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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill "Trained to Kill" Killing is Unnatural Before retiring from the military, I spent almost a quarter of a century as an army infantry officer and a psychologist, learning and studying how to enable people to kill. Believe me, we are very good at it. But it does not come naturally; you have to be taught to kill. And just as the army is conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards. After the Jonesboro killings, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Juvenile Violence came to town and said that children don't naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games. Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one's own kind. I can best illustrate this from drawing on my own work in studying killing in the military. We all know that you can't have an argument or a discussion with a frightened or angry human being. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of the blood vessels, has literally closed down the forebrain--that great gob of gray matter that makes you a human being and distinguishes you from a dog. When those neurons close down, the midbrain takes over and your thought processes and reflexes are indistinguishable from your dog's. If you've worked with animals, you have some understanding in the realm of midbrain responses. Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. But when they fight any other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but they wrestle one another. Almost every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind. When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths--who by definition don't have that resistance--lack this innate violence immune system. Throughout human history, when humans fight each other, there is a lot of posturing. Adversaries make loud noises and puff themselves up, trying to daunt the enemy. There is a lot of fleeing and submission. Ancient battles were nothing more than great shoving matches. It was not until one side turned and ran that most of the killing happened, and most of that was stabbing people in the back. All of the ancient military historians report that the vast majority of killing happened in pursuit when one side was fleeing. In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Paddy Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazing, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel. In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. So, he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head. During World War II, US Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier. That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die; they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation, but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature, but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem." From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did. By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: YertleTurtle (#0)
And now, they're up to 99.99% of the cops in America. Well done.
Join the Ron Paul Revolution Very interesting read, though I think I've read it before. One of the conclusions of the article is that laws should be enacted that prohibit violence in video games and such. Exposure to violent TV and games seems to be the main focus of the article. Obviously most of us here take exception to such laws, but it does make a good argument against violence in media and games. Surely something we can take into consideration in our own homes.
Pinguinite.com EcuadorTreasures.ec
So the fire bombing of Dresden was done by psychopaths? Damn, I never knew this before. I just thought anyone in a war shot to kill the enemy before they got shot themselves.
God is always good!
And playing Ghost Recon while chugging jolt is just the same as bayoneting a POW and then raping a helpless woman. Mass genocide. Refusing to share the remote drone in a multi-player match. It's all the same, really. So does that mean all that time I spent playing as a Middle Eastern Coalition Spec Ops soldier and strapping C4 to USMC tanks makes me a future terrorist? Will my late night Combat Mission 2 marathons cause me to invade Poland? Is Iraq such a mess because the locals play too much counter-strike? Or maybe, just maybe I'm so prone to using violence to solve my problems at this stage in my life because it's effective and the only option left the hypocritical nation I live in where men with large guns and larger egos tell me violence solves nothing while at the same time crushing someone's skull under a jack-boot. "We live in a nation where our youth have the firm conviction that cruelty is never punished and always brings prosperity. If true, what an uncomfortable, horrible, nation we will live in!" It couldn't be the demise of the rule of law or the filth we put in power that causes people to act out. Oh no, it's those damn cartoons and video games! (I write this because not only was it a hot button for me, but not long ago I was put into a position where I might have to shoot someone. Know what? I was scared out of my fucking mind. Can't say I felt very desensitized. No amount of media can prepare you for it or make it easy.)
"The more I see of life, the less I fear death" - Me.
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