Arming Children With the Ability to Kill: MSSNY Alliance Holds Conference Addressing Youth Violence

From MSSNY's News Of New York, December 2000

In their book, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence, authors Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano write:

In Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old boy who stole a gun from a neighbor's house, brought it to school and fired eight shots at a student prayer group as they were breaking up. Prior to stealing this weapon, he'd never shot a handgun before. Of the eight shots he fired, he had eight hits on eight different kids. Five were head shots, the other three upper torso. The result was three students dead, and one student paralyzed for life.

The FBI states that the average, experienced, qualified law enforcement officer, in the average shootout, at an average range of seven yards, hits with less than one bullet in five.

How does a child acquire such a killing ability? What would lead him to go out and commit such a horrific act?

The MSSNY Alliance addressed these very questions and today's epidemic of youth violence at its Conference 2000, held October 20-22 at the Long Island Marriott Hotel in Uniondale, NY. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman was one of the dynamic and fascinating speakers who shared, with over 60 members and spouses who attended, his knowledge and research of this critical public health problem.

Left to right: Joan Cincotta, AMSSNY president; speaker Lt. Col. Dave Grossman; Judy Ciccio, AMSSNY president-elect; and Marlene Medina, AMSSNY immediate past president.

Lt. Col. Grossman, in addition to having been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his writing, is a world renowned expert in the field of aggression and the roots of violence and violent crime. He is the founder of a new field of scientific endeavor — "Killology," which focuses on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations. A former West Point psychology professor and Army Ranger, he has testified before US Senate and Congressional committees and numerous state legislatures. He was an expert consultant in US vs. McVeigh (the first Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing case), and he was called on to brief teachers and administrators on how to deal with the aftermath of Columbine and other high school shootings. Lt. Col. Grossman spends much of his time teaching physicians, school faculty, and elite law enforcement organizations about killing.

Death and Horror as Entertainment
   Based on recent major scientific studies and empirical research, Lt. Col. Grossman advocates that movies, TV and video games are not just conditioning children to be violent — and unaware of the consequences of that violence — but are teaching the very mechanics of killing. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Juvenile Violence, "Children don't naturally kill; they learn it from violence in the home and most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, movies, and interactive video games."

Lt. Col. Grossman states that just as the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat, our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. He cited evidence that during World War II, only 15 to 20% of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier. He stated that when the military became aware of this so-called "problem," they fixed it. By the Korean War, around 55% of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. By Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90%. The training methods the military used to accomplish this are the same methods being used by the media industry today to train our children to kill. They are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning and role modeling.

Brutalization and Desensitization
   A child is first able to discern what is happening and mimic actions on television at the age of 18 months. But it is not until children are six to seven years old that the part of the brain that helps to understand where information comes from kicks in. Even though children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.

In his article, "Trained to Kill," Lt. Col. Grossman writes:

When young children see someone 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 watching 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 hundred upon hundreds of times. ...In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.

Classical Conditioning
   Lt. Col. Grossman explained that Classical Conditioning is to associate killing violent acts with pleasure. Classical conditioning doesn't just teach you to kill; it is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it. He stated:

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 doesn't 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
   Lt. Col. Grossman explained that operant conditioning is a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. "Every time a child plays an interactive video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex skills as a soldier or police officer in training." He further stated that our children are learning to kill, learning to like it — and from all the practice and training they receive from interactive video games — children are becoming extremely accurate at killing their targets. Lt. Col. Grossman further mentioned how children can scan the faces of fellow classmates, teachers or family members onto these video game characters to make their victims even more real.

Role Models
   "Lawless sociopaths" - these are the role models Lt. Col. Grossman feels the media are providing children with through movie and TV programming. He points to the following:

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."

Protecting Children from this Addictive Substance
   Lt. Col. Grossman believes that violence is the addictive substance in television, movies, and interactive video games, just as alcohol is the addictive substance in beer and nicotine in cigarettes.

He says that in order to remove this addictive substance, a national mobilization, to which the MSSNY Alliance and their physician spouses should play a part, is needed. Lt. Col. Grossman suggests three strategies: 1) Educate the public. 2) Legislate the product. 3) Take on the producers and purveyors of media violence through litigation.

We must educate the public about how to spot warning signs in their children and how to go about reporting when signs are there. "When we fail to take action, it is the same as giving that child permission to proceed," said Lt. Col. Grossman.

He stressed that we have helped parents fight for safeguards concerning alcohol, pornography, tobacco, and even consumer products such as cribs, car seats, and toys. "Our focus must now center on the media industry, which sells death and horror to children and teaches them violence is fun."

"The media will shout out that this is censorship," but Lt. Col. Grossman adds, "You will never hear anything on the evening news about joint statements being made to Congress by the medical community about the effects of television violence on children? Who is trying to censor who?"

According to Lt. Col. Grossman, "The day may 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." Time magazine predicts the same future and 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 is 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 1998).

For his shooting spree, Michael Carneal was sentenced in December 1998 to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 25 years.

Reprinted with Permission