Kill your friends guilt free. Get in touch with your gun-toting, cold-blooded murdering side. More fun than shooting your neighbor’s cat.

With these spectacularly egregious examples taken from ad campaigns for computer games, President Clinton announced Tuesday an investigation into how the entertainment industry markets its guilt-free, murderous, all-in-fun gore to kids. At a price of $1 million, a bargain by federal standards, in a span of 12 to 18 months, a blistering pace for government work, America will know what it’s known for 27 years: America’s children are being buried in violent fantasy and there is a strong correlation between that and aggressive reality.

Since 1972, the Surgeon General has studied it twice. The American Academy of Pediatrics has made it a cornerstone of its legislative agenda. Hundreds of research projects have confirmed it and have created a wealth of new knowledge about how young minds absorb and react to violent imagery.

Throughout, the entertainment industry has denied the connection. At the same it has said parents should police what movies kids watch, what games they play. And behaved as though the First Amendment doesn’t just protect offensive expression but requires it. The political parties have taken turns bashing Hollywood, depending upon which party has access to Hollywood’s checkbook, which has the big stars on its fund-raising marquee.

Now, thanks to a highly toxic political atmosphere, old enemies are on the same side. Sen. Sam Brownback, conservative Republican of Kansas, in retaliation for Democrat gun-control proposals, included an amendment in the crime bill calling for such an investigation of the Democrat-hugging entertainment industry. President Clinton, who will not allow himself to be outdone when it comes to smarminess, countered with this identical plan.

Entertainment executives are howling. Just two weeks ago, this president held their hands and told them they’d work through this unpleasant episode together. Now, just because a few hundred pundits and several million citizens questioned his recent $2 million Hollywood fund-raiser, he stabs his pals in the back. Guilt free.

The best part of the Brownback-Clinton plan (let them squabble about top billing) is that it’s not just a routine inquiry. It’s a full-blown Justice Department/Federal Trade Commission investigation, just like the one that humiliated Big Tobacco and sent Joe Camel out to pasture. It won’t be an argument about whether it’s bad for kids to witness senseless, remorseless slaughter or about whether parents need to personally approve every movie, music video or computer game offered to their children. Or even about whether Hollywood execs let their kids watch movies they bank on other kids watching. It will be about the law, about false advertising, about misleading trade practices — things government lawyers understand. It should be highly entertaining.