A Current Concerns Interview with Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Video Games on Our Kids’ Computers Provide Military Training to Kill

Lt. Col. Dave A. Grossman(*) , West Point Psychology Professor and Professor of Military Science

Current Concerns: A few weeks ago at the ‘Electronic Entertainment Exhibition’ in Los Angeles, the US Army introduced new video games targeted at 13-year-olds and upwards. These games aim at teaching children how to kill in situations simulating reality. Recently in Germany the tragedy in Erfurt happened. You have been a military psychologist for many years now and for years you have also been fighting against violent video games. Can you say a few things about the effects of these games?

Lt. Col. Dave Grossman: Look at the Erfurt case. The boy used to play Counterstrike. Counterstrikethat’s a way to kill somebody: The closer you are the better you hit. So that’s the way to kill somebody in Counterstrike. That’s what you are trained to do by the game and that’s what the boy in Erfurt did. The boy didn’t have much range practice. He joined the range but he never spent much time at the range. But what he did: He visualized and rehearsed a particular way of killing people which is to walk right up to the people, shove the gun in their face and pull the trigger repeatedly. Reports from the police force in Erfurt said that some of the victims were so disfigured they couldn’t tell who they were. You can see the boy is trained, the military quality training coming out. The thing to understand is that the US military is basically using PG-13 rated game (= games that can be played from the age of 13, if accompanied by an adult) to educate kids to our thinking about joining the military. We’re seeing far more realistic, far more violent, far more devastating games, and we’re giving them indiscriminately to children, providing them with these skills. You have to understand how hard a heart, how brutal a soul the killer has to have to shoot a person in the face repeatedly.

CC: It’s unimaginable.

DG: Indeed, it’s unimaginable, it’s unthinkable and to do it again and again and again. Even the Nazis and the Mafia couldn’t and can’t be brought to shooting people in the face. They like to turn them around and shoot them in the back of the head. So they don’t have to look in their faces and kill them. But this boy walked to person after person and killed them. And the only way you can do that is by rehearsing and being desensitized to the suffering. He had already done it tens of thousands of timestheir heads explode, they die, they moan, they twitch, they bleed and you get rewarded for it. So the point becomes that we are taking military quality training devices, we are making them far more brutal, far more devastating, destructive and harmful than the ones the military uses and we are turning them loose indiscriminately upon our children. And if we are little disturbed about the military using video games we should educate kids, because it just shows them what the military is like. But we should be infinitely more disturbed that vastly more destructive and devastating and harmful games are being provided indiscriminately to the children without any regulation control or safeguard.

And there is an industry out there doing this. If they were selling guns to children we would never permit them to do it, but if they provide them with military quality training that enables them to use those guns, then they have gone far too far.

CC: One point we also find very important: You said in a different context that the violent video games also affect children who are usually not aggressive at all. If they do this training, they will respond with a reflex action, they become like machines. We first believed Littleton was an isolated case in your country, but similar cases have also occurred in Europe: in Germany, in Great Britain, in France. The number of such incidents is on the increase.

DG: Yes, and understand there is something new, it’s important to understand that: In Germany, in Austria, throughout World War I, in between the wars and throughout World War II, hundreds of thousands of 18, 19 year-old German boys were walking around with those pistols, Mousers, handguns and Lugers, Walthers; hundreds of thousands of boys walking round with those pistols, but none of them committed anything like what we see at Erfurt today. There’s got to be a new ingredient. The weapons are piece of the equation. But we know if the children want to get the weapons, they will! They will find the weapons. If a criminal wants drugs, will he get drugs? Yes. And that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be illegal. We know that if he wants something bad enough, he can get it. If a criminal wants guns, he will get guns. The truth is, you need three things to kill someone, you need a weapon, and you need the skill and the will to kill. And the video games are providing two out of three.

CC: Then it’s wrong to argue for stricter gun control laws. Switzerland is a good example: We have a militia army but nothing like Littleton or Erfurt has ever happened here.

DG: To keep itself safe, the most important thing Switzerland can do is what one guy calls remote control and not gun control. That’s not saying you can’t have an impact. But you understand that what’s on TV and what’s on the video games is vastly more important than what’s in your hands. The guns have always been there.

The primary killing instrument in Littleton (Colorado) 1 at Columbine High School was the 12-gauge pump action shotgun. In Columbine Highschool the 12-gauge pump action shotgun did most of the killing and these shotguns have been in existence for over a century. Literally millions of them have been manufactured and distributed, but it is only today that boys are doing something like that. The primary killing instrument in Jonesboro (Arkansas) 2 was a 30-calibre carbine rifle, a WWII weapon that has existed for half a century. The question we have to ask ourselves is: what is new? The boy in Erfurt used a 9mm pistol. These have been in existence for over a century. Hundreds of thousands of German boys have carried those weapons in WW I and WWII. It’s only today that we see the kids using those weapons in mass murders like this. And there is a new factor in the equation. The American Medical Association, The American Academy of Paediatrics, the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, they all have made definitive statements that there is a new factor in the equation, and that is media violence and violent video games. Because of their interactive nature, the violent video games are particularly dangerous.

CC: Are more and more people opposing these computer games in your country?

DG: What is happening is that more people are becoming educated, they are opposing it. The battle we are having right now is we have passed laws to legislate violent video-games, to regulate the video games. Now the video game industry made 20 billion dollars last year. They have made more money than Hollywood. They are an incredibly influential industry, tremendously powerful, tremendously wealthy. Now the video game industry fights tooth and nail with armies of lobbyists against any attempt to regulate them. We have had a few regulations passed. One was passed in Indianapolis, but it was found unconstitutional by the Circuit Court Judge; but another one was passed in St. Louis where it was found completely constitutional by the Circuit Court Judge. So you see, we are having a real battle here to work this thing up through the court system to say there is no constitutional right for a child to practice blowing people’s heads off at the local video arcade. So you see that’s the battle right now. For a while, as a delaying action, they are hiding behind our First Amendment. Our first amendment is the right to free press and free speech, to say the video games constitute free speeches (!), which is absolutely asinine, yet they have already convinced several judges. So that’s the battle we are having right now, and slowly but surely people are beginning to figure out what’s going on, and we’ll make progress here.

CC: What about the parents? Do you often talk to parents?

DG: You see, the thing is that parents are products of this incredible disinformation campaign. And it is being systematically fought against any opportunity to inform people about what’s going on, and so it’s just a long hard battle. And the most important part of this is education. Possibly the most important research ever done on this topic was released this year, no, this time last year. It was done at Stanford University. They took two elementary schools, and convinced, basically educated one elementary school about the impact of media violence. The Surgeon General said media violent video games are bad for you. Violent television is bad for you, you should turn it off. The bottom line was after the elementary teachers told them that this is a harmful product, the majority of the children voluntarily turned it off. And the result was a 40% reduction of violence at this school. There is a link to the Stanford study on my homepage. (www.killology.com)

Well, this summer the Indiana University will release information about a brain scan, showing what is done to children who play at high-level use violent video games. The bottom line is it is turning off the brain, it is putting the brain on a leash, it is diminishing the brain, doing enormous harm to the brain of the kids who have a high level use of violent television. Once upon a time you could say: Look, here is an x-ray of a smoker’s lung and here is an x-ray of a non-smoker’s lung, and you look at the two side by side. And the result was astonishing. And now we have the brain scans of the video-game player and the brain scan of the non-video game player. And the result is simply astonishing. What you see is: The brain scan of the healthy kid is all full of colours where brain activity is happening. But the other kid, the kid that spends so much time in front of violent video games and television has no brain activity. The forebrain, the human brain, the rational brain is shut down, and the mid brain, the emotional brain, the limbic system is all that functions. So we are turning off the kid’s cognitive brain and we are using these video games truly to make them totally emotional creatures. And when they kill in the video games they truly kill without conscious thought. When you see them playing the game they are taking action and are killing without conscious thought.

CC: That’s the key point. It was always said that these kids were from broken homes, but that’s not true.

DG: So the video game industry has some bogus research. Remember when we were all fighting the tobacco industry. They have their lobbyists, they have their pet-scientists who do their stooge research for them. One of the things they came up with when I was in Sweden, was some Danish research. They claimed that kids can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. It’s not true at all! That’s the kind of bogus video-game-funded research you get. If you ask the kid, we call it the ‘not me’ effect. You ask the kid, you really ask the kid, do you think tobacco is doing any harm and he says ‘no’. And you ask: Do you think it is harming your friend? And he would say: Yes. So if you ask the kids: Do you think what you are doing is harmful for you, they will never admit it! They are children! I mean, they are asking children whether or not they think it has any effects! But there is recent research in Japan that demonstrates that for the kids the video games are more real than reality! If you ask the child what they did on the third of last month, they won’t have a clue, but if you ask them what happened on level three of their favourite video game they will tell you in intimate detail what happened. The video games are more real than reality.

I’ll give you an example. Movies are more real than reality. What is your favourite movie? Do you remember the movie in detail? O.K. Do you remember what you did before you watched the movie? Do you remember anything else you did the day before? No.

The movie you remember in detail, but you don’t remember anything else that happened before, on that day, or the day after. The movie is more real than reality. We call it the hyper-reality effect. The video games are more real than reality. They have a more profound impact on you than reality does. •

1 On 20 April 1999 in Littleton/Colorado two seventeen and eighteen year-old students killed fourteen students (including themselves) and a teacher and injured 23 more students badly .

2 On 24 March 1998 two 11 and 13 year-old students triggered a false fire alarm, shot four classmates and a teacher and injured another ten students in Jonesboro/Arkansas.

Dave Grossman’s homepage: www.killology.com

Dave A. Grossman (top)

Lt.Col.Dave A. Grossman is one of the world’s foremost experts in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence and crime. He is a West Point psychology professor, Professor of Military Science and was an Airborne Ranger infantry officer for many years.

In 1998 he gave up his career as a soldier to become the founder of the ‘Killology Research Group’. Col. Grossman has made revolutionary contributions to our understanding of killing in war, the psychological costs of war, the root causes of the current ‘virus’ of violent crime that is raging around the world, and the process of healing the victims of violence, in war and peace.

He has served as an expert witness and consultant in State and Federal courts and he has testified before U.S. Senate and Congressional committees and numerous state legislatures.

He is the author of ‘On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society’ (ISBN 0-316330116), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is required reading in classes at West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy, police academies worldwide, and ‘peace studies’ programs in numerous universities.

Co-authored with Gloria DeGaetano, ‘Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence has received international acclaim’.

