Once again, the psychologists have come around to tell us what we can see with our own eyes isn't quite the way it really is.

A new study - which is out in a recent issue of Science magazine - purports to show how the amount of television adolescents watch is tied to an increase in violent behavior in adults. It's supposedly the first of its kind to monitor the long-term effects of such things.

I'm looking forward to reading it, myself, mostly because I'm looking forward to seeing how many holes - doubtlessly the size of a New England state - I can poke in their methodology. Most social scientists seem to miss the obvious while they're panning for fools' gold in the muddy waters of popular culture. And from the sounds of things, this has "junk science" written all over it.

And I should know.

My personal doubts come from a very intimate source: myself. I watched a fair clip of television when I was an adolescent, living in fairly affluent suburbia. From when I was 12, and no longer needed a babysitter, television was my life.

During the school year I'd come home and watch around two full hours of mindless but fun - and, yes, violent - cartoons on TV. I'd only go upstairs to do my homework and study when I heard the garage door opening. And during the summers, winter and spring breaks, and any various days off, I'd get up around eight, wait until my Mom and Stepdad were out of the house, and then watch TV all morning long, and often into the afternoon.

That's not to say that I didn't have friends, but playing with friends was for later, when my parents were home and I couldn't watch TV. In fact I often turned down offers to go over to someone else's house and play because I had "stuff to do" - ie, watch TV. I wanted to be by myself, do what I wanted without having to compromise, and just generally be lazy. And there was a big TV in the living room, with Cable...

So I watched a lot of TV for extended periods of time: that is not in dispute. Maybe too much TV.

But do you know what? I'm not a violent person. I don't have a record of violent crime, or even a criminal record, come to think of it. In fact, I can count the number of times I got into honest-to-goodness fights throughout my whole life on one hand; They all happened in Middle School and High School, and there was only ever one I really and truly initiated.

And that is weird, when you consider that I'm the sort of kid who - by all rights - SHOULD HAVE pulled a Columbine. I was the target of choice from Middle School on. Yes, I had some pretty violent revenge fantasies, but I never acted on them; Even if The Morrigan had shown up in Gym class, handed me a repeating shotgun full of shells and given Her blessing to make them all pay... I wouldn't have used it. Never in a hundred million years.

You might be wondering why? Well, I've got three words for you: Fear of Mom.

My mother ran a pretty tight ship around the house. I knew that there were things I could not do, and things that I had better do. If I did the one or didn't do the other there'd hell to pay. And nothing - no punishment from the principal's office, no stern rebuke from a Scoutmaster, or any hopes of turning a bully's face into meat - was comparable to what would happen when mom found out. She wasn't into physical discipline by that point in my life, but she had a way of making me feel like something sharp was being dragged over my soul when she was angry. I wouldn't have wished that treatment on my worst enemy (well... okay, maybe a few...)

So whenever the temptation to do something questionable surfaced up in my head, there was this picture of mom, there in the back of my mind, pissed off and letting me know all about it. That image has probably saved my bacon more times than I care to think about. And given the physical damage a pissed-off fat kid can do when he body-slams the unsuspecting right onto the floor and pummels the heck out of them, that image has probably saved the bacon of a number of bullies as well.

I'm sure I'm not unique in this quality. Maybe for most folks it's dad instead of mom, but I think a lot of us tend to have an "inner authority figure" there, staring us down. It's our conscience's way of reminding us that we're not as free to do what we'd like as we might think we are. And I'd go so far as to venture that it's as much a factor of "proper" child-rearing as anything else.

So that's why I'm wondering about this study - or any other study that purports to prove that a form of entertainment can turn someone violent. Was it really the entertainment itself, or the fact that someone's parents weren't willing - or able - to effectively discipline their kids? This study is supposed to have taken economic and psychiatric factors into consideration, but what if the major difference between the kids was that those watched too much TV didn't get nearly enough interaction with their parents, and the kids who watched just a little bit did?

Indeed, Bucknell University psychology professor Chris Boyatzis says that one reason for the data is just that: parental irresponsibility. "What may be going on is that families high in TV viewing are also lower in moral character education" he says. Why? When families are watching TV, they're not interacting: they're zoning out in front of the tube. And can't we all attest to how true that can often be?

It's comforting to hear common sense from a psychologist, given how rife with easy answers and bad junk the profession can be. But I doubt that any legislator who'd want to use this study as the lynchpin of a new bill punishing the entertainment industry would bother to take that - or my story - into account. As we've seen in the past, for such folks the road taken to get to a conclusion doesn't matter nearly as much as the conclusion itself... which is sort of like saying that it doesn't matter if you wanted to fly to Paris and touched down in Guam, instead.

Bad science makes for bad conclusions, and bills based on bad science make for bad laws. I can only hope that the "more study" this study calls for is carried out before any action is taken down Washington way. I fear it won't be.

"Although 72 % of Americans polled by Times Mirror say that we have too much violence on TV and it leads to higher crime rates, many of them must be tuning in, or the television moguls wouldn't be scheduling such fare. Maybe its time to face the fact that we have all this mayhem in our art and our lives because we like violence. Or if we don't actually like it, we need it." - Robert Scheer