Kids To Kill"
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.”
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 &
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."
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
© 1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction
in any form reserved.