seinfeld" become funnier?

None of this is to apologize for television programming, which tells stories that aren't joined closely with real life in most cases. Face it, if the real lives of most people were on television, people would still be reading books.

Think about your own lives. How many of the people now reading this have actually seen a murder in real-life? Almost none. Yet television portrays murder like it's as common as garbage collection.

There's a show called "Murder, She Wrote." Wonder what that one's about? Every week this lady stumbles across a corpse. She's worse than poison to be around. In my daily activities, I've never just run across a dead body, yet television has Jessica taking it in stride.

Only once in my life have I been knocked unconscious, the result of a freak sporting mishap. It's not something that happens to people a great deal.

My father, who was rather forgiving about television shows, used to howl with laughter about a long-defunct drama called "Mannix," about a private detective who was knocked unconscious an average of three times per episode, usually just before commercials.

If Mannix was a real person, my father contended, he would either take the hint and get a different job, or he would be so punch-drunk he'd never solve a mystery.

Fortunately, my dad didn't apply reality standards to Matt Dillon, who blew a bad guy away weekly before the opening credits even rolled, and Ben Cartwright, who disliked gunplay around the Ponderosa but didn't hesitate to fill someone full of lead when it was called for.

Unlike my father, some people in the early 1960s were probably concerned the violence on "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" was detrimental to society.

Inexplicably, people are indulgent of all this killing. Sex has had a tougher road to acceptance, though the standards are being constantly expanded.

We get conditioned in this thinking, even though sex is a more natural and common action for most people than murder. I recognized this paradox not on television but at a movie earlier this year. At a cheap showing of "Under Siege," some parent in the audience felt the R-rated movie would be a less expensive option for a couple of children than a babysitter. The kids, age 10 or so, sat not far in front of me.

At one point, an actress in the movie was shown gratuitously exhibiting her rather ample chest, and I felt uncomfortable with these kids watching. Yet the rest of movie contained scores of deaths and I was less concerned.

Why? Chances are these children had at some point in their lives seen a naked female breast. However, these kids will live long lives without seeing someone stab a man in the top of the head, which is how Steven Seagal punctuated this movie.

My feeling is that some people are going to be violent and most people aren't. And if environmental influences affect the ones who turn violent, it probably won't be television that has an overriding impact.

In my mind, the problem is not that there's too much violence on television, but just too much television.

And if parents won't tell their children to turn off the television when inappropriate programming is on, what makes Congress think parents will take the extra steps to employ some technological roadblock.

As long as Congress is approving useless measures, lawmakers should just push for technology that makes parents be more responsible for their children.