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Nothing you probably didn't know...but as to # 11, it's hard to believe you couldn't run for office being against assault rifles and extended magazines.
The slain at Sandy Hook were babies. If people would put themselves in the shoes of the parents of the children who didn't come home from school last Friday, the sale of Bushmaster-type assault weapons would be banned by the end of the day.
Only 300+ million firearms out there. Probably a little late to start closing that barn door.
I own quite a few firearms but I am a little disturbed at times by the recent trend of some people treating some types of these weapons as almost toys or some sort of penis enlargement device. Too few people give any serious thought to what exactly they are holding and what responsibility that entails. Combine this trend with video games like "call of duty" and a disturbed mind and we will probably see more of these disasters. That said this is as much about mental health care in America as anything. That and our society in general.
It won't take long before the tiring "arguments" between our politicians and the lobbyists from each side begins....
Our politicans are already talking of setting up "commissions" to study possible "solutions".
Is "commisison looking for a solution" just another phrase for constipation?
Rather than the old, black spy vs white spy, toe to toe argument of "gun rights", just toss the issue squarely in the laps of the NRA, the gun manufacturers, gun hobbyists, etc. and say...
with Obama's visit last night I assume this will be a 'distraction tool' to facilitate austerity measures, tax reform and ongoing QE to come. Of course gun control brings out the very best in Americana . . .
“Look, first off, gun control is for Wimps and Commies. If one of those teachers was packin’ a .45 this would have ended very differently. Besides, carrying a firearm is every Americans right. How else do you expect to stop evil doers or when Obama marches into Michigan with the UN Army?”
A staffer for the Michigan Republican Party who wished to remain anonymous
Here's a tragically ironic coincidence.
Like every other industry, the manufacturers of firearms have a trade association to promote their industry.
It's called the National Shooting Sports Foundation. From their website:
The National Shooting Sports Foundation is the trade association for the firearms industry. Its mission is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports. Formed in 1961, NSSF has a membership of more than 7,000 manufacturers, distributors, firearms retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen's organizations and publishers. Our Mission Statement
To promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports. NSSF's History
Following a series of industry meetings in the late 1950s sponsored by Field & Stream magazine, NSSF was chartered in 1961 to promote a better understanding of and a greater participation in the hunting and shooting sports.
That organization has headquarters in the town that suffered this tragedy. The foundation's mailing address is:
National Shooting Sports Foundation
Flintlock Ridge Office Center
11 Mile Hill Road
Newtown, CT 06470-2359
Google maps shows this address about 1000 feet from the scene of the crime.
If someone wants to kill people he will find a way, either with box cutters and an airplane, with fertilizer like Timothy McVeigh, or with an axe or knife as in china
If we really wanted to ban dangerous things, we'd ban media coverage of this kind of rampage. Every nut job out there knows now where the bar to really make an impact is set after Oregon and California.
The people running this country have not hesitated in setting a course for the impoverishment of the middle class to the benefit of the 1%. Were it not for the fact that The People are armed, I believe that things would be much worse in the US. When the population has effective weapons, it serves as both a practical and psychological check on sociopathic behavior of the ruling elite.
If such infrequent tragedies as we recently experienced are the price we must pay to help protect our freedoms, I think it's worth it.
CDC statistics show that deaths from gun violence have remained stable over the last decade, so we don't have to let the recent events -- as terrible as they were -- lead us into foolish, emotionally driven actions.
On the other hand, we should keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and psychopaths as best we can, without trampling 2nd Amendment rights.
Some facts to consider, as the nation ponders the recent events:
The results discussed earlier contradict those expectations. On the one hand, despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s. On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was ever more drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns.Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violence-ridden nations.
A fact that should be of greater concern—but which the study fails to mention—is that per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent.
====
The worst mass-murder in a school wasn't committed with a gun. Former school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe, who got angry about a property tax levy and detonated three bombs in Bath Township, Michigan, killing 38 elementary school children, two teachers, a handful of other adults and himself. Nearly 60 were injured.
====
Nor do you need a gun to commit mass-murder in general. One of the worst mass-murder events in US history was committed in 1990 with a gallon of gasoline; Julio Gonzalez, who was later convicted of arson and murder, spread gasoline on the entrance to the club and set it ablaze. 87 people died.
Here is Denninger's take on the issue.
Toward the end, he discusses Big Pharma's role in widely dispensing pills whose known side effects are homicidal and suicidal ideation:
Solutions For CT: There Are Some
But they're not what people are promoting, especially those who are always looking for a way to shove you in the hole -- right after they remove your ability to resist.
And let's not kid ourselves -- that's exactly what happened in Connecticut. The teachers and staff in that school had no lawful means to resist, because they accepted (and probably even supported) the fallacious argument that laws (paper) stop bullets. They learned, too late, that this argument is and always has been false.
A murderous thug, enabled by foolish reliance on pieces of paper,shoved them in the hole.
If you believe that "gun control" (of any sort) will stop these events you're suffering from a severe case of logical fallacy -- or delusion. The worst mass-murder in a school wasn't committed by Adam Lanza. That distinction belongs to former school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe, who got*****ed off about a property tax levy and detonated three bombs in Bath Township, Michigan, killing 38 elementary school children, two teachers, a handful of other adults and himself. Nearly 60 were injured.
That murderer also killed his wife and set his farm buildings on fire just before he set off the bombs.
Believe it or not, Bath Township got off light. There were over 500lbs of additional explosives planted in the buildings that failed to go off; he intended to destroy the entire school and presumably kill everyone inside, but the second device failed to explode.
Nor do you need a gun to commit mass-murder in general. One of the worst mass-murder events in US history was committed in 1990 with a gallon of gasoline; Julio Gonzalez, who was later convicted of arson and murder, spread gasoline on the entrance to the club and set it ablaze. 87 people died. Not only did the gasoline cost far less than a gun, it is much easier to obtain. Do you recall any hue and cry for the banning of gasoline, or even for gasoline-powered weed-eaters and lawn-mowers (or, for that matter, portable generators) -- the predicate items that for sane people compel them to buy and use a portable gas can, and thus make portable gas cans available to homicidal maniacs?
Next, let's talk about the school once again, because here we see an over-reliance on half-measures and "feel good" ideation as well. The school locked the doors and required a buzzer to enter, which sounds reasonable. The problem is that they didn't armor the glass in the immediate vicinity of the door, making possible a trivial forced entry. A person intent on homicide doesn't care if he breaks a window (a petty crime) first. You can't reasonably replace all windows with shatter-proof panes (e.g. wired-mesh glass that can be shot through but will not break in a fashion that allows entry) but you can do so for that glass in an entry door or in its immediate vicinity, and you can for small windows in and immediately in the vicinity of classroom doors. You can also equip classroom doors with cylinder deadbolt locks that require a key from the outside to open, but can be operated without a key from the inside. These enhancements, which are pretty inexpensive, would have thwarted the shooter's forced entry into the school and if he gained entry to the building would have prevented his entry into the classrooms. There are reports that teachers had to use file cabinets and their bodies to barricade the doors; one was shot and injured doing so. That's outrageous when a quality deadbolt-equipped door and metal frame bolted to the structure of the building costs only a few hundred dollars.
I want to know who was behind the changes made to "secure" this school and what sort of analytical process was undertaken, whether it was debated in the open at a school board meeting, whether the public was involved, and whether the public was invited to think about and comment on the path undertaken and its expense. Again, while hindsight is always 20/20 if the fact that a plate window was in the immediate vicinity of a "locked" door was not looked at as a security problem then I question both the people and the process involved in "hardening" this installation.
Next, let's talk about the adults in the school. We already require training on sexual assault, child abuse and similar issues for school teachers and administrators. Why do we omit self-defense from this list, when our teachers and administrators claim the right of in loco parentis during school hours for our children?
That omission is asinine.
No, not all teachers will want or be comfortable with the responsibility for defense of the children in their care during class hours. So what? Not all parents are comfortable with that responsibility either! Witness the myriad parents who right here and now are screaming for symbolic acts that the above two events document will not insure their child's safety.
But there are also teachers who are comfortable with these duties and responsibility. Indeed, at least one teacher at this school died while covering her students with her body, the only means of defense she had available to her. There are also parents who believe in the same, and who take such a responsibility seriously. To those who don't or are on the fence, let me ask you a simple question: Let us assume you are in the school when Adam Lanza enters and begins to shoot children. You see him murder a child in cold blood. He has his back turned to you and beyond him is a solid concrete-block wall -- no innocent children or adults. On the table next to you, within arms reach, appears a loaded gun. You have 2 seconds to decide before Adam kills another child: Will you shoot Adam Lanza and stop his assault or not?
I assume that every sane adult who has any sort of respect for and love of human life, whether a parent or not, would shoot Adam Lanza under these circumstances as many times as were necessary to terminate his assault. I know I would do so.
So why, given that the school took what it thought were reasonable precautions but which turned out to be inadequate in the harsh 20/20 hindsight of the next morning, would anyone of similarly sane mind not demand that every employee of said school district, who already must pass a background check in order to be employed at the school since they are in close contact with children, should have the ability to acquire the training and then ability to carry the only device known to man capable of stopping a murderer like Adam Lanza? That is, why do you insist that the only device known effective to terminate such an assault be available only to murderous thugs inside and around a school, and not to those who respect and revere both life itself but also the children inside?
There is no logical argument one can raise against this. Front Sight, a well-known firearms training company, is offering free training for up to three staff members from each school, college or university in the wake of this tragedy. They're right, and the detractors are wrong, purely and simply on the facts.
I understand full well that there are many "pretty snowflakes" who will recoil in horror at this suggestion. It is time for all of those "snowflakes" to wake the hell up for there is in fact evil in this world, and plenty of it. A murderous thug does not care about the law, he does not care if it's illegal to acquire one or more guns, and in the particular case at issue the assailant murdered his mother in order to get the guns he used after he was told he would have to wait 2 weeks to buy one at a store.
If you do not understand that the only deterrent that such a murderous bastard understands is the threat of deadly force used lawfully to defend the intended victims then you're not very bright. And if you do understand this and argue for removing the only tools that are effective from such defenders anyway then you're a sick and corrupt bastard that has no just role in public policy -- or anywhere else in the public square opining on this matter.
You are free to cower in the corner and die sniveling if you wish but I not only refuse I will support others defending your children even if you, who should, will not. You can claim this change in the law and policy would be ineffective if you wish but in point of fact Israel, in the 1970s, faced a rash of terrorist attacks on their schools. Israel also heard people screaming for more gun control, as we do today. Their government analyzed the problem and decided to do the opposite and as I am advocating here -- they trained and armed their teachers instead. What happened? School shootings ceased as schools were no longer "soft" targets full of people who could not shoot back. Come to this debate armed with facts. Never mind what I pointed out yesterday -- in Oregon the recent mall shooter had his "gun free mall zone" concept disrupted by a CCW holder -- and rather than continue his murderous rampage he elected to kill himself.
Therefore all school teachers, administrators and staff should be offered such training and CCW permits should they so choose, and this change in law and policy, including the formal revocation of "Gun Free School Zones" should be widely publicized so that criminal thugs become aware that the day of the "free fire" zone at schools across our land has ended. Finally, on the subject of guns and violent crime you should look at the study out of Harvard (a notoriously liberal school which you would expect to support strong gun control) which recently was published, that found, among other things:
The results discussed earlier contradict those expectations. On the one hand, despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s. On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was ever�-more drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns.22 Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violence-ridden nations. ....
A fact that should be of greater concern—but which the study fails to mention—is that per capita murder overall is only half as frequent in the United States as in several other nations where gun murder is rarer, but murder by strangling, stabbing, or beating is much more frequent. 47
Oh darn, those pesky facts intrude once again.
There is another side of this event, however, that we must address at the same time -- mental illness. Put simply, we deal with it in this nation very poorly and in far too many cases we do so by reaching for the pill bottle without due regard for what should come with that act.
There are plenty of kids who are*****ed off for damn good reason, just as there are many adults who are*****ed off for damn good cause. Anger is a useful emotion and not to be trifled with, simply dismissed, or worse, drugged away. Appropriately focused and used, it can drive one to change their surroundings and remove severe negative influences from one's life. In short it can lift one from failure to success. Inappropriately used, however, it can be extremely destructive.
But then there are those who are psychopaths -- or sociopaths, if you prefer. Many of these people are attracted to positions of power and are very good at acquiring it through beguilement of various forms; once in those positions of power they then abuse that power as they have no emotional connection to the world around them or the intentional damage they inflict on the people beneath them.
If you believe this is a crazy assertion you might want to look at the fact that this has actually been studied, and over-representation at higher levels of power is quite stunning. This likely speaks to much of our lack of policy response; after all, were you in charge of the levers of power in government would you advocate for a set of policy prescriptions, assuming you are highly intelligent, that has a decent probability of leading to the loss of your own power?
Of course not.
Now look at the people who are supposedly "well-respected" but arguing for strict gun control or outright bans, despite the fact that many of them enjoy either their own arms for protection or have armed guards at their disposal, including Mayor Bloomberg, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and many others. How many of those people display psychopathic traits such as not caring about the impact of their policies on the common man -- doubling of gasoline prices, rampant increases in the cost of medical care, bread, milk, cheese, meats. Unemployment. Outrageous levels of offshoring of production and monopoly-style protections for those industries that ladle the cost of their operations on Americans.
Oh, you say, this is an invalid comparison? The hell it is. The fact is that psychopathic behavior lies along a vector; that is, it is not a simple "yes" or "no" but rather extends at one extreme from someone willing to murder his own mother to acquire weapons and at the other end includes people willing to **** over the public to make a buck in one form or another, such as by knowingly selling them worthless mortgage bonds, or to do so for the purpose of accumulation of personal power and protection, such as Mayor Bloomberg who pontificates on gun control while employing armed guards himself.
As a nation we must confront all of this psychotic and psychopathic behavior and those who engage in it, including especially those in our organs of power who use beguilement to seduce us with promises that they know damn well cannot be kept. These people shove in the hole many times the number of bodies that a mass-murderer manages to dispatch before he meets his demise, as each of those deaths takes place much more slowly and in a more-diffuse way. In addition the lives destroyed and despair inflicted by such policies are not counted at all.
Finally, a not-insignificant part of the responsibility for these assaults rest in our pharmaceutical industry. Many of the drugs commonly prescribed for various psychiatric and psychological "disorders" are known and in fact labeled as having the potential to cause homicidal and suicidal ideation. The two are close cousins. How is it that such a substance can be administered in a setting where only self-reporting by the person suffering the ideation is available as a flagging mechanism?
C'mon folks -- you're brighter than that.
This is not to say that such drugs don't have their place. They most-certainly do. But shouldn't we be talking about whether such a prescription should come only under close clinical scrutiny by licensed psychiatrists, not primary-care physicians without specialized training? And should we not insist on legal liability for those writing such scripts to perform clinically-validated supervision on the efficacy and side effects of such drugs?
And let's not kid ourselves -- Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Cymbalta and many more carry a "black label" suicide warning. The correlation between mass-murdering bastards and their use of these drugs is striking -- and deeply troubling.
Yes, this means that there would be much more court-ordered supervision. People would be declared incompetent, temporarily or otherwise. And liability would come -- as it should -- for those pill-pushers who fail to monitor their patients in a proactive, competent and continual manner when and after prescribing these substances if and when those whom they take under their care undertake violent acts that are not only reasonably foreseeable they are warned about directly on the label of the bottle!
Given the clear record of correlation between the recent mass-murderers and these drugs I think we're long beyond the point where such a requirement should be imposed. We have turned ordinary grief and anger, useful emotions that all humans (other than psychotics who have no such emotions) undergo from time to time, into an excuse to hand out a pill -- but in many cases those pills are worse than the cause for their prescription!
At the same time this leads us to be ridiculously and culpably lax in the monitoring that must be applied to legitimate uses for these drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry will no doubt excoriate any such suggestion, since it is part and parcel of development of such drugs that many prescriptions must be written in order to make their development "worth it." That is, wide appeal and use, and therefore lax supervision, is essential to the existing pharmaceutical model.
But when it comes to psychotropic medication this is not only unacceptable it is grossly irresponsible and must end here and now.
Finally, we must accept that there is evil in the world. We can prevent some of these events and mitigate others, but we cannot stop them all. Removing the "soft target" attraction may not prevent every such assault but it will increase the odds that the attempt will be thwarted or the harm minimized, as occurred in Oregon. Imposing requirements for both proactive clinical monitoring of persons on psychotropic drugs and attaching liability to clinicians who do not appropriately monitor their patients will force an examination of whether the treatment modalities and claimed "disorders" we shove pills at are in fact justified or whether we're creating a cure that in many cases is worse than the disease.
And finally, we must confront the fact that many of those who hold the levers of power are in fact low-level functional psychopaths themselves, and it is their grasp for power, influence and control that at many levels is inhibiting the application of logical debate and fact-finding to incidents like this, as they choose instead to protect themselves and their power while increasing the harm done to society as a whole.
The people running this country have not hesitated in setting a course for the impoverishment of the middle class to the benefit of the 1%. Were it not for the fact that The People are armed, I believe that things would be much worse in the US. When the population has effective weapons, it serves as both a practical and psychological check on sociopathic behavior of the ruling elite.
Agree. My heart aches for the families that loved ones. But there are already gun control laws in effect that were disregarded. More gun control would not have saved those children. It did, however, prevent any adult at the scene from being armed, which might well have saved some lives.
As flintlock said, this is indeed as much, if not more, about the lack of effective mental health care in our country, but you won't be seeing Million Mom marches demanding better mental health care. That's why I suspect these recent shootings by lone "nuts" to be false flag operations designed to get people to demand more gun control. Our growing police state just isn't complete without it.
Last edited by shiny!; December 17, 2012, 01:18 PM.
Reason: spelling
Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.
Are we training our children to kill? I am from Jonesboro, Arkansas. I travel the world training medical, law enforcement, and U.S. military personnel about the realities of warfare. I try to make those who carry deadly force keenly aware of the magnitude of killing. Too many law enforcement and military personnel act like "cowboys," never stopping to think about who they are and what they are called to do. I hope I am able to give them a reality check.
....
Virus of Violence
To understand the why behind Jonesboro and Springfield and Pearl and Paducah, and all the other outbreaks of this "virus of violence," we need to understand first the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate doubled in this country between 1957 when the FBI started keeping track of the data--and 1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated by the rate people are attempting to kill one another--the aggravated assault rate. That rate in America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957 to over 440 per 100,000 by the middle of this decade. As bad as this is, it would be much worse were it not for two major factors.
First is the increase in the imprisonment rate of violent offenders. The prison population in America nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992. According to criminologist John J. DiIulio, "dozens of credible empirical analyses . . . leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes." If it were not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest of any industrialized nation), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate would undoubtedly be even higher.
Children don't naturally kill; they learn it from violence in the home and most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, movies, and interactive video games.
The second factor keeping the murder rate from being any worse is medical technology. According to the US Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that would have killed nine out of ten soldiers in World War II, nine out of ten could have survived in Vietnam. Thus, by a very conservative estimate, if we had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder rate would be ten times higher than it is. The magnitude of the problem has been held down by the development of sophisticated lifesaving skills and techniques, such as helicopter medivacs, 911 operators, paramedics, CPR, trauma centers, and medicines.
However, the crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true worldwide. In Canada, according to their Center for Justice, per capita assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder increased nearly sevenfold, and murders doubled. Similar trends can be seen in other countries in the per capita violent crime rates reported to Interpol between 1977 and 1993. In Australia and New Zealand, the assault rate increased approximately fourfold, and the murder rate nearly doubled in both nations. The assault rate tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled in Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland, while all these nations had an associated (but smaller) increase in murder.
This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are many factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the prevalence of guns in our society. But violence is rising in many nations with draconian gun laws. And though we should never downplay child abuse, poverty, or racism, there is only one new variable present in each of these countries, bearing the exact same fruit: media violence presented as entertainment for children.
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 amazingly, 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.
The Methods in this Madness: Desensitization
How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture.
Brutalization and desensitization are what happen at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.
Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.
When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.
Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's just TV." And they nod their little heads and say, "okay." But they can't tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's what the media is doing to them.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three-to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old.
Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually." The article went on to say that ". . . if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).
Classical Conditioning
Classical conditioning is like the famous case of Pavlov's dogs you learned about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear the bell without salivating.
The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.
The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in the years to come. Operant conditioning (which we will look at shortly) teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it.
This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern US military training; but there are some clear-cut examples of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to our children is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie A Clockwork Orange. In A Clockwork Orange, a brutal sociopath, a mass murderer, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent movies while he is injected with a drug that nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches as he watches the movies. After hundreds of repetitions of this, he associates violence with nausea, and it limits his ability to be violent.
Every time a child plays an interactive video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex skills as a soldier or police officer in training.
We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, learning to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.
After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Coliseum.
The result is a phenomenon that functions much like AIDS, which I call AVIDS--Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS has never killed anybody. It destroys your immune system, and then other diseases that shouldn't kill you become fatal. Television violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive pleasure from violence. And once you are at close range with another human being, and it's time for you to pull that trigger, Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome can destroy your midbrain resistance.
Operant Conditioning
The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the use of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits in front of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning light goes on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning light goes on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet; the plane is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him. He is wetting his seat cushion, and he is scared out of his wits; but he does the right thing. Why? Because he has been conditioned to respond reflexively to this particular crisis.
When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do. In fire drills, children learn to file out of the school in orderly fashion. One day there is a real fire, and they are frightened out of their wits; but they do exactly what they have been conditioned to do, and it saves their lives.
The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response. This has substantially raised the firing rate on the modern battlefield. Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response--soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.
Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills.
I was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering mitigation for a kid who was facing the death penalty. I tried to explain to the jury that interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to kill. He had spent hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and shoot, point and shoot. One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to rob the local convenience store. They walked in, and he pointed a snub-nosed .38 pistol at the clerk's head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk right between the eyes--which is a pretty remarkable shot with that weapon at that range--and killed this father of two. Afterward, we asked the boy what happened and why he did it. It clearly was not part of the plan to kill the guy--it was being videotaped from six different directions. He said, "I don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed to happen."
...
The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three-to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old.
Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually." The article went on to say that ". . . if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992)...
It is too late for gun control. What we needed is the principal to have had access to a pistol.
In the past I would be all for gun control. Now, with our rights being ripped away and the nation continuing towards fascism/police state, our government is to be feared. Without any counterbalance, I have no doubt we would already be a failed nation (or worse).
The guy had 10 minutes of unhindered access to children and unarmed adults. That's way too much time.
He killed himself, only when he heard the sirens. He knew at that point that armed adults bent on stopping him were arriving. Prior to that he owned the place.
Gun free zones aren't, obviously.
I don't own any "assualt rifles either", but he had 23 seconds per victim. Magazine capacity was not really an issue here.
On the morning of December 29, the troops went into the camp to disarm the Lakota. One version of events claims that during the process of disarming the Lakota, a deaf tribesman named Black Coyote was reluctant to give up his rifle, claiming he had paid a lot for it.[6] A scuffle over Black Coyote's rifle escalated and a shot was fired which resulted in the 7th Cavalry's opening fire indiscriminately from all sides, killing men, women, and children, as well as some of their own fellow troopers. Those few Lakota warriors who still had weapons began shooting back at the attacking troopers, who quickly suppressed the Lakota fire. The surviving Lakota fled, but U.S. cavalrymen pursued and killed many who were unarmed.
By the time it was over, at least 150 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux had been killed and 51 wounded (4 men, 47 women and children, some of whom died later); some estimates placed the number of dead at 300. Twenty-five troopers also died, and 39 were wounded (6 of the wounded would later die).[7] It is believed that many were the victims of friendly fire, as the shooting took place at close range in chaotic conditions. At least twenty troopers were awarded the coveted Medal of Honor.[8]
Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.
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