Re: ,

On Mar 15, 3:06 am, arash7...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
^Zeitenschrift magazine (Swiss)

Let's Play Killer

How does the U.S. Army override the natural human fear of killing? By
using the video games presently found in millions of children's rooms.

Lieutenant Colonel Dave A. Grossman is a military psychologist and was
an officer in the Airborne Ranger Infantry for many years. He taught
military science for the United States Military Academy at West Point.
In 1998, he ended his military career in order to found the Killology
Research Group (http://www.killology.com/bio.htm), dedicating himself
to the research and study of killing. The former weapons instructor is
a much sought after expert witness and advisor to numerous state and
federal courts, and has testified before the U.S. Senat and various
Congress committees. Grossman pursues many questions in his books and
lectures, among others he asks the following: "How do you teach young
people to shoot - to kill? And that, as fast as possible - without
contemplating.

"One needs three things to kill: one needs a weapon, the skills, and
the will to kill. Video games deliver two of these - the technical
skills and the intention to kill". Dave Grossman learned through his
personal experiences as an instructor, that it takes a few years of
hard training to teach someone the skills set, and above all the will,
to kill. It's against our human nature to kill a person. We have an
innate, biological inhibitional threshold to kill someone of our own
kind. "Throughout all of history known to us, people have been
fighting against each other. Ancient wars were always preceded by a
lot of war dances and chest beating. But the massacre only began when
the one side turned to flee. Most died of stab wounds inflicted to the
back. The accounts from authors of ancient world military are very
clear on this".

With the weaponry available at that time and the strategies used back
then, a regiment in the American Revolutionary War would have been
capable of killing roughly 500 to 1000 men per minute, but "as a
matter of fact, only one or two men per minute fell in battle. After
the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,000 muskets had been collected, that were
left behind on the battlefield. 90% of them were loaded. That's
unusual, because back then one needed 95% of one's time to load and
only 5% to fire. Even more unusual, was that over half of the loaded
weapons, were loaded several times. In one instance, there were 23
bullets left in the barrel. People were exposed to firing; they were
willing to die - but they couldn't bring themselves to kill. Killing
had to be learned".

There was no difference in World War II: "The majority of our infantry
on the battlefield were incapable of killing. We committed a
fundamental error in our training. We gave our people effective
weapons and shipped them off to the front, after training them to
shoot at bull's-eye targets. The majority failed on the front as no
targets emerged before them. It was a lack of proper training. Under
stress, in an extreme state of fear, and given everything that
happened on the front, they couldn't shoot".

Video Games for Breeding Killer Instincts

As a marksmanship trainer, Grossman saw as his responsibility of not
only putting the weapon in his students' hand, but also teaching them
to use it quickly and efficiently. "So we developed killing
simulators. It inherently began with bull's-eye targets. Instead of
shooting at normal targets, we had them shoot at targets with a human
silhouette." But proper arms and real ammunition are expensive. That's
why a switch to simulators came shortly thereafter. "With these kinds
of simulators, there are images of people moving across the screen
that should be shot at. In this way, events on the battlefield are
recreated as realistically as possible". This is the reason computer
games became appealing to the military. "The Marine Corps bought the
rights to the computer game Doom and implemented it as a tactical
training tool. The Army resorted to Super-Nintendo. You are certainly
familiar with the old game Duck Hunt from the arcades. We substituted
the plastic guns with an M-16 made out of plastic, and instead of
ducks, pictures of people scurry across the screen. In the meantime we
have several thousands of these devices, which we implement around the
world for training purposes. They have proven themselves as being very
effective".

The police refer to these computer games as "firearms training
simulators", or F.A.T.S.: those practicing spend several hours in
front of a huge TV screen on which human subjects are moving. If a
subject does something where use of the weapon is justified by law and
order, then - and only then - may the officer fire. If he hits the
target, it topples down; if he misses, the target then shoots at him."
The same kinds of "games" can be found in amusement arcades. The
"player" holds a gun in his hand, pulls the trigger, shoots, and feels
the rebound. If he hits, the enemy, drops dead. If he misses, the
enemy fires back. "That is a murder simulator. It is no longer a
killing simulator for individuals who, reluctantly and under specific
conditions, have to kill. At issue is a device, available to children,
whose social purpose is to provide a child with the ability and will
to kill".

This murder training deeply penetrates the subconscious mind.
Behavioral responses that are learned under stress conditions are also
brought out during stress events. "In the good old days, when the
police still used revolvers, the officers drove to the firing range
every now and then. After six shots, the cylinder was emptied. Since
nobody wanted to have to clean up the firing range on their own
afterwards, the officers would empty the cylinder each time they
finished shooting, sliding out the shell casings onto their hands, and
stuffing them in their pockets before they reloaded and fired again.
Naturally, one doesn't do that during a serious exchange of fire -
there are more important things to do. But guess what happened? After
a shootout, veteran police officers had pockets full of empty rounds.
They couldn't explain how the shells got in there.

"When children play violent computer games, they are practicing to
kill. And they practice and practice. They aren't doing just this
twice a year, as police officers do. Sometimes they do it night after
night, killing every living creature that gets caught in the
crosshairs, until they run out of targets or ammo". Grossman sees and
draws parallels to the shooting rampages and massacres in American and
European schools. He assumes that the teenaged assailant's original
intent was to kill one specific person: "As a rule it is either a
girlfriend or a teacher - someone who has deeply disappointed them.
But after they started shooting, they just couldn't stop. They shot at
everything that moved in front of them, until they ran out of targets
or ammunition. During the arrest, police officers asked the juveniles:
'OK, you shot the person you were angry at. But why did you kill
everyone else? Among those were even your own friends?' The kids
couldn't say why, because they didn't even know themselves".

Everything our children and teenagers are trained to do, while
"playing" on the computer, is repeated under certain circumstances and
similar situations when they are under stress, without contemplation.
Their parents used to play with toy guns and wooden swords, yelling
"Bang, bang, you're dead!" "I also said 'Bang, bang, you're dead!", to
my sister and she would answer, 'No, I am not dead!' and then I hit
her on the head with the toy pistol. She started to cry and ran to
tell mom, and I was in big trouble", Dave Grossman recalled in an
interview. "This was how I learned that my sister was a real person,
that my brother was real, that my dog was real. Children are real
beings and if you hurt them, you get in trouble. That is a lesson. All
children go through a phase where they bite and a stage where they hit
others. And one teaches them that they are not allowed to do this,
that it is something bad, hurtful. For 5000 years, we would thrash
around poking wooden swords at each other and play "bang, you're
dead.' But as soon as someone gets hurt, the game stops. If someone
gets injured during a basketball or football game, the game is
interrupted and the referee penalizes the aggressor. This is how it
should be in rational game...nowadays, during a killer game, I blow the
head off the virtual opponent and the blood just keeps flowing. But do
I get in trouble? On the contrary, I get points for it. It is a morbid
game".

Children: The Perfect Killing Machines

In a lot of games, there are bonus points for hitting the head.
Youngsters achieve a hit rate and accuracy, that would make soldiers
in specialized units green with envy. In a real situation, you shoot
at the target as long as needed, until it collapses or is eliminated.
But computer games train our children and teenagers to shoot at new
targets, in quick succession. Firing in rapid succession quickly
becomes a conditioned response. One shot, one murder. And bonus points
for shots to the head or heart. As a rule and according to FBI
statistics, trained officers in an exchange of fire, make one hit for
every five times the weapon is discharged. Compare this to the 14 year-
old in Paducah, Kentucky. He stole a .22 caliber pistol, took it to
school and fired 8 shots.

"How many targets did he hit? 8 shots, 8 hits at 8 different children,
5 of which were shot in the head. The other three shots hit children
in the upper torso. This is staggering. I've trained Texas Rangers,
police patrol officers in California; I've trained an entire battalion
of Green Berets. In the entire history of the police, the military, or
in the annals of crime have we ever come across a record that in
anyway even comes close to this".

When children or teenagers incessantly practice targeting and firing
in front of a screen, they are soon better than a professional
marksman with a few years of target practice on the firing range. They
fire their weapons more often, with greater precision, and cheaper
than any soldiers could. Children and adolescents are "playfully"
turning into perfect killers, even if they have never held a weapon in
their hands.

A loss of reality arises, when children and youngsters spend hours and
days at game-playing. "After the massacre at Columbine High School
took place and the situation was announced over the school p.a.
system, a few of the high school kids loudly applauded. - Why? Video
games teach children to sense enjoyment in the death and suffering of
other creatures".

Moral values are turned upside down and trained off. A type of
brainwashing takes place, where gamers are conditioned not to feel
abhorrence when they are killing, but rather gratification and
enjoyment. Recent studies in Japan prove that video games are more
real to kids than reality itself. When asking children what they did
on a certain day, they often have no idea. But if you ask them about a
sequence of events occurring in their favorite video game, the
children can describe what happened in detail. Dave Grossman calls
this the "hyper-reality effect," i.e., movies and video games leave a
deeper impression than reality: "What's your favorite movie? Do you
remember the movie in detail? Do you remember what you were doing
before you watched the movie? Or what you did the day before? No. You
can still remember the movie in detail, but you can't remember
anything else that happened on that day or the day before".

http://www.zeitenschrift.net/magazin/2-videogames.ihtml


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