This is our first task—caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.
… These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.
—President Barack Obama Newtown, Connecticut, Prayer Vigil December 16, 2012
The directive is simple: You are a police officer embarking on your first day in uniform. “Finish your first patrol,” Postal III instructs you, “and don’t f—it up! Simple.”
You begin strolling around a virtual city, complete with stray cats, parked cars, mom-and-pop shops, and a collection of people going about their business. It could be any city in America, and you look like the consummate police officer proudly protecting the public.
You hear sounds of a struggle in the distance. As you move toward the commotion, you realize that you are witnessing a mugging. “Don’t kill me!” the female victim yells to her male attacker, “I’m a virgin!” You move fast to apprehend and handcuff the mugger. He’s neutralized, lying on the ground. You begin to beat and kick him. Then, when you get tired, you pour gasoline on him and light the man on fire.
“Man, that smells kind of good,” you say as his flesh boils and melts away from his bones. “Bacon bacon bacon!”
At this point, you note that your bladder is full, so you begin to piss on your victim, whose skin blisters and chars as he dies.
You start to walk away, but since you aren’t quite finished, you stop to piss on a woman innocently sitting on the bench next to you. She reacts with horror. You note, “Now the little flowers will grow!”
A short while later, you see two teenage boys who appear to be fighting in the street. You yell, “No fighting, children! Detention for everyone!” before grabbing a stray cat and stuffing a grenade up its ass. “Hold still, little gato explodio!” you say, proud of your ingenuity. “This will only hurt for a second.” You hurl the cat at the teens. It explodes, sending the boys’ and the cat’s body parts and blood splattering across the street.
Unaffected by the scene, you continue on your patrol and see a man vandalizing a parked car. Clearly, this must be stopped. You throw a series of grenades at the car, blowing it up along with the vandal and a handful of pedestrians and onlookers. You watch their bloody limbs and chunks of flesh fly through the air. “Oops. Hunting accident,” you say. You pick up a severed human leg and casually toss it at a woman standing on the sidewalk. A snappy 1980s electronic pop music soundtrack starts to play in the background, ushering you on through the rest of your patrol.
Don’t worry. There are hours of fun ahead.
—First fifteen minutes of gameplay in Postal III (2011)
I’m a former buck sergeant, paratrooper, Army Ranger, infantry company commander, and West Point psychology professor and current law enforcement trainer. I’ve had a hand in training the men and women at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and in the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals, and the Central Intelligence Agency. I also have served as a reserve deputy coroner in the state of Illinois. My previous books have focused on a topic that most Americans would rather not think about—the act of killing. As a military psychology professor, scholar, and trainer, I became interested in the subject of killing and, specifically, how we train our soldiers to kill. Others had examined the general mechanics and nature of war, but even with all this scholarship, no one addressed the specific act of killing: the intimacy and psychological impact of the act, its stages, its social and psychological implications and repercussions, and its resultant disorders. My first book, On Killing, was my attempt to rectify this. Today that book is on the United States Marine Corps Commandant’s Professional Reading List and has been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. Writing it, I drew a reassuring conclusion about our basic nature: Despite an unbroken tradition across centuries of violence and war, the average human being is not, by nature, a killer.
Over the years, I’ve delved into the body of scientific data and discovered the existence of a “safety catch” in humankind that inherently exists in healthy members of our species to prevent them from killing or seriously injuring one another. I studied how to work around this safety catch in military and police training. As I did so, I was continually plagued by one question: If it is so difficult to turn off the safety catch and teach our soldiers to kill in the face of deadly threats, how is it that acts of criminal violence are often committed with seeming ease?
This book represents my attempt to answer that question.
I am a soldier of twenty-four years’ service. I have been a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division, a platoon leader in the 9th (High Tech Test Bed) Division, and I have been a general staff officer and a company commander in the 7th (Light) Infantry Division. I am a parachute infantryman and an Army Ranger. I have been deployed to the Arctic tundra, Central American jungles, NATO headquarters, countries that were signatories to the Warsaw Pact, and countless mountains and deserts. I am a graduate of military schools ranging from the XVIII Airborne Corps NCO Academy to the former British Army Staff College. I graduated summa cum laude from my undergraduate training as a historian and Kappa Delta Pi from my graduate training as a psychologist. I have had the privilege of being a cospeaker, with General William Westmoreland, at the National Veterans Leadership Breakfast and I served as the keynote speaker for the Sixth Annual Convention of the Vietnam Veterans of America. I have served in academic positions ranging from junior high school counselor to West Point psychology professor, and I have served as a professor of military science and as chair of the Department of Military Science at Arkansas State University.
The objective of my life’s work has been to uncover the dynamics of killing. Over the last few years, my prime motivation has shifted from understanding the processes that take place on the battlefield to using the knowledge I’ve gained to understand the cause of the current wave of violent killing that suddenly feels so shockingly commonplace in our society.
The subject of killing makes most healthy people uneasy, and some of the specific subjects addressed in these pages will be repulsive. We would rather turn away from them, but as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz warned, “It is to no purpose, it is even against one’s own interest, to turn away from the consideration of the affair because the horror of its elements excites repugnance.” Bruno Bettelheim, a survivor of the Nazi death camps, argued that the root of our failure to deal with violence lies in our refusal to face up to it. We deny our fascination with the “dark beauty of violence,”1 and we condemn aggression and repress it rather than look at it squarely and try to understand and control it.
In 2004, my coauthor, Kristine Paulsen, heard my presentation on media violence given to a group of educators, parents, and community members. By the end of the day, she made a personal commitment to ensure that teachers, parents, and students would learn about the research. Since then she has been a wonderful fellow peace warrior in this endeavor. Her work on the Take the Challenge Take Charge media detox curriculum has positively influenced thousands of students in her home state of Michigan and beyond, and her passion and dedication to this work often have inspired me. Although this book is written in my voice and from my perspective, Kristine has been instrumental in its creation. I am honored to have her as my coauthor, and we are deeply grateful to Katie Miserany for her amazing competence and energy rounding out this team as our in-house editor.
As you’ll learn in the following chapters, the new challenges facing educators, parents, students, and communities throughout our country are not disconnected. Over the last fifty years, thousands of research studies on the effects of violent video games and other media on the mental and physical health of our children have sought explanations for the current state of our nation. This is a topic of particular relevance today, as we are still reeling from horrific events such as the massacre of 20 children and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the murder of 49 people at an Orlando nightclub, and a recent, unprecedented explosion of homicide in our major cities. I hope that this book provides a practical plan of action for families, schools, and communities so we can begin to take the steps necessary to ensure that our children are safe and healthy.
I clearly recall an incident that turned my thoughts from the realm of soldiers on the battlefield to the garden-lined streets of our neighborhoods. In March of 1998, I had just retired from the army and was starting my career as a military trainer at my home base in Jonesboro, Arkansas. My youngest son, Joe, was in middle school. One morning I was packing for a trip to train the Canadian military when I got a call from my aunt in Florida. “Is that Joe’s middle school on the news?” she asked. I turned on the television. The story was on every channel—“Mass Murder in Jonesboro Middle School.” I was gut-struck. I was paralyzed. I cannot describe the magnitude of the horror I felt.
An eleven-year-old boy had run through the back door and pulled the fire alarm. He then ran to a thirteen-year-old friend of his who was waiting on a small hill overlooking the school. The students and teachers streamed out of the building in response to the fire alarm, but the killers waited for the exit doors to lock shut before they opened fire, gunning down 13 little girls and 2 teachers.
With my heart in my throat, I rushed to my son’s school. There I learned that the killings hadn’t, in fact, occurred at Joe’s school. They took place at the other middle school in town. Relief washed over me, followed by anger. How could this have happened in my own city?
As an expert in post-traumatic stress disorder, I was part of the team that went to the school on that day, the day on which those two boys set a new record for juvenile mass murder in human history. Assembled in the gym, my fellow counselors and I took the lessons of the battlefield—lessons on mass critical-incident debriefings designed for trained soldiers—and applied them to the children of my friends and neighbors. Representatives from the Salvation Army, Red Cross, law enforcement, and a few local churches helped us. We stayed until dawn the following morning trying to help people wrap their heads around an unanswerable question—Why? Just outside, the bloody evidence was still congealing. Why, why, why?
When an event like the massacre in Jonesboro takes place, we always talk about the number slain. We sometimes talk about the number of wounded, too, but we don’t begin to count the number of emotionally scarred—a number that threatens to echo across generations. The fact of the matter is that the kids we counseled on that day in Jonesboro, Arkansas, may never have answers to their questions.
They are not alone. The massacre at Jonesboro was followed by those in Pearl, Paducah, Springfield, Littleton, Edinboro, Santee, San Diego, Moses Lake, Bethel, Red Lake, Sparks, Centennial, Troutdale, Marysville, Saskatchewan, and elsewhere. There was Sandy Hook Elementary School, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, Louisiana Vocational Tech, the University of California–Santa Barbara, Umpqua Community College, Northern Arizona University. Four cops were killed in a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington; during a midnight movie screening in Aurora, Colorado, 12 innocent people were murdered and 58 wounded; 9 were killed in a Charleston, South Carolina, church; and 49 people were murdered and 53 wounded at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida. With such violence in our recent history, now more than ever we must overcome our revulsion and understand why it is that human beings fight and kill. And, equally important, we must understand what prevents them from doing so.
The observation that violence in the media causes violence in our streets is nothing new. The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) both have made unequivocal statements about the link between media violence and violence in our society. As early as 1994, the APA released a resolution on the undeniable link between media violence and actual violence and concluded that viewing media violence leads to increases in aggressive attitudes and behavior—particularly in children.2 In July 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry joined the APA and AMA to make the following statement before a bipartisan, bicameral Congressional hearing:
Well over 1,000 studies—including reports from the Surgeon General’s office, the National Institute of Mental Health, and numerous studies conducted by leading figures within our medical and public health organizations—our own members—point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.3
In 2005, the APA again issued a resolution on violence in video games and interactive media emphasizing that exposure to violent video games increases aggressive behavior and decreases helpful behavior in children and adolescents. In August 2015, the APA released yet another resolution on the topic, which stated, “The link between violent video game exposure and aggressive behavior is one of the most studied and best established.… Scientific research has demonstrated an association between violent video game use and both increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognitions and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy, and moral engagement.”4
The scientific evidence is conclusive, but the debate is not over. In our not-too-distant past we heard from “scientists” who claimed that cigarettes don’t cause cancer, but today we know that their views were a part of the barrage of misinformation disseminated to consumers by the cigarette industry. In 2016, a small number of researchers claim that violent video games and other media do not cause violence in society. Such individuals have no trouble finding funding for their research, and they are guaranteed coverage by the media they help protect, but they also have staked out the same moral and scientific ground as the pro-cigarette scientists from years ago.
Our enemy is denial. Denial is a great big blanket we pull up over our heads so we can pretend the bad man will never come. Denial kills us twice. It kills us once physically when violence catches us unprepared, and it kills us again psychologically when we know that we could have prevented the violence and failed to do so.
My investigation into the psychology of killing on the battlefield led me inevitably to the question of how our citizens—children among them—can inflict violence on one another with such apparent ease and in such alarming numbers. Understanding this “virus of violence” must begin with an assessment of the magnitude of the problem: namely, the ever-increasing incidence of violent crime in spite of the way medical technology holds down the murder rate, in spite of an aging population, and in spite of the role played by an ever-growing number of incarcerated violent criminals. In military training, our armed forces use psychological conditioning to help their troops turn off the safety catch inherent in most healthy human beings that produces a natural aversion to killing other members of our species. The video game industry indiscriminately applies these same techniques to the consumers who play their games. Thousands of sound, scholarly studies have proven that if you sow violence in a child’s life, you are more likely to reap violent behavior as a result.
Is there a solution? Yes. It lies in Stanford University Medical School’s S.M.A.R.T. media turn-off curriculum and Kristine’s work on the Take the Challenge media detox curriculum, both of which demonstrate that if we remove media violence from a child’s life, we can cut school violence and bullying in half, reduce obesity and nagging for toys, and raise test scores by double digits. If you begin to feel desperate as you read the depressing statistics and overwhelming evidence in these pages, skip to chapters 8 and 9 to see what you can do today to make a difference.
Through our examination of the effect of media violence on our children, we hope to help you better understand that all-important psychological safety catch, how it works, and what each of us can do to turn it back “on” throughout our society.
Consider this example: In 1997 in Paducah, Kentucky, a fourteen-year-old high school freshman5 fired eight shots into a prayer circle in the large foyer of his school. He achieved a 100 percent hit ratio.
Conversely, in the controversial Amadou Diallo shooting two years later, well-trained New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers shot and killed an unarmed man at point-blank range, firing 41 shots but hitting their target with only 19 rounds. These officers achieved less than a 50 percent hit ratio, with bullets distributed from Diallo’s feet to his head. Within law enforcement circles, a 50 percent hit ratio would be considered a normal level of accuracy resulting from a fear-induced “spray-and-pray” response. Yet in the Paducah school massacre,6 this fourteen-year-old boy fired eight shots into a panicked crowd of children and scored eight hits on eight different kids. Five of his hits were head shots (almost all in the face), and the other three landed in the upper torso.
A few nights before committing this mass murder, the killer stole a pistol and fired two clips of ammunition as practice. He had never fired a real pistol before that moment.7
When I train members of elite military and law enforcement organizations, including the FBI, the Green Berets, the Los Angeles Police Department Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams, and the Texas Rangers—warriors highly trained in firearms—they are stunned to hear about the boy’s accuracy in Paducah. Nowhere in the annals of law enforcement, military, or criminal history can we find an equivalent achievement, and yet this unprecedented feat of marksmanship didn’t come at the hands of a deranged ex-military type. It was the work of a fourteen-year-old boy who had fired a pistol only once before the tragedy.
Witness statements say that the killer had a strange, calm look on his face. He held his gun up in two hands and never fired far to his left or right. His first bullet went straight between his girlfriend’s eyes. Then he proceeded to put one bullet in every target that popped up in his field of vision. His own sister wrote that she started to move toward her brother to tell him to stop, but then hesitated. She recalled thinking, “He doesn’t know who I am. He’s going to kill me,” before she ran in the opposite direction.
What was the secret to this teenager’s “success” as a marksman? To his cold-blooded, calm, precise execution?
The killer had been practicing every night for years, playing first-person shooter video games. Despite the fact that he was firing into a crowd of living human beings, the killer processed the events as if he were playing a video game—reverting to an almost mindless state that had been carved into his neurons through years of operant and classical conditioning at home and at the arcade. He calmly put a bullet in every target that popped up on his “screen.”
Not every kid who diligently plays violent video games will become a mass murderer. In this case, however, the evidence linking video games and the killer’s actions is compelling.
In military training, researchers have found that most shooters aim at a target and fire until it drops. Then, after evaluating the results, the shooter may or may not move on to another target. The way the Paducah killer fired one bullet into each of his victims (with an emphasis on head shots) and then moved on to the next is highly unusual in human combat. Most of the early generation of video games, however, trained players to make a one-shot kill. Even before that target drops, the killer is rewarded in these games for moving on to the next target, and the one after that, racking up as high a score as possible. These first-generation video games taught players to shoot everything in front of them and hit as many targets as fast as they could. A player earned bonus points for head shots. The latest generation of video games teaches the more “realistic” method of firing until your target drops, and the games still give bonus points for head shots.
For the Paducah killer—and many other kids across these recent, violent decades—the video game was not just a murder simulator. It was a mass-murder simulator.
In 2012, Dr. Brad Bushman, a media researcher at Ohio State University, demonstrated that video game players who had no previous experience firing actual pistols were able to pick up real guns and achieve a far higher level of marksmanship than non–video game players. They also had 99 percent more head shots. Dr. Bushman noted, “We didn’t tell players to aim for the head—they did that naturally because the violent shooting game they played rewarded head shots.”8
Not only do video games teach marksmanship, they also teach the most effective place to shoot in order to kill: the head and face. It isn’t natural to shoot a person in the face. As a former deputy coroner, I can tell you that forensic research indicates that only a very small fraction of murderers shoot their victims in the head, and far fewer shoot them in the face. This tendency is a trademark of the video game marksman.
After I discussed the Paducah school massacre in testimony before the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the video game industry’s lobbyists circulated a “confidential” document to legislators and reporters that not only attacked my body of work but also forbade anyone from quoting it. The document was full of the kind of distortions you would expect any lobbyist to spout in defense of his or her industry, but the most outrageous claim was that police reports indicated that the Paducah killer had his eyes closed during the massacre—that he fired blindly.
Actually, the reports said no such thing. In a statement to his psychiatrist that was entered into evidence at trial, the killer did say, “I don’t know, it was all, like, blurry and foggy, I just didn’t know what was going on. I think I closed my eyes for a minute.” (Emphasis added.) All of the witness statements refuted the idea that his eyes were closed. In addition, the psychiatric and psychological evaluation of the killer concluded that “his claims… to have closed his eyes when he shot… are scarcely to be believed.” Add to this my own bewilderment over how a young boy with no weapons training could achieve such shocking accuracy in marksmanship, and the lobbyists’ statement is particularly hard to swallow. Nevertheless, the video game industry’s lobbyists presented it to legislators and reporters as a “fact.”
Why?
What did they have to gain by insisting that the killer had fired blindly into the crowd? If he hadn’t, the link between his behavior on that day and the training he received as a video game player was too obvious. If the killer had his eyes closed, it might have been dumb “luck” that he hit all eight targets.
After years of studying the behavior of killers in school massacres, after analyzing the rise of gang violence and the ever-increasing rates of murder and aggravated assault around the world, we know it isn’t merely happenstance that a child today is capable of picking up a loaded weapon and firing it into a crowd of his classmates and friends. It isn’t by chance that he is exceptionally well trained to do so.
What lobbyists aim to do with statements like this about the Paducah shooter is to encourage you—the American public—to turn a blind eye to the growing virus of violence affecting modern society. The struggle between researchers and the media isn’t new; for more than four decades scientists have been proving the existence of a link between violent media and violent behavior. Yet reporting by media conglomerates on those scientists’ findings has been extraordinarily rare.9
The Paducah murderer didn’t have his eyes closed when he shot those children. We owe it to his victims—and the thousands of children like them who fall prey to violence each year—to open our eyes to the realities at hand. The bulk of the evidence in the Paducah case makes it clear that the killer was doing exactly what he was trained to do. In a single slice of “entertainment,” the video game industry both gives our children world-class weapons training and psychologically primes them to murder one another. That the industry is making billions serving this toxic cocktail of deadly physical skills and dark, insidious thinking is precisely what this book hopes to drag out of the shadows and into the harsh light of day.