(media/video game violence)
by David Grossman
A military expert on the psychology of killing
explains how today's media condition kids to
pull the trigger.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 abusing 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.
"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.
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.
Copyright(c) 1998 by the author or Christianity
Today, Inc./Christianity Today magazine. For reprint
information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail
ctedit@aol.com.
August 10, 1998 Vol. 42, No. 9, Page 30