Talk of Violence

Talk of Violence:
Lecturer Tells Audience Children are Being Trained to Kill

By David Clouston, April 2001
The Salina Journal Staff Writer

Cap gun battles with toy six-shooters were mostly tame affairs in the neighborhood in which Dave Grossman grew up.

That is, unless tempers flared and Grossman actually smacked one of his buddies with the butt of his pretend firearm. That youngster would run home crying. And once Grossman's parents found out, Grossman knew he'd be punished for the scuffle.

"The purpose of healthy play is to learn not to hurt others," Grossman, a retired Army lieutenant Colonel, author and lecturer on the subject of juvenile violence, told an audience in Salina Saturday.

Yet today, many youths alone in their rooms playing gruesome, interactive video games are being conditioned to kill as many creatures as possible until they run out of bullets. The result, Grossman said, is a generation of desensitized youth, some of whom have gone on highly publicized school killing sprees, such as the one in 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

Grossman, formerly an Army ranger and professor of psychology and military science at West Point Military Academy, appeared Saturday with Sen. Sam Brownback, RKan, at an educational symposium at the Kansas Highway Patrol Training Center and Troop C Headquarters in Salina.

Grossman's most recent literary work is the book "Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill." In it, and in his presentation Saturday, he detailed the similarities between the way the military trains soldiers to kill and how American culture today does the same to youth via television, movies and video games.

Killing Methods Mirrored

Grossman described four "killing enabling methods" used by the military that are mirrored by today's media. They are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and role models.

Brutalization and classical conditioning become evident in action-adventure movies where a horrendous act is followed not by a quest for justice but for vengeance - the evildoer's death, Grossman said.

"People who do just want justice are seen as wishy-washy. They're just in the way," he said. "The result is we have become a nation full of people who are going to make others feel their pain."

Even in countries such as Canada and in Europe, with more restrictive gun laws than in the United States, Grossman said, the rate of serious assaults has risen two to seven fold between 1977 and 1993, as U.S. television programming has taken greater root."

"Whenever you feed death and violence and destruction to your children, you reap what you sow in about 15 years," he said.

Training tools are games

Likewise, video game flight simulators are recognized as valuable training tools for trained beginning pilots. Yet video games such as "Doom" that depict realistic killing have been adopted for use by the military for use in operant conditioning - training soldiers to kill.

"You can't market this stuff to the Army as a killing simulator and then turn around and sell it to kids and claim that it is harmless," Grossman said.

Grossman also said there's been a disturbing view expressed by some youths in the wake of school shootings that is effect is envious of the shooters for getting their pictures on the covers of national weekly news magazine. The shooters become role models - motivation for "racking up a high score," Grossman said.

Grossman said he regularly gets e-mail from those critical that he is trying to ban violent video games. He says he is not and that adult content should remain available for adults.

Advice for parents

What he advocates for parents is that for children up to about age 7, keep television to a minimum and maximize reading time. For older youths and teen-agers, it's important to intervene and confront inappropriate behavior. And that, he said, means knowing what's going on in kids' lives and in their rooms at home.

"The parenting kit for the 21st century is a flashlight, a crowbar and a hammer," he said, smiling.

Communities can make a difference in the culture of violence and brutality by putting pressure on legislators, for instance, to bring stricter adherence to rating systems for movies and video games. Grossman said. No one likes lawsuits, either, but the reason America has the safest commercial airplanes, for instance, is that manufacturers know they'll be sued if they produce an unsafe product. The same litigation pressure can be brought to bear on the entertainment industry, he said.

"There is no constitutional right to practice blowing people's heads off," Grossman said.