11. Teaching Kids to Kill
by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
A Case Study: Paducah Kentucky
Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old killer in the Paducah, Kentucky, school shootings, had never fired a real pistol in his life. He stole a .22 pistol, fired a few practice shots, and took it to school. He fired 8 shots at a high school prayer group. He hit 8 different kids with eight shots, five of them head shots and the other three upper torso.
I train numerous elite military and law enforcement organizations around the world. When I tell them of this achievement they are stunned. Nowhere in the annals of military or law enforcement history can I find an equivalent 'achievement.'
Where does a 14-year-old boy who never fired a gun before get the skill and the will to kill? Video games and media violence.
A Virus of Violence
To understand the 'why' behind Jonesboro, Springfield, Pearl, Paducah, and Littleton, we need to first understand the overall magnitude of the problem. The murder rate does not accurately represent the problem. Murder has been held down by the development of ever more sophisticated life saving skills and techniques. A better indicator of the problem is the aggravated assault rate - the rate at which human beings are attempting to kill one another. And that has gone up from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957, to over 440 per 100,000 by the mid-1990s.
Even with small downturns in recent years, the violent crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true not just in America but worldwide. In Canada, per capita assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, and attempted murder increased nearly sevenfold. According to Interpol, between 1977 and 1993 the per capita assault rate increased nearly fivefold in Norway and Greece, and in Australia and New Zealand it increased approximately fourfold. During the same period it tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled in: Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland. In India during this period the per capita murder rate doubled. In Mexico and Brazil violent crime is also skyrocketing, and in Japan juvenile violent crime went up 30 percent in 1997 alone.
This virus of violence is occurring worldwide, and the explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. Like heart disease, there are many, many factors involved in the causation of violent crime, and we should never downplay any of them. But there is only one new variable that is present in each of these nations, bearing the exact same fruit in every case, and that is media violence being presented as 'entertainment' for children.
Killing Unnaturally
I spent almost a quarter of a century as an Army infantry officer, a paratrooper, a Ranger, and a West Point psychology professor, learning and studying how we enable people to kill. Most soldiers have to be trained to kill. And we are doing the same thing to our kids, but without the safeguards. According to the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Task Force on Juvenile Violence, 'children are learning to kill from abuse and violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games.'
Most healthy members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance to killing their own kind. Animals with antlers and horns fight one another, by butting heads. Against other species they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranha turn their fangs on everything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes bite anything, but they wrestle one another.
When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear our thought processes become very primitive, and we slam head on into that hard-wired resistance against killing. During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy soldier. You can observe this resistance throughout history, as I have outlined in much greater detail in my book, On Killing (which is being used as a textbook worldwide), in my three peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries, and in my entry in the Oxford Companion to American Military History.
That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able to kill. The rest may be willing to die, but they are not willing to kill. When the military became aware of this, they systematically went about the process of 'fixing' this 'problem.' And fix it they did. By the Korean War around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam the rate rose to over 90 percent.
The Methods in This Madness
The training methods the military uses are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and demonstrate how the media does the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards.
Brutalization and Values Inculcation
Brutalization, or 'values inculcation,' is what happens at boot camp. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked, and dressed alike, losing all vestiges of individuality. You are trained relentlessly in a total immersion environment. This is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values. In the end you embrace violence and discipline and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.
Something very similar is happening to our children through violence in the media, but instead of 18-year-olds it begins at the age of 18 months. At that age a child can understand and mimic what is on television. But up until they are six or seven years old they are developmentally, psychologically, physically unable to discern the difference between fantasy and reality.
This means that when a young child sees somebody on TV being shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered, to them it is as though it were actually happening. In the end some of them embrace violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in a brutal new world.
On June 10, 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. In nations, regions, or cities where television appears there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That's how long it takes for a brutalized two year-old to reach the 'prime crime' years. That's how long it takes before you begin to reap what you sow when you traumatize and desensitize a toddler or a five year-old.
The JAMA concluded that, 'the introduction of television in the 1950s caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one-half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually.' The study went on to state that '...if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.'
Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society is superior to that linking cancer and tobacco. The American Psychological Association (APA), the American Medical Association, the AAP, the Surgeon General, and the Attorney General have all made definitive statements about this. When I presented a paper to the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) annual convention in May 2000, the statement was made that: 'The data is irrefutable. We have reached the point where we need to treat those who try to deny it, like we would treat Holocaust deniers.'
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is like Pavlov's dog in Psych 101. The ringing bell was associated with food, and eventually the dog could not hear the bell without salivating.
Early in World War II, the Japanese would make some of their young, unblooded soldiers bayonet innocent prisoners to death. Their friends would cheer them on. Afterwards, all these soldiers were treated to the best meal they had had in months, sake, and to so-called 'comfort girls.' The result? They learned to associate violence with pleasure.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training, but the media is doing it to our children. They watch vivid images of human death and suffering and they learn to associate it with: laughter, cheers, popcorn, soda, and their girlfriend's perfume.
After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high school teachers told me about her students' reaction when she told them that someone had shot a bunch of their little brothers, sisters, and cousins in the middle school. 'They laughed,' she told me with dismay, 'they laughed.' We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate vivid depictions of human death and suffering with pleasure.
Operant Conditioning
The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful procedure of stimulus response training. A benign example is the use of flight simulators to train pilots, or children in fire drills.
When the fire alarm is set off, the children learn to file out of the school in orderly fashion. One day there is a real fire and they are frightened out of their little wits, but they do exactly what they have been conditioned to do and it saves their lives.
The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response. In World War II we taught our soldiers to fire at bullseye targets, but that training failed miserably in preparing our soldiers for combat. We have no known instances of any soldiers being attacked by bullseyes.
Now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up in their field of view. That is the stimulus. The conditioned response is to shoot the target and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, repeated hundreds of times. Later, when they are in combat and somebody pops up with a gun, reflexively they will shoot and shoot to kill. Of the shooting on the modern battlefield, 75 to 80 percent is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.
If we are a little troubled by that, then we should be far more troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, they are learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills. In his national presidential radio address on April 24, 1999, shortly after the Littleton High School massacre, President Clinton stated that: 'A former lieutenant colonel and professor, David Grossman, has said that these games teach young people to kill with all the precision of a military training program, but none of the character training that goes along with it.'
The result is ever more homemade pseudo-sociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our kids are learning to kill and learning to like it. The most remarkable example is the Paducah, Kentucky, school shooting outlined at the beginning of this article. Eight shots, eight hits, on eight different milling, scrambling, screaming kids. Five of them were head shots. Where did he get this phenomenal skill? Well, there is a $130-million lawsuit against the video game manufacturers, currently working itself through the appeals system, claiming that the violent video games, the murder simulators, gave that mass murderer the skill and the will to kill.
In July 2000, at a bipartisan, bicameral Capitol Hill conference in Washington, D.C., the AMA, the APA, the AAP and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) issued a joint statement saying that 'viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life... Although less research has been done on the impact of violent interactive entertainment [such as video games] on young people, preliminary studies indicate that the negative impact may be significantly more severe than that wrought by television, movies or music.'
Role Models
In the military you are immediately confronted with a role model: your drill sergeant. He personifies violence, aggression, and discipline. (The discipline, and the fact that it is being done to adults, is the safeguard.) Along with military heroes, such as John Wayne, Audey Murphy, Sergeant York and Chesty Puller, these violent role models have always been used to influence young, impressionable teenagers.
Today the media are providing our children with role models, not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and in TV shows, but in the transformation of these schoolyard killers into media celebrities.
In the 1970s we learned about 'cluster suicides,' in which TV reporting of teen suicides was directly responsible for numerous copycat suicides of other teenagers. Because of this research, television stations today generally do not cover suicides. But when the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the effect is exactly the same. Ask yourself this: If there are children willing to kill themselves to get on TV, are there children willing to kill your child to get on TV?
Thus we get the effect of copycat, cluster murders that work their way across America like a virus spread by the six o'clock local news. No matter what someone has done, if you put their picture on TV, you have made them a celebrity and someone, somewhere, will emulate them. This effect is greatly magnified when the role model is a teenager, and the effect on other teens can be profound.
After the Jonesboro shootings, the Japanese reporters kept asking American reporters, 'Why do you keep putting those killers on TV? Don't you know that this will inspire other kids to do the same thing?' In Japan, Canada, and many other democracies around the world, it is a punishable, criminal act to place the names and images of juvenile criminals in the media, because they know that it will result in other tragic deaths. The media has every right and responsibility to tell the story, but do they have a 'right' to glorify the killers by presenting their visual images on TV?
Unlearning Violence
On the night of the Jonesboro shootings, clergy and counselors were working in small groups in the hospital waiting room, comforting the groups of relatives and friends of the 15 shooting victims. Then they noticed one woman who had been sitting alone silently.
A counselor went up to the woman and discovered that she was the mother of one of the girls who had been killed. She had no friends, no husband, no family with her as she sat in the hospital, alone and stunned by her loss. 'I just came to find out how to get my little girl's body back,' she said. But the body had been taken to Little Rock, 100 miles away, for an autopsy. Told this, in her dazed mind her very next concern was, 'I just don't know how we're going to pay for the funeral. I don't know how we can afford it.' That little girl was truly all she had in all the world, and all she wanted to do was wrap her body in a blanket and take her home.
Some people's solution to this problem is 'If you don't like it, then just turn it off.' If that is your only solution to this problem, then come to Jonesboro, my friend, and tell this mother how this would have kept her little girl safe.
Another possible option to deal with violent crime infringes on civil liberties. We can oppress minorities, take away the freedoms of adults, and extensively regulate our society. One thing that a police state can always truthfully claim is that they can make the streets 'safe.' And if we don't get a grip on violent crime I fear that this is exactly what will happen. But perhaps we can consider regulating what the violence industry is selling to kids, carefully controlling the sale of visually violent imagery to children, while still permitting free access to adults, just as we do with guns, pornography, alcohol, tobacco, sex and cars.
Fighting Back: Education, Legislation, Litigation
We need to make progress in the fight against child abuse, racism, and poverty, and in rebuilding our families. Work is needed in all these areas, but there's a new front - taking on the producers of media violence. The solution strategy that I submit for consideration is, 'education, legislation, litigation.'
Simply put, we ought to work toward 'legislation' which outlaws violent video games for children. In July 2000, the city of Indianapolis passed just such an ordinance, and any other city, country or state in America has the right to do the same. There is no Constitutional 'right' to teach children to blow people's heads off at the local video arcade.
We are very close to being able to do to the networks, through 'litigation,' what is being done to the tobacco industry. The day may also be coming when we should be able to seat juries in America who are willing to sock it to the networks in the only place they really understand - their wallets.
Most of all, the American people need to be informed, through a comprehensive 'education' campaign, about what is happening. Every parent in America desperately needs to be warned of the impact of TV and other violent media on children, as we would warn them of some rampant carcinogen. Violence is not a game, it is not fun, it is not something that we let children do for entertainment. Violence kills.
CBS President Leslie Moonves when he was asked if he thought the school massacre in Littleton, Colorado had anything to do with the media. His answer was: 'Anyone who thinks the media has nothing to do with it, is an idiot.' That is what the networks are selling. We do not have to buy it. Along with a little legislation and litigation, an educated and informed society can find their way home from the dark and lonely place to which we have traveled.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is a retired Army Ranger, West Point psychology professor, and an expert on the psychology of killing. He has testified before the U.S. House and Senate, and his research was cited by the President of the United States in the wake of the Littleton school shootings. He is director of the Killology Research Group in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and has written On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little, Brown and Co., 1996) and has co-written Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call To Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence, (Crown/Random House, 1999).
Contact:
E-mail: LtColDaveG(at)aol.com