Wednesday, February 28, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Our predator
problem
The common denomina-
tor underlying school kill-
ings isn’t what you think
it is. It isn’t guns, and it
isn’t mental illness. The
only common denomina-
tor underlying mass school
killings is long-term, disso-
ciative exposure to violent
media.
Whether it’s violence in
films, violent lyrics, violent
television shows, violent
novels, violence depicted
across social media, or the
endless flood of violent
imagery in first-person-
shooter video games, those
countless hours steeped
in images of interpersonal
violence are damaging
the minds of our nation’s
children.
That is particularly true
in violent video games,
which encourage a child to
kill using the same methods
employed by the U.S. mili-
tary to increase lethality on
the battlefield.
The military accom-
plishes this by the intensive
and repetitive use of reac-
tive targets, which reward
the trainee with little shots
of dopamine — nature’s
biochemical reward — for
success.
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So do violent video
games.
Dave Grossman, who is
among the nation’s foremost
experts on school shoot-
ings, has written extensively
about the role of media vio-
lence in creating child pred-
ators. He argues effectively
that school shooters are only
doing what they have trained
to do, hour after hour.
“When children play vio-
lent video games, they’re
drilling, drilling, drilling —
not two times a year — (but)
every night, to kill every
living creature in front of
(them), until (they) run out
of targets or (they) run out
of bullets… So, when these
kids start shooting — we’re
reasonably confident that in
Pearl, Mississippi, and in
Paducah, Kentucky, and in
Jonesboro, Arkansas, these
juvenile, adolescent kill-
ers set out to shoot just one
person: usually their girl-
friend… But, then, they kept
on going! And, they gunned
down every living creature
in front of them, until they
ran out of targets or ran out
of bullets!”
The natural proclivities
of military trainees against
killing human beings are, at
least theoretically, already
fully formed in the mid-
brain and must be overcome
by repetitive drilling.
And, most importantly,
professional warriors are
taught that killing innocents
is antithetical to their role,
counterproductive to the
mission and the command-
er’s intent, and punishable
by imprisonment or even
death. They are also taught
how to turn the safety back
to the ON position.
Which is not what is
happening in the minds
of children steeped in the
dissociative violence of
first-person-shooter video
games or other media.
As a matter of science,
Grossman argues, constant
exposure to violent media
and violent video games is
short-circuiting the crucial
functions of the unformed
mid-brain in our children,
which serves to, among
other things, filter violent
impulse.
Not every child who
plays video games will
become a killer. But every
school shooter has played
violent video games.
But we don’t talk about
that much. We don’t mention
that 97 percent of American
adolescents, 12-17, play
video games, or that the
American Psychological
Association concluded, over
a decade ago, that “the evi-
dence strongly suggests that
exposure to violent video
games is a causal risk fac-
tor for increased aggressive
behavior, aggressive cogni-
tion, and aggressive affect
and for decreased empathy
and prosocial behavior.”
In other words, they cre-
ate sociopaths.
Instead, we insist on hav-
ing the wrong conversation,
and then compound that
problem — in an embar-
rassing abdication of adult
responsibility — by ushering
traumatized children in front
of television news cameras
in exploitive attempts to
have them set the tone and
direction of what is already
the wrong conversation.
The questions we should
be asking each other aren’t
about firearms, which mil-
lions of Americans use and
enjoy without ever killing
anyone or anything, it’s
what’s going on in our cul-
ture that is creating so many
dangerous predators in the
first place.
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And despite the now-
familiar — and well-
meaning — refrains for
stricter gun control after
every active-killer event,
it remains unclear how any
gun ban, magazine restric-
tion, bullet-button, confisca-
tion scenario, or buy-back
program will negate the sud-
den appearance of a blood-
thirsty predator in a defense-
less henhouse.
And as a matter of his-
torical fact, everything from
jet airplanes to poison punch
has been used more than
once in acts of mass killing.
Because preying on the
weak is what predators do.
We are not alone with
this problem in the world,
if that’s at all comforting,
and despite the best efforts
of gun-banners and other
fantasists — who insist on
the magic-think hallucina-
tion that gun bans will stuff
the predator genie back into
the bottle — the world-
wide evidence clearly says
otherwise.
A study by the University
of Melbourne concluded
that despite often being
touted as a responsible act of
prevention following a mass
shooting, the Australian gun
buyback had no discernable
effect on gun homicides in
Australia.
Violent crime across
Europe — where Norway
holds the world record for
a mass-shooting event, and
Germany held the world
record for students killed
in a school-shooting until
last week — has spiked
over the last 15 years. In
Russia, where private gun-
ownership is prohibited, the
7
murder rate is four times
that of the United States.
Grossman writes: “In
just 15 years, according to
Interpol data, per-capita vio-
lent crime went up almost
fivefold in Norway and
Greece; nearly fourfold in
Australia and New Zealand.
There was a clean tripling in
per-capita violent crime, in
these 15 years, in Sweden.
And per-capita violent crime
approximately doubled
in seven other European
nations…
“The question you need
to keep asking yourself,”
Grossman suggests, “is what
is the new variable, what is
the new ingredient? And the
new ingredient is that we are
creating killers, we are cre-
ating sociopaths (by way of
violent media).”
Gun bans aren’t going
to stop the mass-production
of predators in our country.
Prohibition never works.
Not for alcohol, and not
for drugs, which kill more
Americans every year than
guns by a wide margin. It
doesn’t work because pro-
hibition of a thing doesn’t
treat the underlying issues
that lead to abuse or misuse
of the prohibited thing.
We’ve always had guns.
What we haven’t always
had is a proliferation of
lethal sociopaths, and until
the parents of America stop
allowing their children to
train in synthetic violence
academies, where they
eventually graduate and
become tomorrow’s vicious
predators, negotiating away
any means of effective self-
defense is both delusional
and foolish.