ABSTRACT
Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman (U.S.A. Ret.) is the author of On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, and now with Gloria De Gaetano, “a nationally recognized educator in the field of media violence,” of Stop Teaching Our Children to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence. Lt. Col. Grossman, a former paratrooper who has taught psychology at West Point and is now a professor of military science in Arkansas, has Good News and Bad News to reveal. The Good News is the attractive and inspiriting proposition that most people have a powerful instinctual disinclination to kill other human beings, and under normal conditions, including their own presence on a battlefield in immediate proximity to homicidal strangers, will refuse to do so. The Bad News is that modern media culture produces an abnormal condition in which ordinary children are all too likely to become more effective killers than, say, a typical American GI facing the SS in Normandy. And Col. Grossman is supremely confident that he can prove both of these contentions. His attempts to do so, in these two fantastic and extremely dispiriting parodies of rational argument, are fascinating illustrations of the intellectual level of much contemporary American social science.
