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

by Dave Grossman

War has often been a sexist environment, but death is an equal opportunity employer.

The harsh, unforgiving environment of warfare is a realm in which only the best and most valuable tactics, strategies, and ideas are preserved, and that which has no utility is quickly cast off.

Wishful thinking and pie-in-the-sky theories are usually among the first victims of warfare.

But the link between killing and war is like the link between sex and relationships.

the act of killing: the intimacy and psychological impact of the act, the stages of the act, the social and psychological implications and repercussions of the act, and the resultant disorders (including impotence and obsession).

despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.

the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be unable to kill.

Basically, all that S. L. A. Marshall was arguing was that some of our warriors do not shoot in combat, and more realistic targets will raise the firing rate. Marshall was the pioneer whose research and writing spurred modern trainers to change from bull’s-eye targets to realistic combat simulations.

Today the body of scientific data supporting realistic training is so powerful that there is a Federal Circuit Court decision which states that, for law-enforcement firearms training to be legally sufficient, it must incorporate realistic training, to include stress, decision-making, and shoot–don’t shoot training.

viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children.

prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.

A thousand sound scholarly studies have proven that if we put media violence in a child’s life, we are more likely to get violent behavior.

When people become angry, or frightened, they stop thinking with their forebrain (the mind of a human being) and start thinking with their midbrain (which is indistinguishable from the mind of an animal). They are literally “scared out of their wits.” The only thing that has any hope of influencing the midbrain is also the only thing that influences a dog: classical and operant conditioning.

That is what is used when training firefighters and airline pilots to react to emergency situations: precise replication of the stimulus that they will face (in a flame house or a flight simulator) and then extensive shaping of the desired response to that stimulus.

We do not tell schoolchildren what they should do in case of a fire, we condition them;

and when they are frightened, they do the right thing.

Through the media we are also conditioning children to kill; and when they are frightened or angr...

The “violence immune system” exists in the midbrain, and conditioning in the media creates an “acquired deficiency” in this immune system. With this weakened immune system, the victim becomes more vulnerable to violence-enabling factors, such as poverty, discrimination, drug addiction (which can provide powerful motives for crime in order to fulfill real or perceived needs), or guns and gangs (which can provide the means and “support structure” to commit violent acts).

poverty, drugs, gangs, discrimination, and the availability of firearms all predispose more blacks than whites toward violence.

this is identical to the genocidal process in which for centuries the white man used alcohol in a systematic policy to destroy the culture of the American Indian. For a variety of cultural and genetic reasons, the Indians were predisposed toward alcoholism, and we dumped it into them as a crucial part of the process that ultimately destroyed their civilization. The pumping of media violence into the ghettos today is equally genocidal. Media violence-enabling in the ghetto is the moral equivalent of shouting, “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. As a result, murder is the number-one cause of death among black male teens, and 25 percent of all black males in their twenties are in jail, on probation, or on parole.