Trained to Kill

David Grossman

An expert in "killology", I travel around the world training medical, police and US military personnel about the realities of war. Ironically, the largest school massacre in American history happened in my own hometown, Jonesboro, Ark. On March 24, 1998, four schoolgirls and a teacher were shot to death in a schoolyard, 10 others were injured, and two boys, ages 11 and 13, have been charged with the murders.

To understand the "why" behind Jonesboro and other outbreaks of violence, we need to understand the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate doubled in the US between 1957 and 1992. Even worse, the rate at which Americans are attempting to kill one another--the aggravated assault rate--rose from 60 per 100,000 to over 440 per 100,000. As bad as this is, it would be much worse were it not for two factors.

First is the increase in the imprisonment rate. The prison population in the US nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992. Criminologist John J. DiIulio says, "Dozens of credible empirical analyses . . . leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes."

Second is new medical technology. According to the US Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that would have killed 9-out-of-10 times in World War II, was survived 9-out-of-10 times in the Vietnam War. This means that if we had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder level would be ten times higher than it is. The rate has been held down by helicopter medevacs, 911 operators, paramedics, CPR and trauma centres.

In Canada, according to the Centre for Justice, per capita assaults increased almost five-fold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder increased nearly seven-fold, and murders doubled. Interpol reports similar trends in other countries.

This virus of violence is occurring worldwide, and many factors are involved, including child abuse, poverty and racism. But there is only one "new" variable that is present in every single one of these countries: violence in the media being presented as entertainment for children.

Before retiring, I spent almost a quarter of a century as an Army infantry officer and a psychologist, studying how to enable people to kill. It doesn't come naturally; you have to be taught to kill.

We all know that you can't have a discussion with a frightened or angry human being. What has happened to them is that narrowing of the blood vessels has literally closed down the forebrain--that gob of gray matter which distinguishes a human being from a dog. When those neurons close down, the midbrain takes over, and the thought processes and reflexes are indistinguishable from a dog's. The battlefield and the realm of violent crime are the realm of mid-brain responses. Yet within the midbrain, in almost every species, there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing one's own kind. When animals with antlers fight one another, they head butt each other in the most harmless fashion; only against other species do they go to the side to gore.

When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, that resistance in the midbrain generally prevents us from killing. Throughout human history, when humans have fought each other, there has been a lot of posturing, noise-making, fleeing and submission. The ancient battles were nothing more than great shoving matches. It wasn't until one side turned and ran that the vast majority of the killing happened, and most of that was stabbing people in the back.

In more modern times, Patty Griffith demonstrated that the killing potential of the average US Civil War regiment was 500-to-1000 men per minute. Yet, the actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). Of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the Battle of Gettysburg, 90% were loaded. This is odd because it took 95% of the time to load a musket and only 5% to fire. Even more amazingly, over half of the muskets had multiple loads in the barrel. The reality is that the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but at the moment of truth he could not bring himself to kill. And so he would bring the weapon down and load it again. One weapon was found with 23 loads in the barrel. Of those who did fire, the vast majority fired over the enemy's head.

During World War II, US Army Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall assembled a team of researchers. They asked the individual soldier what he did in battle, and discovered that only 15-20% of riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.

That's the reality of the battlefield. Men are willing to die, but they're not willing to kill. When the military became aware of that, they systematically went about trying to fix this "problem". By the Korean War, around 55% of US soldiers were willing to fire to kill. By the Vietnam War, the rate rose to over 90%.

How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers is instructive because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods the military uses are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and role modelling.

1. Desensitization.

Brutalization and desensitization are what happen at boot camp. From the moment they step off the bus, new recruits are physically and verbally abused. They endure countless push-ups and endless hours of standing at attention or running with heavy loads, while trained professionals take turns screaming at them. Their heads are shaved; they are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all traces of individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down existing values and lead soldiers to accept a new set of values. In the end, they accept violence as a normal and essential survival skill in their brutal new world.

Something very similar is happening to our children through violence in the media. But instead of at 18 years old, it begins at the age of 18 months, when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. At that age, children can watch something happening on television and imitate it. But it isn't until they're six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in which lets them understand where information comes from. They are psychologically unable to discern the difference between fantasy and reality.

This means that when a young child sees somebody being shot, stabbed, raped or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. It is the psychological equivalent of introducing your children to a friend, letting them play with that friend and then butchering that friend in front of their eyes in the living room. And this happens to our children hundreds of times. They are told, "This is not real, it's just TV", they nod their heads and say okay, but the reality is that they can't tell the difference.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published a definitive study on what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance. The researchers studied nations and regions that were demographically and ethnically identical--except for the presence of television. In every single case, in the nation, region or city with television, there was an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That's how long it takes for a brutalized three-to-five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age".

The data linking violence in the media to violence in society is superior to that linking cancer and tobacco, proven by hundreds of scientific studies. The Journal of the American Medical Association (June 10, 1992) concluded, "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."

Classical conditioning is what happened to Pavlov's dog, who learned to associate the ringing of a bell with food. The dog 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 with their hands bound behind them. One by one, young Japanese soldiers had to go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, there was an officer who would shoot the Japanese soldiers if they did not kill. All of their friends would cheer them on. Afterwards, they were treated to the best meal they'd had in months, alcohol and "comfort girls". The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.

This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern US military training, but there are some clear-cut examples of it being done by the media to our children. Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death and learn to associate it with what? Their favourite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.

After the Jonesboro shootings, a high school teacher told her students that someone had shot a bunch of their little brothers, sisters and cousins in the middle school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theatres when there is 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 as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum. They have obliterated their midbrain resistance to killing.

Operant conditioning is also known as stimulus response-training. A benign example is the use of flight simulators. An airline pilot in training sits in front of a flight simulator for endless, mind-numbing 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 necessary. One day, the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet, the plane is going down, 300 people are screaming behind him, he's scared out of his wits, but he does the right thing. Why? Because he's been conditioned to respond in a particular way to this crisis situation.

When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do. The military and police have made killing a conditioned response. Whereas target training in World War II used bullseye targets, now soldiers fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop up unexpectedly. The trainees only have a split second to shoot the target, and then it drops. Soldiers and police officers experience hundreds of repetitions of this. Later, on the battlefield or police beat, they reflexively shoot to kill--75-80% of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.

If you're troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time children play an interactive point-and-shoot video game, they're learning the same conditioned reflex?

As an expert witness in a murder case, I tried to explain to a jury that interactive video games had conditioned a teenage boy. He had put hundreds of dollars into video games learning to point and shoot. One day, he and a buddy decided to rob the local quickie mart. They walked in, and he pointed a pistol at the clerk's head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from about six feet, hitting the clerk between the eyes--a remarkable shot. Afterwards, the boy said, "It was a mistake; it wasn't supposed to happen."

One of the children allegedly involved in the Jonesboro shootings had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The other had almost no experience. Those two kids fired 27 shots from over 100 yards and hit 15 people. That's remarkable shooting. How did they do it? Video games.

In the military, new recruits are immediately confronted with a role model--the drill sergeant, who personifies violence and aggression.

Today the media are providing our children with role models. This can be seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and TV shows, but also in the news and the copycat crimes it inspires.

Research in the 1970's revealed the phenomenon of "cluster suicides", in which TV reporting of teen suicides was directly responsible for numerous copycat suicides of young, impressionable teenagers. Somewhere in every population there are potentially suicidal kids who will say to themselves, "I'll show those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV." Because of this research, television stations today generally do not cover suicides. But when pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the effect is exactly the same: Somewhere there is a potentially violent little boy who says, "I'll show those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV, too."

Thus copycat, cluster murders work their way across the country, like a virus spread by the six o'clock news. The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings can first be picked up at Pearl, Mississippi less than six months earlier, when a 16-year-old boy was accused of killing his mother and then going to school and shooting nine students. Two months later, in Paducah, Kentucky, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing three students and wounding five others. Fifteen days later, in Stamps, Arkansas, a 14-year-old boy hid in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school. 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 couldn't have helped but hear about it.

So what is the road home from the dark and lonely place to which we have travelled?

* One route infringes on civil liberties. The city of New York has made some remarkable progress in bringing down crime rates, but this may very well have been done at the expense of civil liberties. People who are fearful say that's a price they are willing to pay.

* Another route would be that if you don't like what is on television, "just turn it off". Yet, every one of the parents of the 15 shooting victims in Jonesboro could have protected their children from TV violence, and it wouldn't have done a bit of good--because down the road were two little boys whose parents didn't "turn it off".

* Another route is gun control, but that won't be easy. Americans have a mentality that doesn't trust the government and believes that every individual should be responsible for taking care of himself and his own family. When the media portray violence, Americans become fearful and arm themselves. The more guns there are, the more violence there is; and the more violence there is, the greater the desire for guns. We're trapped in a spiral of self-dependence and lack of trust. Real progress will never be made until we reduce this level of fear. It will take decades, maybe even a century, before we wean Americans off their guns.

* We need to make progress in the fight against child abuse, racism, poverty and the breakdown of the family. Research demonstrates that one major source of harm associated with single-parent families occurs when the TV becomes the second parent.

* We ought to work toward legislation which outlaws violent video games for children. There is no constitutional right for children to play games that teach them to kill.

* The day may also be coming when juries will sock it to the networks in the only place they really understand--their wallets--just as is being done to the tobacco industry.

* Most of all, people need to be informed about what is happening. "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free," Jesus said (John 8:32). The problem is that our key means of public education is television. In the days after the Jonesboro shootings, I was interviewed by Canadian, US and international TV, radio and newspapers. The American television networks simply would not touch the media violence aspect of the story. Time after time, idealistic young network producers contacted me, but, unlike in other media, their stories were killed by the networks. The networks have blood on their hands, and they dare not admit it. The networks will courageously expose anything--except themselves. A CBS-TV executive told me he knows all about the linkage between media and violence; his in-house people have advised him not to expose his child to TV in any way until she's old enough to read, and then select very carefully what she sees.

* We need the moral courage to stand up and censure those around us who think that media violence is okay. I was on a radio call-in show in Texas when a woman called in and said, "My 13-year-old boy spent the night with a neighbour boy. After that night, he started having nightmares. I got him to admit to me what the nightmares were about. While he was at the neighbour's house they watched "splatter" movies all night long--people cutting people up with chainsaws and stuff like that. I called the neighbours and told them, `You are sick people. I couldn't feel any differently about you if you had given my son pornography or alcohol. 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.' "

* There are many things that the Christian community can do. Youth activities can provide an alternative to television, and churches can lead the way in providing alternative locations for latch-key kids. Fellowship groups can provide guidance and support to young parents as they strive to raise their kids without the destructive influence of the media. Mentoring programs can pair mature, godly women with young mothers to help them through the preschool ages without having to use the TV as a babysitter. Most of all, churches can call people to decency, love and peace as an alternative to death and destruction.

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman retired from the US Army in February, 1998. He now teaches psychology at Arkansas State University, is director of the Killology Research Group in Jonesboro, Ark. and has written On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little, Brown and Co., 1996). This article is adapted from one published in Christianity Today, Aug. 10. 1998.

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