On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

In video arcades children stand slack jawed but intent behind machine guns and shoot at electronic targets that pop up on the video screen. When they pull the trigger the weapon rattles in their hand, shots ring out, and if they hit the “enemy” they are firing at, it drops to the ground, often with cries of pain and chunks of flesh flying in the air. The important distinction between the killing-enabling process that occurs in video arcades and that of the military is that the military’s is focused on the enemy soldier, with particular emphasis on ensuring that the U.S. soldier acts only under authority. Yet even with these safeguards, the danger of future My Lai massacres among soldiers drawn from such a violent population must not be ignored, and, as we saw in the section “Killing and Atrocity,” the U.S. armed forces are taking extensive measures to control, constrain, and channel the violence of their troops in future conflicts. The video games that our children conduct their combat training on have no real sanction for firing at the wrong target. This is not an attack on all video games. Video games are an interactive medium.

This is the origin of this obsolete theory. Gamers never get PTDS from games as well as "desentization" to real violence. The mind perfectly separates what is a game and what is real even if the game is very realistic. Rampant gun violence is observed in only a handful of countries while the entire world plays violent games and nothing bad happens.