http://www.christianity.net/ct/8T9/8T9030.html
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August 10, 1998
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Trained to Kill
A military expert on the psychology of killing explains how today's media
condition kids to pull the trigger.
David Grossman
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Why are kids shooting their classmates?
David Grossman is a military psychologist who coined the term killology for
a new interdisciplinary field: the study of the methods and psychological
effects of training army recruits to circumvent their natural inhibitions to
killing fellow human beings. Here he marshals unsettling evidence that the
same tactics used in training soldiers are at work in our media and
entertainment. CT thinks that parents, the church, scholars, and the
government must come together to study this question more intensely:
Are we training our children to kill?
I am from Jonesboro, Arkansas. I travel the world training medical, law
enforcement, and U.S. military personnel
about the realities of warfare. I try to make those who carry deadly force
keenly aware of the magnitude of killing. Too many law enforcement and
military personnel act like "cowboys," never stopping to think about who
they are and what they are called to do. I hope I am able to give them a
reality check.
So here I am, a world traveler and an expert in the field of "killology,"
and the largest school massacre in American history happens in my hometown
of Jonesboro, Arkansas. That was the March 24 schoolyard shooting deaths of
four girls and a teacher. Ten others were injured, and two boys, ages 11 and
13, are in jail, charged with murder.
My son goes to one of the middle schools in town, so my aunt in Florida
called us that day and asked, "Was that Joe's school?" And we said, "We
haven't heard about it." My aunt in Florida knew about the shootings before
we did!
We turned on the television and discovered the shootings took place down the
road from us but, thank goodness, not at Joe's school. I'm sure almost all
parents in Jonesboro that night hugged their children and said, "Thank God
it wasn't you," as they tucked them into bed. But there was also a lot of
guilt because some parents in Jonesboro couldn't say that.
I spent the first three days after the tragedy at Westside Middle School,
where the shootings took place, working with the counselors, teachers,
students, and parents. None of us had ever done anything like this before. I
train people how to react to trauma in the military; but how do you do it
with kids after a massacre in their school?
I was the lead trainer for the counselors and clergy the night after the
shootings, and the following day we debriefed the teachers in groups. Then
the counselors and clergy, working with the teachers, debriefed the
students, allowing them to work through everything that had happened. Only
people who share a trauma can give each other the understanding, acceptance,
and forgiveness needed to understand what happened, and then they can begin
the long process of trying to understand why it happened.
Virus of violence
To understand the why behind Jonesboro and Springfield and Pearl and
Paducah, and all the other outbreaks of this "virus of violence," we need to
understand first the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate
doubled in this country between 1957--when the fbi started keeping track of
the data--and 1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated
by the rate people are attempting to kill one another--the aggravated
assault rate. That rate in America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in
1957 to over 440 per 100,000 by the middle of this decade. As bad as this
is, it would be much worse were it not for two major factors.
First is the increase in the imprisonment rate of violent offenders. The
prison population in America nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992.
According to criminologist John J. DiIulio, "dozens of credible empirical
analyses . . . leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted
millions of serious crimes." If it were not for our tremendous imprisonment
rate (the highest of any industrialized nation), the aggravated assault rate
and the murder rate would undoubtedly be even higher.
Children don't
naturally kill; they
learn it from violence
in the home and
most pervasively,
from violence
as entertainment in
television, movies,
and interactive
video games.
The second factor keeping the murder rate from being any worse is medical
technology. According to the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that
would have killed nine out of ten soldiers in World War II, nine out of ten
could have survived in Vietnam. Thus, by a very conservative estimate, if we
had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder rate would be ten times
higher than it is. The magnitude of the problem has been held down by the
development of sophisticated lifesaving skills and techniques, such as
helicopter medevacs, 911 operators, paramedics, cpr, trauma centers, and
medicines.
However, the crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is
true worldwide. In Canada, according to their Center for Justice, per capita
assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder
increased nearly sevenfold, and murders doubled. Similar trends can be seen
in other countries in the per capita violent crime rates reported to
Interpol between 1977 and 1993. In Australia and New Zealand, the assault
rate increased approximately fourfold, and the murder rate nearly doubled in
both nations. The assault rate tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled
in Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and
Scotland, while all these nations had an associated (but smaller) increase
in murder.
This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to
be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are
many factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the
prevalence of guns in our society. But violence is rising in many nations
with draco-nian gun laws. And though we should never downplay child abuse,
poverty, or racism, there is only one new variable present in each of these
countries, bearing the exact same fruit: media violence presented as
entertainment for children.
Killing is unnatural
Before retiring from the military, I spent almost a quarter of a century as
an army infantry officer and a psychologist, learning and studying how to
enable people to kill. Believe me, we are very good at it. But it does not
come naturally; you have to be taught to kill. And just as the army is
conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to
our children, but without the safeguards.
After the Jonesboro killings, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics
Task Force on Juvenile Violence came to town and said that children don't
naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and
violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment
in television, the movies, and interactive video games.
Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing
one's own kind. I can best illustrate this from drawing on my own work in
studying killing in the military.
We all know that you can't have an argument or a discussion with a
frightened or angry human being. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of the
blood vessels, has literally closed down the forebrain--that great gob of
gray matter that makes you a human being and distinguishes you from a dog.
When those neurons close down, the midbrain takes over and your thought
processes and reflexes are indistinguishable from your dog's. If you've
worked with animals, you have some understanding of what happens to
frightened human beings on the battlefield. The battlefield and violent
crime are in the realm of midbrain responses.
Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing
your own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired
resistance to killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When
animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a
harmless fashion. But when they fight any other species, they go to the side
to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight
one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but
they wrestle one another. Almost every species has this hardwired resistance
to killing its own kind.
When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on
into that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only
sociopaths--who by definition don't have that resistance--lack this innate
violence immune system.
Throughout human history, when humans fight each other, there is a lot of
posturing. Adversaries make loud noises and puff themselves up, trying to
daunt the enemy. There is a lot of fleeing and submission. Ancient battles
were nothing more than great shoving matches. It was not until one side
turned and ran that most of the killing happened, and most of that was
stabbing people in the back. All of the ancient military historians report
that the vast majority of killing happened in pursuit when one side was
fleeing.
"Few researchers
bother any longer
to dispute that
bloodshed on
TV and in the
movies has an
effect on kids who
witness it."
(Time, April 6, 1998)
In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil
War battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the
average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men
per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per
regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of
Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after
the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95
percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even
more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple
loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel.
In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his
shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he
would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but
at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And
so he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a
tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.
During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of
researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in
history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They
discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring
themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.
That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers
are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are
willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing
to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military
became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying
to fix this "problem." From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing
rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And
fix it the military 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: Desensitization
How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is
instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our
children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical
conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these
in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to
the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture.
Brutalization and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. From the
moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused:
countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads,
while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head
is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all
individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing
mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction,
violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to
violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your
brutal new world.
Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening
to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds,
it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what
is happening on television. At that age, a child can watch something
happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children
are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets
them understand where information comes from. Even though young children
have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are
developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.
When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded,
or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To
have a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to
relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30
minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered
is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a
friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend
in front of your child's eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds
upon hundreds of times.
Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's
just TV." And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can't tell
the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's
lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's
what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's
what the media are doing to them.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive
epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. The research
demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its
appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or
regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only
one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation,
region, or city with television, 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 is how long it takes for the brutalization of a
three- to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it
takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize
a three-year-old.
Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are
superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific
studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The
Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction
of television in the 1950's 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 article went on to
say 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"
(June 10, 1992).
Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is like the famous case of Pavlov's dogs you learned
about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing of the
bell with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear the bell
without salivating.
The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their
soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on
their knees with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few
Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to
death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank,
countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence.
Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by
making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds
of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate
pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the
soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they
had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned
to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.
The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective
at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in
the years to come. Operant conditioning (which we will look at shortly)
teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful
mechanism that teaches you to like it.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples
of it in modern U.S. military training; but there are some clear-cut
examples of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to
our children is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie A
Clockwork Orange. In A Clockwork Orange, a brutal sociopath, a mass
murderer, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent movies while he
is injected with a drug that nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches
as he watches the movies. After hundreds of repetitions of this, he
associates violence with nausea, and it limits his ability to be violent.
Every time a
child plays an
interactive video
game, he is
learning the exact
same conditioned
reflex skills as
a soldier or police
officer in training.
We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human
suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft
drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.
After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how
her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle
school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens
all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young
people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We
have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate
violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the
Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.
The result is a phenomenon that functions much like AIDS, which I call
AVIDS--Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS has never killed
anybody. It destroys your immune system, and then other diseases that
shouldn't kill you become fatal. Television violence by itself does not kill
you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive
pleasure from violence. And once you are at close range with another human
being, and it's time for you to pull that trigger, Acquired Violence Immune
Deficiency Syndrome can destroy your midbrain resistance.
Operant conditioning
The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful
procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the
use of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits
in front of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning
light goes on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning
light goes on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response,
stimulus-response, stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a
jumbo jet; the plane is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him.
He is wetting his seat cushion, and he is scared out of his wits; but he
does the right thing. Why? Because he has been conditioned to respond
reflexively to this particular crisis.
When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been
conditioned to do. In fire drills, 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 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. This has substantially raised the firing rate on the modern
battlefield. Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye
targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes
that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have
only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to
shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response,
stimulus-response--soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of
repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer
is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot
reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting
on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response
training.
Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be
troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive
point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex
and motor skills.
I was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering
mitigation for a kid who was facing the death penalty. I tried to explain to
the jury that interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to
kill. He had spent hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and
shoot, point and shoot. One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to
rob the local convenience store. They walked in, and he pointed a snub-nosed
.38 pistol at the clerk's head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the
defendant shot reflexively from about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk
right between the eyes--which is a pretty remarkable shot with that weapon
at that range--and killed this father of two. Afterward, we asked the boy
what happened and why he did it. It clearly was not part of the plan to kill
the guy--it was being videotaped from six different directions. He said, "I
don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed to happen."
In the military and law-enforcement worlds, the right option is often not to
shoot. But you never, never put your quarter in that video machine with the
intention of not shooting. There is always some stimulus that sets you off.
And when he was excited, and his heart rate went up, and vasoconstriction
closed his forebrain down, this young man did exactly what he was
conditioned to do: he reflexively pulled the trigger, shooting accurately
just like all those times he played video games.
This process is extraordinarily powerful and frightening. The result is ever
more homemade pseudosociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our
children are learning to kill and learning to like it; and then we have the
audacity to say, "Oh my goodness, what's wrong?"
One of the boys allegedly involved in the Jonesboro shootings (and they are
just boys) had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The other one
was a nonshooter and, to the best of our knowledge, had almost no experience
shooting. Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range of over
100 yards, and they hit 15 people. That's pretty remarkable shooting. We run
into these situations often--kids who have never picked up a gun in their
lives pick up a real gun and are incredibly accurate. Why? Video games.
Role models
In the military, you are immediately confronted with a role model: your
drill sergeant. He personifies violence and aggression. Along with military
heroes, these violent role models have always been used to influence young,
impressionable minds.
Today the media are providing our children with role models, and this can be
seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and TV shows, but it can
also be seen in the media-inspired, copycat aspects of the Jonesboro
murders. This is the part of these juvenile crimes that the TV networks
would much rather not talk about.
Research in the 1970s demonstrated the existence of "cluster suicides" in
which the local TV reporting of teen suicides directly caused numerous
copycat suicides of impressionable teenagers. Somewhere in every population
there are potentially suicidal kids who will say to themselves, "Well, I'll
show all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture
on TV, too." 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 the same: Somewhere there is a potentially violent little
boy who says to himself, "Well, I'll show all those people who have been
mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV too."
Thus we get copycat, cluster murders that work their way across America like
a virus spread by the six o'clock news. No matter what someone has done, if
you put his picture on TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone,
somewhere, will emulate him.
The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings began at Pearl, Mississippi, fewer
than six months before. In Pearl, a 16-year-old boy was accused of killing
his mother and then going to his school and shooting nine students, two of
whom died, including his ex-girlfriend. Two months later, this virus spread
to Paducah, Kentucky, where a 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing three
students and wounding five others.
A very important step in the spread of this copycat crime virus occurred in
Stamps, Arkansas, 15 days after Pearl and just a little over 90 days before
Jonesboro. In Stamps, a 14-year-old boy, who was angry at his schoolmates,
hid in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school. Sound
familiar? Only two children were injured in this crime, so most of the world
didn't hear about it; but it got great regional coverage on TV, and two
little boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas, probably did hear about it.
And then there was Springfield, Oregon, and so many others. Is this a
reasonable price to pay for the TV networks' "right" to turn juvenile
defendants into celebrities and role models by playing up their pictures on
TV?
Our society needs to be informed about these crimes, but when the images of
the young killers are broadcast on television, they become role models. The
average preschooler in America watches 27 hours of television a week. The
average child gets more one-on-one communication from TV than from all her
parents and teachers combined. The ultimate achievement for our children is
to get their picture on TV. The solution is simple, and it comes straight
out of the suicidology literature: The media have every right and
responsibility to tell the story, but they have no right to glorify the
killers by presenting their images on TV.
Reality Check
Sixty percent of men on TV are involved in violence; 11 percent are
killers. Unlike actual rates, in the media the majority of homicide victims
are women. (Gerbner 1994)
In a Canadian town in which TV was first introduced in 1973, a 160 percent
increase in aggression, hitting, shoving, and biting was documented in
first- and second-grade students after exposure, with no change in behavior
in children in two control communities. (Centerwall 1992)
Fifteen years after the introduction of TV, homicides, rapes and assaults
doubled in the United States. (American Medical Association)
Twenty percent of suburban high schoolers endorse shooting someone "who
has stolen something from you." (Toch and Silver 1993)
In the United States, approximately two million teenagers carry knives,
guns, clubs or razors. As many as 135,000 take them to school. (America by
the Numbers)
Americans spend over $100 million on toy guns every year. (What Counts:
The Complete Harper's Index © 1991)
Unlearning violence
What is the road home from the dark and lonely place to which we have
traveled? One route infringes on civil liberties. The city of New York has
made remarkable progress in recent years in bringing down crime rates, but
they may have done so at the expense of some civil liberties. People who are
fearful say that is a price they are willing to pay.
Another route would be to "just turn it off"; if you don't like what is on
television, use the "off" button. Yet, if all the parents of the 15 shooting
victims in Jonesboro had protected their children from TV violence, it
wouldn't have done a bit of good. Because somewhere there were two little
boys whose parents didn't "just turn it off."
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 victims. Then they noticed one woman sitting
alone silently.
A counselor went over 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, 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. Her very
next concern was, "I just don't know how I'm going to pay for the funeral. I
don't know how I can afford it." That little girl was truly all she had in
all the world. Come to Jonesboro, friend, and tell this mother she should
"just turn it off."
Another route to reduced violence is gun control. I don't want to downplay
that option, but America is trapped in a vicious cycle when we talk about
gun control. Americans don't trust the government; they believe that each of
us should be responsible for taking care of ourselves and our families.
That's one of our great strengths--but it is also a great weakness. When the
media foster fear and perpetuate a milieu of violence, Americans arm
themselves in order to deal with that violence. And the more guns there are
out there, the more violence there is. And the more violence there is, the
greater the desire for guns.
We are trapped in this spiral of self-dependence and lack of trust. Real
progress will never be made until we reduce this level of fear. As a
historian, I tell you it will take decades--maybe even a century--before we
wean Americans off their guns. And until we reduce the level of fear and of
violent crime, Americans would sooner die than give up their guns.
Top 10
Nonviolent
Video Games
The following list of nonviolent video games has been developed by The Games
Project. These games are ranked high for their social and play value and
technical merit.
1. Bust a Move
2. Tetris
3. Theme Park
4. Absolute Pinball
5. Myst
6. NASCAR
7. SimCity
8. The Incredible Machine
9. Front Page Sports: Golf
10. Earthworm Jim
For descriptions, publishers, and prices for these games, including a
searchable database for additional recommendations, check The Games Project
Web site at: http://www.gamesproject.org/. This list is updated
periodically. Others are encouraged to make recommendations in their "Add
your favorites" section.
Fighting back
We need to make progress in the fight against child abuse, racism, and
poverty, and in rebuilding our families. No one is denying that the
breakdown of the family is a factor. But nations without our divorce rates
are also having increases in violence. Besides, research demonstrates that
one major source of harm associated with single-parent families occurs when
the TV becomes both the nanny and the second parent.
Work is needed in all these areas, but there is a new front--taking on the
producers and purveyers of media violence. Simply put, we ought to work
toward legislation that outlaws violent video games for children. There is
no constitutional right for a child to play an interactive video game that
teaches him weapons-handling skills or that simulates destruction of God's
creatures.
The day may also be coming when we are able to seat juries in America who
are willing to sock it to the networks in the only place they really
understand--their wallets. After the Jonesboro shootings, Time magazine
said: "As for media violence, the debate there is fast approaching the same
point that discussions about the health impact of tobacco reached some time
ago--it's over. Few researchers bother any longer to dispute that bloodshed
on TV and in the movies has an effect on kids who witness it" (April 6,
1998).
Most of all, the American people need to learn the lesson of Jonesboro:
Violence is not a game; it's not fun, it's not something that we do for
entertainment. Violence kills.
Every parent in America desperately needs to be warned of the impact of TV
and other violent media on children, just as we would warn them of some
widespread carcinogen. The problem is that the TV networks, which use the
public airwaves we have licensed to them, are our key means of public
education in America. And they are stonewalling.
In the days after the Jonesboro shootings, I was interviewed on Canadian
national TV, the British Broadcasting Company, and many U.S. and
international radio shows and newspapers. But the American television
networks simply would not touch this aspect of the story. Never in my
experience as a historian and a psychologist have I seen any institution in
America so clearly responsible for so very many deaths, and so clearly abusi
ng their publicly licensed authority and power to cover up their guilt.
Time after time, idealistic young network producers contacted me from one of
the networks, fascinated by the irony that an expert in the field of
violence and aggression was living in Jonesboro and was at the school almost
from the beginning. But unlike all the other media, these network news
stories always died a sudden, silent death when the network's powers-that-be
said, "Yeah, we need this story like we need a hole in the head."
Many times since the shooting I have been asked, "Why weren't you on TV
talking about the stuff in your book?" And every time my answer had to be,
"The TV networks are burying this story. They know they are guilty, and they
want to delay the retribution as long as they can."
As an author and expert on killing, I believe I have spoken on the subject
at every Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions Club in a 50-mile radius of Jonesboro.
So when the plague of satellite dishes descended upon us like huge locusts,
many people here were aware of the scientific data linking TV violence and
violent crime.
The networks will stick their lenses anywhere and courageously expose
anything. Like flies on open wounds, they find nothing too private or
shameful for their probing lenses--except themselves, and their share of
guilt in the terrible, tragic crime that happened here.
A CBS executive told me his plan. He knows all about the link between media
and violence. His own in-house people have advised him to protect his child
from the poison his industry is bringing to America's children. He is not
going to expose his child to TV until she's old enough to learn how to read.
And then he will select very carefully what she sees. He and his wife plan
to send her to a daycare center that has no television, and he plans to show
her only age-appropriate videos.
That should be the bare minimum with children: Show them only
age-appropriate videos, and think hard about what is age appropriate.
The most benign product you are going to get from the networks are 22-minute
sitcoms or cartoons providing instant solutions for all of life's problems,
interlaced with commercials telling you what a slug you are if you don't
ingest the right sugary substances and don't wear the right shoes.
The worst product your child is going to get from the networks is
represented by one TV commentator who told me, "Well, we only have one
really violent show on our network, and that is NYPD Blue. I'll admit that
that is bad, but it is only one night a week."
I wondered at the time how she would feel if someone said, "Well, I only
beat my wife in front of the kids one night a week." The effect is the same.
"You're not supposed to know who I am!" said NYPD Blue star Kim Delaney, in
response to young children who recognized her from her role on that show.
According to USA Weekend, she was shocked that underage viewers watch her
show, which is rated TV-14 for gruesome crimes, raw language, and explicit
sex scenes. But they do watch, don't they?
Education about media and violence does make a difference. I was on a radio
call-in show in San Antonio, Texas. A woman called and said, "I would never
have had the courage to do this two years ago. But let me tell you what
happened. You tell me if I was right.
"My 13-year-old boy spent the night with a neighbor boy. After that night,
he started having nightmares. I got him to admit what the nightmares were
about. While he was at the neighbor's house, they watched splatter movies
all night: people cutting people up with chain saws and stuff like that.
Every parent
in America
desperately needs
to be warned of
the impact
of TV and other
violent media on
children. But the
TV networks--our
key means of
public education
in America--are
stonewalling.
"I called the neighbors and told them, 'Listen: you are sick people. I
wouldn't feel any different about you if you had given my son pornography or
alcohol. And I'm not going to have anything further to do with you or your
son--and neither is anybody else in this neighborhood, if I have anything to
do with it--until you stop what you're doing.' "
That's powerful. That's censure, not censorship. We ought to have the moral
courage to censure people who think that violence is legitimate
entertainment.
One of the most effective ways for Christians to be salt and light is by
simply confronting the culture of volence as entertainment. A friend of
mine, a retired army officer who teaches at a nearby middle school, uses the
movie Gettysburg to teach his students about the Civil War. A scene in that
movie very dramatically depicts the tragedy of Pickett's Charge. As the
Confederate troops charge into the Union lines, the cannons fire into their
masses at point-blank range, and there is nothing but a red mist that comes
up from the smoke and flames. He told me that when he first showed this
heart-wrenching, tragic scene to his students, they laughed.
He began to confront this behavior ahead of time by saying: "In the past,
students have laughed at this scene, and I want to tell you that this is
completely unacceptable behavior. This movie depicts a tragedy in American
history, a tragedy that happened to our ancestors, and I will not tolerate
any laughing." From then on, when he played that scene to his students, over
the years, he says there was no laughter. Instead, many of them wept.
What the media teach is unnatural, and if confronted in love and assurance,
the house they have built on the sand will crumble. But our house is built
on the rock. If we don't actively present our values, then the media will
most assuredly inflict theirs on our children, and the children, like those
in that class watching Gettysburg, simply won't know any better.
There are many other things that the Christian community can do to help
change our culture. Youth activities can provide alternatives to television,
and churches can lead the way in providing alternative locations for
latchkey children. Fellowship groups can provide guidance and support to
young parents as they strive to raise their children without the destructive
influences of the media. Mentoring programs can pair mature, educated adults
with young parents to help them through the preschool ages without using the
TV as a babysitter. And most of all, the churches can provide the clarion
call of decency and love and peace as an alternative to death and
destruction--not just for the sake of the church, but for the transformation
of our culture.
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Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, an expert on the psychology of killing, retired from
the U.S. Army in February. He now teaches psychology at Arkansas State
University, directs 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). This article was adapted from a
lecture he gave at Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, in April.
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August 10, 1998 Vol. 42, No. 9, Page 30
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