SIGHTINGS



Video Games Train Kids
To Kill Says Military Expert
By Andrea Baillie
The Canadian Press
8-26-99
 

 
HAMILTON -- An American psychologist who spent 25 years teaching soldiers how to kill says violent video games may be turning a whole generation of young people into killers.
 
In a chilling warning to Canada's police chiefs Tuesday, retired lieutenant colonel Dave Grossman said the games have the same desensitizing effect as military killing simulators, which ingrain soldiers with a homicidal reflex.
 
"We're providing military quality training at a young age," he said. "Children see human death and suffering and learn to associate it with pleasure."
 
Grossman, author of the soon to be released Teaching our Kids to Kill, has uncovered unsettling links between military conditioning and video games.
 
Killing, he says, does not come naturally. Soldiers are prepared for combat by firing at human shaped targets that pop into view. Only with constant repetition, does this become a conditioned response.
 
In combat, and even in soldiers who become frozen with fear, conditioning takes over.
 
Children, Grossman says, inadvertently learn the same type of reflex through video games. Grossman says this may explain why some student killers often keep firing even after they have shot the person that initially made them angry.
 
"In school shootings, students open fire, then keep on going. Police ask them why and they say they don't know. But we know . . . Kids who have never shot a gun practice with tens of thousands of bullets during video games."
 
Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone, who led rescue teams during the April massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., says teenage shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were avid fans of video games.
 
The two committed suicide after killing 12 classmates and a teacher.
 
"These guys played a video game called Doom, which is one of those games where you shoot and hunt people down," said Stone, who also spoke Tuesday at the annual conference of Canada's police chiefs.
 
"Students (who were shot at) said these guys were having a good time doing this. One of the kids in the library asked 'what are you doing?' (The killer) just smiled and said 'we're killing people.' It was almost like a fantasy for him."
 
The Colorado murders were echoed just a week later in Taber, Alta, when a 14-year-old student killed a school mate and wounded another at W.R. Myers High School.
 
Const. Dennis Reimer -- who took down the Taber shooter -- says although there was no evidence the teenage killer played video games, the possible link between violence and television should not be overlooked.
 
"The idea is to try and instill an attitude that even though you're playing these games, real life isn't like that."
 
Some experts say it's misleading to assume a direct cause and effect relationship between screen violence and real violence.
 
While the various sides disagree, Grossman isn't willing to take any chances.
 
Like the parents from Kentucky whose children were shot at in a school shooting two years ago, Grossman believes that sometimes too much freedom is destructive.
 
Those parents believe their children's attacker was influenced by violent video games and films and have launched a multi-million-dollar suit against producers and distributors for turning their children into monsters.
 
Says Grossman: "The First Amendment shouldn't protect the rights of five-year-olds who learn to blow people's heads off at the arcade."






SIGHTINGS HOMEPAGE