Imagine those idiots from the NRA making this point. 

I think this one will ice the cake!!

Cars doan kill...stupid drivers do.

Same story.

The availability of guns are an issue.  Sometimes the guns are acquired through ligit means and then used for such acts.  In this case, he was not the owner however, it was easily available in his home.  There is some 300 mio ligit guns out there, so I'm not sure how this could now be rolled back.  This is not a simple issue as even an appeal for voluntary surrender will make an insignificant dent.

 

I still don't understand why the mother needed to have these guns in her home, especially having an unstable son.  This is a cultural issue here in the US.

 

We have to accept this as part of this society.

They do have a point tough you may not agree.  I don't see this changing, the NRA won't get banned, guns will remain out there, so the solution will be complex and this risks never fully mitigated.

 

Connecticut is one of the strictest states with guns, yet it happened so easily. The perp was not the owner of the weapons.

The President and Congress need to stop pandering to the NRA, PERIOD!!

How many more will have to die , no one and no where is safe anymore.

 

In exit polls last election 72% of NRA members said  they in agreement for better gun control laws.

Knee-jerk reaction don't solve any problems.  What control could have prevented him, he stole it from his mother who, by any measure, was a legitimate and qualifying owner.

 

This is a complex and difficult issue and no easy solution is at hand.  You cannot just legislate it away.

We had legally available guns for many hundreds of years without kids going on killing sprees. Two things have changed: we have entered a period of cultural pessimism, especially after the wave of political assassinations in the 1960s, and there is one other new development: the US military began to develop computer simulators to help soldiers overcome their natural revulsion to the taking of human life, by having them undergo thousands of repetitions of simulated killing to de-sensitize them. This in and of itself is creepy in a "Clockwork Orange" sort of way. But what is far creepier is that someone decided it would be a smart thing to mass-market these killing simulators as entertainment for children, in the form of point-and-shoot video games. The results should have been predictable. Lt. Col. David Grossman has written some useful material on this topic.

Correct Henry.  There is no "mechanical" solution to this problem.  Slaughter of humans have been made childs-play with all the realistic video games which proliferate the society where, for a few, it's real.  The policing style in the US where killing people when in doubt is the norm has added.  Add into the mix the beaming of US military action abroad where you kill everyone in site when in doubt, the youth have become very insensitive and embrace this value.

 

Take this mind-set and add the available of guns, the very few among us will play this out.  I hate to sound pessimistic, but this stuff is here to stay.

 Shut your behind. I have played with first person shooters and other RPG games all my life and I do not have any inclination to kill anyone. Everyone I know play these games and most of us do not even own guns. I play all of the Bethesda games, is friends with a couple of the guys who work there  but none of us have  any inclination to be any of the character we can create. The distinction is game play vs shooting one in real life. In first person shooters the object is to confront an evil. Here these freaks kill innocents.

Storm, I play war gamed with my boys too.  99.9999% will not mix the lines, but that .00001% who does and gain access to the means will create havoc.

Quite a few issues need to be looked at, gun control, mental health  and  violent video games and also the mental state of the NRA .

The "killing" culture is baked into the American DNA. The very act of crossing the Atlantic meant that you would kill to defend the freedoms you left Europe for, and you will kill native Indians to preserve and expand your life. The 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms was born out of this.

 

Henry's point about guns being around for a long time and only in recent decades has there been the proliferation of mass killing, and especially a school situation. Losing our innocence in the period of assassinations in the 60s is however not the start of this - it may be a statistical coincidence.

 

We've seen how America uses its military to protect and advance freedoms and we saw how defense of values caused hundreds of thousands of Americans to be killed by other Americans. The detachment of the human element of war (video drone killings, simulations, etc.) has led to weekend warriors (paint balls) and video game practitioners. The evidence on the contribution of this to mass killings in a mall or school is as yet to be compulsive.

 

There have been approaches to mitigating such killings that do not dilute the 2nd Amendment rights - like banning assault weapons and having weapons concealed and not brought into some places of gathering. Some of these though have expired, or were rolled back in the not-so-long-ago wild-west days of G.W. Bush.

 

In the Connecticut school shooting case you had (i) a mentally disturbed person; (ii) easily available means of mass killing; (iii) an understandable absence of preventative measures in the school. President Obama called for "meaningful actions to prevent" these tragedies. Most elected officials and Mayors of America's urban centers are demanding some action. Like the movement on same-sex marriage , abortion and immigration, America will come around to some measures on the second Amendment.

The mother is to be blamed in this instance for her not taking the necessary steps to make sure her killing tools were not easily accessable to others.

You are assuming she didn't, you don't know that.  Truth of the matter, I still don't know why people need guns in the first place, but that won't change.

I am against gun control.  When you meet a black bear in the bush at least you have a 30% chance of surviving the attack if you have a large caliber gun.

If you are a bushman, you need a gun.  I agree.

Well, that certainly does seem consistent with your overall sweet disposition.

Dude, the only consistent thing here is the easy availability of guns to those who kill and an on going paranoia that there are conspiracies afloat that is targeted at them. Does that ring a bell? I hope you are not one of those with a large stash of guns in your closet or you would be a prime candidate since you see conspiracy everywhere.

 

This idea of US overseas military adventurism, desensitization due to video games etc is an easy grasping for answers from a conspiracy theorist now budding psychiatrist. You folks do not need evidence. That is besides the point.  Well, fool, the available evidence to date is the kid was mentally unbalanced and loved guns.

 

Perhaps, ( if you are game for conspiracies) if he had listened to some Tupack and Biggie or played some Quake, Wolfenstein or Deus Ex he may have gotten the killing disease out of his mind. Actually, he would clearly know it is the evil people Mechs and monsters you kill and not five year olds. Now go take your prozac or what ever you are suppose to take least you go for your guns.

Hahahahahehehe!

hahahaha...good one.  Storm, you walked into it.

That would be so if indeed my real life disposition could be discerned from the persona on the site.

 

This man is an idiot and a conspiracy nutcase. He gets an orgasm every time he conceives of a new conspiracy theory with the British at the head of it and the US their willing pawn. I bet they are the one manufacturing these games to deform the psychology of kids worldwide!

 

No one has remotely broached the causative agents to this tragedy as US military adventurism abroad or insensitivity to killing on account of excessive game play of first person shooters.

 

The kid was plain psychologically unbalanced and the ready access to guns on account of his mom's compulsive  hobby of collecting a high powered arsenal is the direct cause.  His mental peculiarity presents distinctly as an aspergers disorder but we do not even know that.

So Stromy, how you suggest approaching this problem.

The approach has to be a balance of getting rid of the easy access to these high powered assault weapons. Mental  health of troubled kids have to be taken seriously with help for parents being readily available. This kid as it turned our ( i had a lucky guess) is an aspergers  kid. i know one such kid, the adopted child of one of my wife's cousin. He is normal in everyday except he has no conscience.

Quite a few of the PPP GNIers has that same problem!!!

You're being extremely generous Chief......

How do you explain, then, the fact that before the 1990s there was access to high powered assault weapons, there were kids with mental illnesses, and yet, there were no mass killings by kids? What changed in our society that has made these killings such a frequent occurrence? (Incidentally, although I don't have any particular take on Aspergers, those who do are already presenting a case that there is no connection between Aspergers and violent behavior.)

I do not have to explain anything. I know easy access to guns has always been the consequence of people getting killed when some damaged person, mental or otherwise, murders others.

 

Aspergers is a category of autism. The individuals are high functioning but have no impulse control and are often socially distant. I also know they can be violent because I have witnessed it many times. My wife's cousin is writing a book on the lack of state and federal support. The schools according to her are warehouses where the kids do not progress and never makes a social connection. It is the reason, she never put her son in one even though he  at 15 was a six footer at 200 lbs and prone to tantrums when things did not go his way. 

 

As he is presently he is a gentle giant, acutely smart, musically gifted, (actually he is a genius in multiple areas) but he still has the social skills of a gnat. The only hope for him is that he did  make a connection with a girl like himself and the two balance each other out.

So, evidently you have little to add to this discussion. Although the revelation about your point-and-shoot gaming obsession does help others to understand your behavior on this board.

 And you of the infinite conspiracies do!!!! I play point and shoot games. To say I have an obsession with that would be your characterization.  You have little option to do otherwise. One would be wise to have  you tested for aspergers.

 

The point is fool, every nation of the west have people who play these games. The gaming industry is huge and games like war craft constitute a significant income to Microsoft. Only in the us do we have these problems with mass murders. In France there is no such and they are avid gamers. The same goes for any other European nation. The commonality here is the easy access to very powerful weapons.

 

In domestic violence instances, those who end up dead almost always are in homes with fire arms. Extrapolate from that to the troubled individual. The ready access to guns make the killing possible.

As usual, you prate loudly and ignorantly. Last year there were the mass killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik, also addicted to point-and-shoot gaming; in 2009, a murder spree in a school in Winnenden, Germany, by Tim Kretschmer(also a gamer); another mass killing by Robert Steinhäuser (also a gamer) in Erfurt, Germany, 2002; and one in Finland by Matti Juhani Saari (also a gamer) in 2008. This does not mean that you or any other gamer is necessarily destined to be a mass killer in real life (as opposed to in your fantasy life); but it seems to me to be fairly obvious that to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours simulating the shooting, stabbing or incinerating of countless images of human beings is not a recipe for mental health.

 

Breivik was a sick political zealot no less than a suicide bomber thinking he is making a difference in fostering his neo nazi cause.  No game made him do what he did.

 

Tim Kretschmer was a budding sadomasochist who was already psychologically damaged individual. His crimes were driven by his mental deficiencies and not by video games.

 

Matti Juhani Saari had a hatred for humanity and women in general so once again you have damaged goods to begin with.

The overwhelming findings in all of these instances were that these were mentally disturbed individuals and that their murderous assault on innocent people were that they had access to guns. There are no findings that their disease pathology was a  consequence video games.

 

None of these occurrences are as regular in these nations as in the US.

 

Doing anything in excess is not a recipe for a good life so you are not plumbing some hither to fore unknown truth. As for my life, I am happy with it. It should be no concern of yours be it good or bad in your eyes. It meets my expectations of a good life.

(CNN) -- On Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, a line of 26 black crosses stand in the sand, with the Stars and Stripes behind them and a pot of flowers alongside.

 

They are the tribute of the group Rio de Paz -- River of Peace -- to the victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School, from a group that knows all too well what tragedies gun violence can inflict on society.

 

Brazil, Norway, Britain, France and Australia are among many countries that have seen terrible episodes of gun violence in recent years.

 

But alongside the many expressions of sympathy and condolences that have poured into Newtown, Connecticut, from around the world, there is also a sense of bewilderment that such tragedies happen on an almost routine basis in America.

 

"Routine" may seem an exaggerated or callous description, but it was President Barack Obama who said at an interfaith service Sunday night in Newtown: "We can't accept events like this as routine."

 

Even so, commentaries from abroad often include a sense of resignation that much can or will be done to prevent such atrocities in the future.

John Cassidy, who is British and blogs for The New Yorker, writes of driving to his hometown of Leeds in northern England, as he heard the news of the killings at Sandy Hook.

 

Reaction to Newtown school killings

"Nowhere have mass shootings been as prevalent as the United States, and nowhere has the policy reaction been so pathetic," he wrote this weekend.

Brian Masters, writing in the UK's Daily Telegraph, agreed.

 

"No American politician will have the nerve to propose the only cure to this repetitive insanity, which would be a sensible, mature and responsible attitude towards the ownership and use of guns," he predicted.

In the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, commentator Tzipi Shmilovitz was more brutal.

 

"America is not ready to talk about how it is easier to get a handgun than it is to see a doctor, not ready to speak about the video games that have extreme violence. It is just willing to sweep up everything under the carpet of tears."

 

And over at Haaretz, one of Israel's leading commentators, Chemi Shalev, lamented a "combustible mix of angry American young men, often disturbed and usually white, spurred on by the pervasive and always growing presence of limitless violence in popular American culture, together with the easy-access, open market of guns and ammo, which together produce these shooting slaughters with such sickening regularity. ...

"And if you pour in the often gruesome violence so rampant in the computer and video games that so many American boys are weaned on and addicted to, it should come as no surprise, perhaps, that not only are the most evil and inhuman of mass murders possible, they may soon become commonplace," he added.

 

Such observations are not new. Five years ago Chris Lockwood, U.S. editor of The Economist wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "We might be a little surprised that a country with all the ingenuity and energy that America has seems simply to throw up its hands when it comes to guns, and in effect declares that the homicide rate and regular appalling school massacres, are insolvable problems."

 Vigil held for shooting victims

Obama has now suggested otherwise -- broadening his existing support for a ban on assault weapons.

 

'SNL' honors school shooting victims

"We can't tolerate this anymore; these tragedies must end," he said Sunday.

 

"We will be told that the causes are complex and that is true. No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil and prevent acts of violence, but that can't be an excuse for inaction," he continued.

 

Commentators and academics from other countries who have looked at this "inaction" in America often raise the following points.

 

The polarization in U.S. politics means that on the really difficult issues, paralysis is more likely than progress. The power of lobbying interests -- and in the case of guns that means the National Rifle Association -- contributes to that paralysis, they say.

 

They also assert that the U.S. Constitution and its political culture protects individual liberty -- or license -- to a much greater degree than is the case almost anywhere else. That includes allowing the ownership of powerful firearms capable of killing dozens within a minute.

 

Sixteen years ago, both Australia and the United Kingdom saw gun rampages similar to those at Virginia Tech, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the theater in Aurora, Colorado, and Sandy Hook.

More: How other countries have dealt with massacres

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In the town of Dunblane, Scotland, 16 children and one adult were shot dead at an elementary school in 1996. The gunman then shot himself. The atrocity led to revisions to the Firearms Act that in effect banned the possession of handguns in Britain.

Jack Straw, the minister who pushed the legislation through Parliament, said after the Sandy Hook killings that he would "not put money" on U.S. laws changing.

 

In a BBC interview, Straw added: "I think sensible people want it to happen, but the National Rifle Association, which is this extraordinary gun lobby and gun manufacturers' lobby, controls politics in a number of states."

 

One tweet put it more bluntly: "Dunblane,1996. 16 dead kids+adult. 1.2 million sign petitions. UK govt. enacts new law. Halts private guns. Tag, USA. You're It."

 

In that same year, a 28-year old Australian killed 35 people with two semiautomatic rifles in just eight minutes. Then-Prime Minister John Howard pushed through a law that banned assault weapons and instituted a gun buy-back policy. (Some 650,000 were taken out of circulation.)

Howard recalls telling an audience in Texas in 2008 that the law was among his proudest achievements in 12 years as prime minister.

"There was an audible gasp of amazement," he wrote in an op-ed this year in The Sydney Morning Herald.

 

After the mass shooting in Aurora this year, Howard said he was not optimistic it would change anything.

 

"The responses of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney ... were as predictable as they were disappointing," he said.

 

"There are many American traits which we Australians could well emulate to our great benefit. But when it comes to guns we have been right to take a radically different path," Howard concluded.

 

Australian-born media magnate Rupert Murdoch chimed in Saturday on his Twitter account: "When will politicians find courage to ban automatic weapons? As in Oz after similar tragedy."

 

Some columnists don't detect any popular pressure in the United States for change, even if the gun control debate has flared in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.

 

Mirjam Remie, who writes for the Dutch newspaper Handelsblad, observes that "support for stricter gun laws has been steadily declining for decades. According to Gallup, it is 44%, but twelve years ago it was 66%."

Debate rages about the relationship between the availability of guns in society and the number of deaths caused by guns. But the laws enacted in the UK and Australia sharply restricting gun ownership do appear to have made a difference.

 

A study (PDF) by researchers at Harvard University in 2011 found that in the 18 years before the new law was enacted in Australia, a total of 13 gun attacks had led to four or more fatalities. In the 16 years since the new law, the number was zero. Individual homicides involving guns have also fallen.

 

Japan has some of the most restrictive regulations in the world on gun ownership.Shotgun licenses for hunting require a lengthy application; handguns are forbidden. Homicides by gunfire in Japan rarely get into double figures in a year.

 

In the view of author David Kopel, who has studied Japan's gun control laws in great detail, its regulations work because they are "part of a vast mosaic of social control ... a pervasive cultural theme that the individual is subordinate to society and to the government."

 

That would not be acceptable in the United States. Even so, while recognizing the power of the Second Amendment, foreign commentators are not shy of recommending what could and should be done to tackle gun violence in the U.S.

 

In the UK, The Guardian editorialized in the wake of the Newtown shootings: "A proper federal system of regulation, including background checks registration, and limits on the type and number of weapons an individual can own, would bring the U.S. belatedly into line with other civilized countries, as would a determined push back against state legislation allowing the carrying of concealed weapons in public."

Hours before the Sandy Hook massacre, Michigan lawmakers passed legislation allowing those with concealed pistol licenses to carry guns into schools, hospitals and churches among other places.

 

 

In the words of one commentator: "No society that holds itself up as an example to the world should, as the United States does, brazenly shrug off what are clearly deep national character flaws when it comes to our love of guns or our celebration of hate politics."

 

 

The writer was not a foreigner, but an American -- David Rothkopf -- writing in Foreign Policy. And he was writing not this weekend, but after Jared Loughner shot and killed six people, and injured more than a dozen, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in January 201

"Teaching Kids To Kill"

By Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
Phi Kappa Phi National Forum, Fall 2000, 2500 words

Authors note: This was published in Phi Kappa Phi “National Forum,” in their Fall 2000 issue. "National Forum is one of the most prestigious, interdisciplinary, academic journals. An earlier version was published in “Christianity Today,” “Saturday Evening Post,” “US Catholic,” “Hinduism Today,” and many other US publications, and it was translated and published in periodicals in nine different languages. I am the copyright holder, and I authorize reproduction and distribution of this article by the readers of this web page.

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 eight shots at a high school prayer group, hitting eight kids, five of them head shots and the other three upper torso (Grossman & DeGaetana, 1999).

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 we 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

First we must understand the magnitude of the problem. The murder rate does not accurately represent our situation. 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-1990’s (Statistical Abstracts of the United States, 1957-1997).

Even with small downturns recently, 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. 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 newfactor that is occurring in all of these countries (Grossman, 1999b). Like heart disease, there are many factors involved in the causation of violent crime, and we must never downplay any of them. But there is only one new variable that is present in each of these nations, bearing the 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.

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 hardwired 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 (Marshall, 1998). You can observe this in killing throughout history, as I have outlined in much greater detail in my book, On Killing, (Grossman, 1996), in my three peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries, (Grossman, 1999a, 1999b, and Murray, 1999) and in my entry in the Oxford Companion to American Military History (1999).

That's the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are willing and able 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 Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman, 1999a).

The Methods in this Madness: Brutalization

The training methods the military uses are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. Let us explain these and then observe how the media does the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards.

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. 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. It begins at the age of 18 months, when a child can begin to understand and mimic what is on television. But up until they're six or seven years old they are developmentally, psychologically, physically unable to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. Thus, when a young child sees somebody on TV being shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered, to them it is real, and some of them embrace violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in a brutal new world. (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).

On June 10th, 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a definitive 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 toddler 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 children. (Centerwall, 1992).

The JAMA 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 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” (Centerwall, 1992).

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 (AMA), the American Academy of Pediatrics (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 (Grossman, 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. Remember the ringing bell, the food, and the dog could not hear the bell without salivating?

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've 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. Kids watch vivid images of human death and suffering and they learn to associate it with: laughter, cheers, popcorn, soda, and their girlfriend's perfume (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).

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 human death and suffering with pleasure (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).

Operant Conditioning

The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a powerful procedure of stimulus-response training. We see this with pilots in flight simulators, or children in fire drills. When the fire alarm is set off, the children learn to file out in orderly fashion. One day there's a real fire and they're frightened out of their little wits, but they do exactly what they've been conditioned to do (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).

In World War II we taught our soldiers to fire at bullseye targets, but that training failed miserably because 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's 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, 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of training (Grossman & Siddle, 1999).

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 in Paducah, Kentucky the school killer fired eight shots, getting eight hits, on eight different milling, scrambling, screaming kids. Five of them were head shots (Grossman & DeGaetano, 1999).

Where did he get this phenomenal skill? Well, there is a $130-million law suit against the video game manufacturers in that case, 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 Capital Hill conference in Washington, DC, 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 your role model is your drill sergeant. He personifies violence, aggression, and discipline. (The discipline, and doing it to adults, are the safeguard)(Grossman, 1996). The drill sergeant, and heroes such as John Wayne, Audey Murphy, Sergeant York and Chesty Puller, have always been used as role models 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 1970's 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, television stations today generally do not cover teen suicides. But when the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the effect is tragically similar. 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, may emulate them. This effect is magnified when the role model is a teenager, and the effect on other teens can be profound.

In Japan, Canada, and 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 turn the killers into celebrities?

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.

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. "I just came to find out how to get my little girl's body back," she said. But the body had been taken to the state capital, for an autopsy. Told this, she said, "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 all she had in all the world, and all she wanted to do was wrap her little girl’s body in a blanket and take her home. Some people’s solution to the problem of media violence is, “If you don’t like it, just turn it off.” If that is your only solution to this problem, then come to Jonesboro, and tell her how this would have kept her little girl safe.

All of us can keep our kids safe from this toxic, addictive substance, and it won’t be enough if the neighbors are not doing the same. Perhaps the time has come to consider regulating what the violence industry is selling to kids, controlling the sale of visual 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 must work against child abuse, racism, poverty and children’s access to guns, and in rebuilding our families, but we must also take on the producers of media violence. The solution strategy that I submit for consideration is, “education, legislation, litigation.”

Simply put, we need to work toward “legislation” which outlaws violent video games for children. In July, 2000, the city of Indianapolis passed just such an ordinance, and every 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. And we are very close to being able to do to the media, through “litigation,” what is being done to the tobacco industry, hotting them in the only place they understand--their wallets.

Most of all, the American people need to be informed. Every parent must be warned of the impact of violent visual 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 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." (Reuters. 2000, March 19). That is what the networks are selling, and we do not have to buy it. An educated and informed society can and must find its way home from the dark and lonely place to which it has traveled.

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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 Warrior Science Group in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and has written Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie, and Video Game Violence, (Crown/Random, 1999) and On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little, Brown and Co., 1996).

There are absolutely no definitive studis pointing to video games as instrumental to these mass murder rampages. That is a fact. What is clearer is the obvious commonality that these individuals are were troubled and their parents, neighbor and friends noticed that. While not all troubled teens go on a rampage the necessity for more screenings etc  in combination with higher awareness at schools and campuses can serve as a deterrent but not as a cure.

So, you think it's wise to have troubled individuals undergo hundreds of hours of the same training programs that are used to help soldiers overcome their inhibitions about killing, and teach them to fire with amazing accuracy?

 Quit making an ass of your self Wolfenstein is a program to train soldier? If so they should actually use it as compat training. The same goes for any of the games inclusive of those like the widely popular Warcraft, etc. None are used in conditioning programs to create a core fighting unit by any one.  These games are fantasy and the enemy are often imaginary creatures or if persons those imbued with unusual evil characteristics.  No one in the real world  thinks these things have any similarity to a boot camp training regimen. Further, boot camp does not screw up soldiers. War does.

 

Millions of copies of Warcraft were sold and if you combine that with the other top games like battlefield 3,  Halo,Crysis, Call of Duty etc  we are speaking of tens of millions of players. Why is it only a few  of from among the mentally damaged people with known peculiarities who go on to murder? Get it fool, even mentally damaged people do not go out en-mass and murder people. Only a few do  this kind of damage and and to this point no one knows why.  It is obviously not on account they played a shoot em up game.

D2, you are quite the dunce. Have you ever spoken with a soldier straight out of boot camp? They are confused, disoriented, zombified, and they will call you "sir" and instantly obey any request, thinking it to be an order.

 

Every sophistical argument you make to the effect that there persons who use the murder simulators without actually going out and committing murder in real life, could be applied with equal validity to other components of the problem. For example, there are many people who own assault rifles and never shoot a human with them. It were better to ask, do we really need our citizens to have assault rifles? Or, do we really need our citizens to simulate mass murder, regardless of how much money it may make for Microsoft?

 

And again, your countless hours of repetitions on the murder simulators have clearly affected your cognitive abilities, which I'm sure were never anything to write home about in the first place. The military killing simulators were developed early on. It was only later that someone had the brilliant idea of marketing them as toys to persons such as yourself. Here is a further explanation from Lt. Col. Grossman:

 

You see, in World War II, we had a problem. And the problem was, that the vast majority of our soldiers would not fire. We had magnificent soldiers. We had magnificent weapons. The problem was, that we had crummy training. And in the training, we taught our soldiers to fire at bull's-eye targets.

Now, what is the fundamental flaw in teaching your soldiers to fire at bull's-eyes. Well, as most of you figured out, we have no known instances of any bull's-eyes ever attacking any of our soldiers. If you want a soldier to be capable of killing a human being, he must rehearse on a human being. Anybody that's been in the military in the last 40 years, or law-enforcement training in the last 30 years, what you learn to shoot at, was not a bull's-eye target, but a man-shaped silhouette that pops up in your field of view.

You see, if I wanted you to fly a plane, I'd have to put you in a flight simulator. A driving simulator isn't close enough. Under stress, in the plane, your experience in the driving simulator isn't close enough, and it won't transfer to the reality. I've got to put you in the most realistic flight simulator I can.

And in the same way, if I want you to pull the trigger and kill a human being under stress, I have to put you in a killing simulator. In the military, in the law-enforcement community, the conditioned stimulus is a man-shaped silhouette that pops up in your field of view. Conditioned response—you have a split second to engage the target, you hit the target, the target drops. Stimulus-response. Stimulus-response. Stimulus-response. A few hundred repetitions of that, and then when an enemy soldier pops up in front of our guys in Vietnam, boom—we shot, and we shot to kill. And we raised the firing rate approximately fivefold; five times more individual soldiers, left to their own devices, in Vietnam, were willing to fire than in World War II, because of the training.

Now, a bull's-eye is completely different from a human being. Firing at bull's-eyes doesn't transfer to that skill. There's a vast chasm between being a healthy human being, and killing another being—and most people cannot cross that chasm. And firing at a bull's-eye doesn't help. But, firing at a man-shaped silhouette, firing at a simulated human being, that is close enough to the reality that I can use it as an intermediate step, that it can prepare me, it can rehearse me, mentally, for the act of killing.

And then, in the violent video games, when I actually hold the plastic gun in my hand, and I pull the trigger, and I feel the recoil, and when I hit the target, the target drops, not only do I learn the mental skill to kill, but I also develop the physical ability to kill—the pointing skills, the trigger control, that allowed the young boy in Paducah, Kentucky to fire eight shots, and get eight hits on eight different kids—a supernatural accuracy.

These violent video games are murder simulators. They're not just murder simulators—they are mass-murder simulators, because the child drills, and drills, and drills, and drills, to kill every living creature in front of him, until he runs out of targets, or he runs out of bullets.