Teaching Kids to Kill

Compare a typical teenage chronic video game player to a U.S. Marine and you'll find that each has achieved a level of reflexive conditioning that makes him deadly with a weapon, and each has been desensitized to the act of pointing his weapon at another human being and pulling the trigger. There’s a crucial difference, however. The Marine is part of an organization that instills discipline in the use of violence. He operates under strict rules of engagement. The teen doesn’t.

Operant Conditioning: A Study of Killing

How did we get to such a state of affairs? David Grossman, a retired Army psychologist, has written extensively about the process that takes immature, untrained teens and turns them into killers. His research, called “killology,” is documented in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Grossman's book describes how the military confronted a unique problem: Not enough of its soldiers were actually shooting their weapons in battle. Studies after the Civil War and World Wars I and II found that a relatively small number of soldiers — as few as 15 percent — actually fired at the enemy. “Obviously, you can’t have that situation in war,” he says.

The military realized that simply learning to shoot at a round bull’s-eye did not condition soldiers to the battlefield reality of sighting on another human being and taking a life. There was a psychological barrier that had to be overcome. “Hardwired into the brains of most healthy members of most species is a response against killing their own kind,” Grossman explains. By using human-shaped pop-up targets and other means, the military was able to desensitize soldiers to the act of aiming at a human shape, which increased the firing rate to as high as 90 percent by the Vietnam War.

With the invention of video game technology, the military began to use this equipment to further train its soldiers. The Marine Corps, for example, adapted a version of the popular game Doom to hone Marines’ reactions in a combat environment. In many ways, video games, particularly first-person shooting games, exactly mimic the process used by the military. Teens (including the gunmen at Columbine High School) log countless hours with these same games — but without the discipline that comes from military training and, obviously, without any need to develop these skills in the first place.

The psychological process involved in this type of training is called “operant conditioning.” Not only is the mind desensitized to a certain level of violence and to the process of sighting on an enemy, but the shooter also develops the muscle memory necessary to become an expert marksman. Grossman cites the example of one school shooter, Michael Carneal, who fired into a group of students at a high school in Paducah, Ky., in 1997.

“The kid had never fired an actual pistol in his life,” says Grossman, who was an expert witness at Carneal’s trial. The teen stole a .22-caliber pistol from a neighbor’s house and practiced with two clips of ammo the previous night. That was the sole extent of his marksmanship training — at least with live ammo. “But he’d been on the simulator for nearly a lifetime,” Grossman says. The boy’s family had converted their two-car garage into a playroom lined with point-and-shoot arcade games, a genre Grossman calls “murder simulators.”

Carneal took the stolen gun to school and opened fire on a group of students with an astounding degree of accuracy. “You have kneeling, scrambling, screaming targets,” Grossman explains. “Carneal fires eight shots at eight different targets. Five of them are head shots, the other three upper torso. Now, I have trained the FBI. I have trained Navy SEALs, Green Berets and Texas Rangers, and when I tell them about this case, they’re simply stumped. Nowhere in the annals of law enforcement, military or criminal history can we find equivalent achievement.”

It was, Grossman says, a classic case of operant conditioning.

Feeding the Dog Brain

Until recently, manufacturers of hostile video games and other violent media have pooh-poohed the connection between their products and teen violence, claiming that any correlation has been, at best, anecdotal. But science is now proving the connection.

The Indiana University School of Medicine has conducted a series of tests using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). This allows researchers to compare the brain activity of teens consuming a heavy diet of violent media to those not as heavily exposed. The scans showed decreased brain functioning in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the organ that regulates emotions, impulsivity and conscience.

Grossman explains it this way: “Our frontal lobes are what make us human. This is where the written word and the spoken word are processed and where, incidentally, abstract concepts like God and spirituality exist. Lying underneath the forebrain is the midbrain, the mammalian brain, the part of your brain which is identical to your dog’s brain. Images, particularly violent images, bypass the forebrain and go straight to the dog brain.”

The differences are also apparent between left and right brain, he adds. “The right brain is your artistic, creative, innovative brain. The left brain is your logical, rational, predictive brain. Your right brain really is kind of like the little devil who sits on one shoulder and thinks foolish things. The left brain is sort of like the little angel who sits on the other shoulder and says, ‘Oh, that will get us in trouble; we can’t do that.’ The left brain really does have veto power.”

While young people who suppress left-brain activity by feasting on violent media may not open fire in the school cafeteria, there are still consequences. “This kid just won’t do his homework, because the ability to understand the logical ramification of not having his homework done tomorrow morning doesn’t click,” Grossman says. “Who knows what he’ll do behind the wheel of a vehicle. This kid is cocked and primed to do drugs. He does not understand, because the left brain is catastrophically shut down.”

The good news is that this change in brain functioning does not appear to be permanent. Studies have shown that children weaned from a heavy media diet do better on school aptitude tests, and school administrators report fewer incidents of playground violence and bullying.

A Cultural Problem Needs a Cultural Response

The American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry made a joint statement to Congress* in 2000 regarding the link between media and societal violence. “They said that 30 years of research and a host of sound, scholarly studies have proven that media violence causes violence in our society,” Grossman says.

The solution, it would appear, is obvious. But as much as parents may wish to ban violent media, it’s not going to happen. We can, however, prevent impressionable children from consuming it. “There’s a social cost to several things that we allow for adults but not kids,” Grossman states. “Driving. Alcohol. Tobacco. ... We can say there are some things adults can have that kids can’t.”

Of course, we’ve all heard the entertainment industry argue, “If you don’t like the violence, just turn it off.” Grossman’s rebuttal is simple. He shares a personal story from one of the first school shootings, which happened to take place in his hometown of Jonesboro, Ark. He stood helplessly, watching a forlorn, single mother as she waited for the final identification of her daughter’s body at the morgue. “This mom had lost everything she had in the world because of two kids who decided to act out a violent video game,” Grossman recalls. “You tell that single mom who lost her daughter to just hit the ‘off’ switch.

*(Note: Referrals to Web sites not produced by Focus on the Family are for informational purposes only and do not necessarily constitute an endorsement of the sites' content.)

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