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

by Dave Grossman

You perceive that the role model has a key trait that makes him/her similar to you.

The role model has the power to reward

envy the role model’s receipt of reward...

From this time on I will be your mother, your father, your sister, and your brother. I will be your best friend and your worst enemy. I will be there to wake you up in the morning, and I will be there to tuck you in at night. You will jump when I say “frog” and when I tell you to s——your only question will be “What color.” IS THAT CLEAR?

He is also the reason that military service has always been a positive factor for young people from delinquent or disadvantaged backgrounds.

But he does all of them well.

But today there is a new kind of hero in movies, a hero who operates outside the law. Vengeance is a much older, darker, more atavistic, and more primitive concept than law, and these new antiheroes are depicted as being motivated and rewarded for their obedience to the gods of vengeance rather than those of law. The fruit of this new cult of vengeance in American society can be seen in Columbine High School, Virginia Tech, and the Oklahoma City bombing. If we look into the mirror provided by the television screen, the reflection we see is one of a nation regressing from a society of law to a society of violence, vigilantes, and vengeance.

This new brand of role model is a brutal and usually supernaturally empowered murderer who is depicted as graphically torturing and murdering innocent victims.

Add to this the dissolution of the family. Children from all economic strata no longer have a censor, counsel, or role model at home. They turn to their peers as authority figures. In some cases they find a family in gangs.

The only connecting point in our society is the media.

Male power, male dominance, masculinity, male sexuality, male aggression are not biologically determined. They are conditioned….

What is conditioned can be deconditioned. Man can change.

that means controlling children’s access to firearms.

The current debates over euthanasia, abortion, and the death penalty indicate that we are divided over the ethics of life and death.

To sponsors, media executives claim that just a few well-placed seconds can control how America will spend its hard-earned money. But to Congress and other watchdog agencies they argue that they are not responsible for causing viewers to change the way they will respond to any emotionally charged, potentially violent circumstance that they may subsequently find themselves in. This in spite of the fact that, as of 1994, there have been more than two hundred studies demonstrating the correlation between television and violence.[4]

The medical and mental health communities have no agenda, no reason to twist the data. In general, the medical and mental health communities’ only goal is public health, and if individual members turn from that goal they are accountable to their state certification boards. The television, movie, and video game industries and their handful of (nonmedical) defenders can say anything they want, and generally do anything short of a provable prosecutable criminal act, and have no accountability.

Throughout history nations, corporations, and individuals have used noble-sounding concepts such as states’ rights, lebensraum, free-market economics, and Constitutional rights to mask their actions, but ultimately what they are doing is for their own personal gain and the result—intentional or not—is killing innocent men, women, and children. They participate in a diffusion of responsibility by referring to themselves as “the tobacco industry” or “the entertainment industry,” and we permit it, but they are ultimately individuals making individual moral decisions to participate in the destruction of their fellow citizens.

The study of killing in combat teaches us that soldiers who have had friends or relatives injured or killed in combat are much more likely to kill and commit war crimes.

No other result is possible if successive generations continue to grow up with greater and greater desensitization to the suffering of their fellow human beings.