(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE CHILDREN who killed 12-year-old Amanda Simpson seared a hole in the American Dream. Just after midnight on April 28, 1991, while Amanda and her mother were sleeping, a group of youngsters broke into their Dayton home and stole a microwave oven. A short while later, some of the juveniles reentered the house, this time with a can of gasoline. They doused the kitchen floor and set the fuel alight. ''Fuck 'em, let 'em burn!'' the ringleader, a 15-year-old boy, exclaimed. Smoke and flames raced through the tiny structure. Amanda died five days later. Her mother, Judith, was seriously injured, but survived. Amanda Simpson was only one recent victim in a raging epidemic of violence against children. You have heard and read a great deal about guns and gangs and ghettos. But this onslaught of childhood violence knows no boundaries of race, geography, or class. Amanda Simpson, a white parochial school student in a medium-size Midwestern city, was killed by a spontaneously organized throng of white children -- a bunch of kids loose on the street, unrestrained by their parents, their peers, or their community. Six boys and two girls, ages 12 to 16 at the time of the crime, were convicted or pled guilty in connection with Amanda's death. The child they killed was an animal lover, a saxophone player, a computer buff, and a volunteer at a local nursing home. One year she sold more than 1,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, enough to win a week at the summer camp to which her mother, a single parent, could not afford to send her. An ever-increasing number of youngsters are caught up in violence -- as victims, as witnesses, as perpetrators. The number of children under the age of 18 arrested each year for murder has jumped 55% in the past decade, to 2,674 in 1990. Juvenile arrests for aggravated assault and forcible rape are rising dramatically. Says Colonel Leonard Supenski of the Baltimore County police department: ''There are a whole lot of disaffected, alienated youth out there who use violence, and use it with no remorse.'' For too many children, there are no safe havens. They are victimized at home, at school, on the street. An astonishing number of youngsters are beaten, maimed, molested, and murdered by parents, relatives, or baby sitters. The National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse (NCPCA), using reports filed by all 50 states, calculates that 2.7 million kids -- some 4% of American children -- suffered from abuse or neglect last year; that's an increase of 40% just since 1985. An estimated 1,383 children (half of them under the age of 1 year) died from maltreatment in 1991, the worst year on record. If anything, says Deborah Daro, the NCPCA's research director, these figures understate the problem. Among older children, the numbers are even bleaker. More adolescents die from violence -- especially gun violence -- than from any illness. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, homicide by firearms is now the second-leading cause of death (after motor vehicle crashes) for 15- to 19- year-old whites. For African Americans in that age bracket, homicide is the leading cause of death. Altogether, 2,771 children, ages 10 to 19, died from homicide in 1989, up 48% from 1984. Another 2,245 in that age group died from suicide, now the third-leading cause of death among adolescents. TEENAGE VIOLENCE mostly affects urban African Americans (except for suicide, a predominantly white problem). But it is beginning to spread. Under pressure from big city police departments, gangs are stashing their guns and dope in the suburbs and recruiting high school students as pushers. Says Captain Richard Kozak, chief of intelligence for the Illinois State Police: ''We're seeing gang activities in places where they didn't exist two years ago. The gangs are playing off the fact that law enforcement in the suburbs is not prepared to deal with them.'' But is anybody really prepared to deal with this escalation of childhood violence? In a word, no. The grim trends tell us -- or ought to -- that our entire approach to the problem has been misguided. We are constantly acting after the fact, trying to mend bodies after they have been broken. When children are burned or stabbed or shot, we bury them, or we deliver them to overstretched hospitals, shelters, and foster homes. When youngsters commit violent crimes, we send them into an antiquated juvenile justice system that rarely punishes them sufficiently and almost never rehabilitates them. When teenagers kill themselves, we have groups to console their bereaved parents, but we have very few programs to identify and help potentially suicidal kids before they pull the trigger. ''We believe violence in America to be a public health emergency, largely unresponsive to methods thus far used in its control,'' declared a recent editorial by two physicians in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The authors, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop and journal editor George Lundberg, are right. We must address violence against youth the way we treat other public health threats like smoking, drunken driving, or drug abuse: We must focus our efforts on prevention. The most pressing task is to get guns away from children. The widespread availability of firearms makes it far too easy for kids to kill and be killed. Guns figure in more than 75% of adolescent homicides and more than half of adolescent suicides. Should we really be surprised that so many children are infatuated with firearms? There are more than 200 million privately owned guns in America, and half of all households have at least one. Movies, TV programs, and popular songs are saturated with gun-toting heroes and villains. A five- year study by the American Psychological Association found that the average child has witnessed 8,000 murders and 100,000 other acts of violence on television by the time he or she has completed sixth grade. An astounding number of children either own a gun or know how to get one. Says Baltimore County's Colonel Supenski, whose suburban jurisdiction surrounds Baltimore but excludes the city itself: ''For youth today, I don't care where you live, what class you are, or whether you're white, black, or Hispanic, it's cool to carry a gun. Owing to a lot of things, primarily the entertainment industry, it's a macho thing to do.'' The teenage arms race shows no signs of abating. A national survey of high school students in 1990 by the Centers for Disease Control found that 4% had carried a gun at least once in the past month. In a more recent study of 11th- graders in Seattle, 6% of boys said they had actually brought a gun into the school building. And these pieces aren't just for show: One-third of the gun-owning students in Seattle reported that they had fired their weapons at another person. Given the proliferation of guns, it's not surprising that kids say they need to carry one to protect themselves. But the line between ''protection'' and ''aggression'' is often so thin that it disappears. At the Henry Horner Homes, a mostly African American housing project on Chicago's West Side, some teenagers view popping a person as a noble act, a matter of honor and pride. Says David Powell, a counselor at Better Days for Youth, an antigang program: ''These kids think if someone is messing with their girlfriend and they shoot him, that's not violence. They see what happens on TV. If the hero has a problem, he shoots. And the hero shows no remorse.'' Guns are surprisingly easy to get. In the Seattle study, 34% of the students said they had easy access to a handgun. In Chicago, where handgun sales have been banned since 1982, an inner-city youngster can take delivery of the weapon of his choice in under two hours. All it requires is a few bucks and a brief chat with the guys hanging out on his front steps. For $20 he can buy a used .22 caliber pistol. For as little as $200 he can own a brand-new, semiautomatic 9-millimeter pistol. And it takes no skill at all to become a juvenile murderer. The increasingly popular 9-millimeter semiautomatic weighs about 2 1/2 pounds. A teenager can conceal the muzzle in the waistband of his pants and cover up the handle with his sweatshirt or warm-up jacket. The gun's magazine can spew out 15 bullets / in less than nine seconds. When one magazine is spent, the shooter can quickly snap on another. This is a point-and-shoot weapon. Aim it at another person and you are likely to inflict great damage, as this writer (who had never used a handgun) discovered when he trained the weapon on a human-shaped firing range target. James Love knows all about 9-millimeter pistols. When he was 15, he used one to murder a 22-year-old. He also wounded the young man's teenage brother. Now 20, Love, who was tried and convicted as an adult, is serving a life sentence in the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore -- eligible for parole in 14 years. As a teenager in an East Baltimore housing project, Love ran a small-time drug ring that netted big money, as much as $10,000 a day. Love says his two victims owed him $15,000. When they didn't pay, he shot them. ''When you shoot someone, you don't think about the consequences,'' says Love, a muscular young African American man dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and a Nike Air cap. Love now expresses some regret for what he did: ''I wish it never would have happened. It ain't worth taking nobody's life for no money.'' THAT MESSAGE is not getting through to the streets. Teenagers are not only shooting one another, they are also killing, wounding, and terrorizing their younger brothers and sisters. The steady popping of guns can inflict lasting psychological wounds. Children can become withdrawn, mistrustful, fatalistic, defensive, and violent. Says Sharon Brown, a director of programs for children at the Lutheran Social Services center at Cabrini-Green, a housing project on Chicago's North Side: ''The kids are all on edge. Brush against them, and they're ready to fight.'' Listen to the children of Cabrini-Green describe their world. Says 10-year- old Derrell Ellis: ''You can't come outside. You got to duck and dive from the bullets. They be shooting most every day.'' Eleven-year-old Rachella Thompson used to hurry away from her fifth-floor window when gangs began gunfights in the courtyard of her building. Now, she says, ''I don't care. I just sit there and play Nintendo. If they're going to shoot, they're going to shoot. Ain't nobody going to stop them.'' Children exposed to a single violent event can suffer anxiety and depression for years. Psychologist James Garbarino, co-author of a new book called Children in Danger, has studied children in the war zones of Mozambique, Northern Ireland, Kuwait, and Israel's Occupied Territories, as well as the children of the war zones of American cities. Says he: ''We haven't begun to address the issue of kids who see violence every day.'' These kids don't see violence just in the streets. All too often they witness it in their homes -- the result of an altercation between people who know each other. Says Dr. Carl Bell, head of Community Mental Health Council, a psychiatric center on Chicago's South Side: ''It's not gang related or drug related or crime related. It's just people getting mad at each other and going off on each other.'' This kind of violence sends a powerful message to the children who witness it. Says Bell: ''Everyone talks about violence on TV. But they forget that a personal endorsement of violence from someone who is loved, trusted, and respected carries the most weight in the world.'' African American children are not only more likely to witness violence at home, they are also more likely to be victims of it. Dayton resident Delrine Edwards, a 27-year-old African American woman, knows this only too well. Her second-youngest child, Demetri Green, died last December at the age of 3, strangled by her husband, Lorenzo, who said he was high on drugs at the time. Lorenzo, who was not Demetri's father, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and is serving nine to 25 years in prison. Says Delrine Edwards, who has three other children: ''Demetri was a child, so I know he's in heaven. At least I don't have to worry about him like I do the others.'' Children die violently in white suburban homes as well, but there the most critical problem is suicide. Many factors can prompt adolescents to kill themselves -- a broken romance, poor grades, concern about their homosexuality, sexual abuse by a parent, an impending divorce, the death of a friend or relative. Reverend Charles Rubey, a Catholic priest who for 13 years has run Loving Outreach to Survivors of Stress (LOSS), a suicide survivors organization in Chicago, thinks parents expect their children to achieve too much too fast. Says he: ''There is this intense drive to succeed. Parents say they want the best for their kids, but this can put a tremendous amount of pressure on them.'' Rubey also thinks children have been conditioned by fast food, microwave ovens, and 30-minute TV sitcoms to expect instant solutions to complex problems. With ready access to firearms, kids even have a quick way to kill themselves. Therese Gump, program director of LOSS, warns parents not to underestimate the potency of their children's feelings. She speaks with tragic authority. Her second-oldest son, Joey, a normally jovial boy, became depressed at 19 during a severe case of mononucleosis. Later he was jilted by a girlfriend and tried to kill himself by swallowing iodine. He survived. Then at 21, shortly after losing a job, Joey climbed into his parked car in a closed garage, turned on the engine, and suffocated. In his note, he said he knew his family loved him but that he couldn't bear to feel love because it caused too much pain. THERE ARE NO easy answers to the complex problem of childhood violence. Because a disproportionate number of its victims are poor and African American, the issue overlaps with many other social problems: youth unemployment, welfare, racism, failing schools, sick hospitals, rotten housing, alcoholism, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and single-parent households. Our current approach is a de facto policy of containment. While middle-class neighborhoods are still relatively safe, violence festers in the homes, schools, and communities of the 18% of American children who live in poverty. Says Garbarino: ''You cannot write off one-fifth of your society for free.'' The price is more jails, more foster homes, more crime, more deaths, more fear. Nor is there any guarantee that juvenile violence will stay put. Says Commander Robert Dart, a beefy ex-Marine who heads the Gang Crime Section of the Chicago Police Department: ''In some cases we eradicate gangs. In some cases we push them. I was born in Chicago, I live in Chicago, and I work for Chicago. If I have to push the gangs somewhere else, that's what I'll do.'' That somewhere else may be your home town. Beyond eliminating poverty or shoving crime from one jurisdiction to another, there are several workable and affordable steps we can take to reduce our children's exposure to violence:

-- Help parents be parents. The best place to begin is at the beginning of a child's life. Hawaii's Healthy Start program, funded by the state, intervenes from day one. A case worker interviews new parents in the hospital shortly after their baby is born. The aim is to identify parents at risk of abusing their children: teen mothers, alcoholics, drug users, welfare recipients, or people who have themselves been abused, either by their own parents or their spouses.

Parents who fall into the high-risk category are offered, at no charge, the services of a home visitor. The visitors are paraprofessionals, typically high school graduates who grew up in stable households. A home visitor may counsel a family for as long as five years. Parents are not compelled to enroll in the program, but only a handful refuse the service. The home visitors, who work for private social service agencies under contract to the state, act as all-purpose advocates for the family. They show parents how to feed and nurture a baby. They ensure that children get regular preventative medical care, including inoculations. In some cases they help parents secure jobs, housing, and, when eligible, welfare and Medicaid. Healthy Start shows healthy results. Without intervention, some 20% of high- risk parents can be expected to mistreat their children, a figure borne out by research in other states. Among the 1,204 families served by Healthy Start between 1987 and 1989, there were just three cases of abuse and six of neglect -- less than 2%. Once the program expands to cover all at-risk families in the state, the total annual cost will be about $16 million. That's substantially less than the $40 million a year Hawaii spends on post-abuse protective custody and foster care. Healthy Start is also likely to have a salutary effect on crime later in life. Abused children are walking evidence that violence begets violence. A Denver study of first-time juvenile offenders, for example, concluded that 84% had been abused before the age of 6. Says Gail Breakey, the director of the Hawaii Family Stress Center, the leading provider of Healthy Start services: ''Child abuse is actually the root cause of so many social problems.'' The National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse, using a $1 million grant from the Ronald McDonald Children's Charities, is campaigning for the establishment of home visitor programs nationwide. It hopes to have Healthy Start programs in place in 25 states by 1995.

-- Teach children how to manage anger. Although anger is a basic human emotion, beginning with a wailing infant's insistent demand for nourishment, many children never learn how to deal with it nonviolently. At the Roth Middle School in Dayton, which is nearly 90% African American, several hundred students take part in a program called Positive Adolescents Choices Training (PACT). Developed by psychologists at nearby Wright State University and incorporated into the middle school's health education classes, PACT aims to defuse violence by teaching African American students how to talk instead of fight. PACT participants use role playing to reenact the kinds of real-life disputes that can escalate into violence. For example, an adolescent boy confronts a friend who has been spreading false rumors that his sister is pregnant. Instead of cussing his friend out, the boy asks if they can talk, says something positive about their friendship, states what he is angry about and why, tells his friend what action he'd like him to take, asks if he understands, and thanks him for his time. If they can't reach an agreement on the first boy's terms, they try to negotiate a compromise. Hard as it is to teach kids surrounded by violence to cool their emotions, preliminary studies show that students trained by PACT are less likely to get suspended from school for fighting and more able to handle themselves peaceably in tough situations. The PACT students who have shown the most progress are those whose parents have enrolled in Impact, a companion program to help them deal with their anger. Says Willa Cotten, a parent participant: ''I used to get into total screaming matches with my daughter. This program helped me understand all the peer pressure these kids are going through.'' Cotten now tries to make 13- year-old Wilhemina understand that if she breaks the rules, she won't be shouted at or beaten, but that she will lose privileges. PACT, like Healthy Start, stresses a most important concept that has eroded in many families: parental responsibility. Says Michelle Hassell, coordinator of the program: ''These parents yell at their kids, throw things at them, and threaten them, but they don't discipline them. If you don't discipline your kids, you set them up to fail, because no one is going to love them the way you do.'' There are many school-based violence prevention programs, but no one has attempted to evaluate their long-term effectiveness. Cautions Rodney Hammond, PACT's project director: ''These programs are not a panacea. The absence of social skills is not the prime reason for violence. But if our society refuses to deal with the big variables that contribute to violence, like poverty and the easy availability of guns, then we as psychologists need to minimize the casualties as best as we can.''

-- Keep guns away from kids. We cannot control juvenile violence without controlling guns. Requiring manufacturers to build child-resistant features into firearms could be a small first step. Trigger restraints and other devices would help prevent very young children from accidentally shooting themselves or someone else. But these mishaps are only part of the problem. Says Stephen Teret, director of the Johns Hopkins University Injury Prevention Center: ''What we need to do is gun-proof children rather than child-proof guns.'' Three years ago Florida became the first state to make adults partially responsible for the use of guns by children. Any adult who fails to keep a loaded gun safely away from a child under age 16 can be charged with a felony if the child uses the gun to shoot somebody. Laws similar to the Florida act are now on the books in ten states and three cities. These laws, while helpful, are mere dams erected to stop a tidal wave. Every year about four million new guns are manufactured in the U.S. for civilian use; nearly 1.4 million of those are semiautomatics. Municipalities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., ban the sale of handguns, but the laws are of limited use when firearms can be bought legally just a few steps outside the city limits. We need action at the federal level, and we need it fast. The public is ahead of politicians on this issue. A Gallup poll last year found that 68% of Americans feel that laws covering the sale of firearms should be ''more strict.'' A resounding 93% favored imposing a mandatory seven-day waiting period on anyone trying to buy a gun, the so-called Brady Bill now languishing in Congress. But the Brady Bill, if it passes, would primarily stop convicted felons and mentally ill people from buying firearms. With 200 million guns in circulation, we need to do much more to stanch the flow. Says Dr. Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, professor of pediatrics and community health at Northwestern University's medical school: ''The solution is to ban the manufacture, sale, and private possession of handguns.'' We can start by outlawing assault weapons, like the 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, that are wreaking so much havoc on our children. VIOLENCE against children undermines the very foundation of our nation. Opponents of gun control who cite the Second Amendment to the Constitution should pay more heed to the preamble, especially the phrase about insuring ''domestic tranquillity.'' We the People have created a most untranquil society for our children, where the right to bear arms has been used to sanction a buildup of lethal personal weaponry unprecedented in human history. We cannot ''secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity'' if we continue to allow the slaughter of our offspring. Beyond controlling guns, we need to reassert the principles of parental and community responsibility. Our children's future is etched in the wan face of Judy Simpson. Amanda Simpson's mother is a frail woman. She is 34 but looks many years older. When she speaks of Amanda, her entire body convulses. Her pain is so palpable that it fills the room. The arsonists who killed her only child left her too ill to work, forcing her to rely on the limited largess of her retired parents and the caring counseling of the victims advocates at the Montgomery County prosecutor's office. Imbedded in Judy Simpson's anguish is a seething rage, a mission, a purpose: ''They took my lovely child from me. I can't do anything to get Amanda back, but I need to get her story out, for the sake of other parents and other children. For too many juveniles, crime seems to be a game. This has to stop.'' We owe at least that much to the memory of Amanda Simpson and Demetri Green and Joey Gump and all the rest. We owe it to the frightened kids of Cabrini- Green. They are all our sons. They are all our daughters. They are all our responsibility.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FORTUNE CHART/SOURCE: NATIONAL CENTER FOR HEALTH STATISTICS CAPTION: COUNTING THE VICTIMS. . . LETHAL WEAPON DEATH AT AN EARLY AGE

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FORTUNE CHART/SOURCE: FBI CAPTION: . . .AND THE PERPETRATORS

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: FORTUNE CHART/SOURCE: NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR PREVENTION OF CHILD ABUSE CAPTION: SUFFER THE CHILDREN