Dave Grossman: First-Person Shooter Videogames Should be Banned
January 4 | Katechon
Posted on Friday, January 04, 2013 8:43:51 PM by Katechon
The first juvenile mass-murder happened for the FIRST TIME in recorded human history in the late 1970s, in California. In 500 years of gun-powder combat, not once had a juvenile committed multiple homicide. We had a couple in the 1980s, and now it's out of control. So what happened?
It's Pavlog Dog, said Lt. Col. Lt. Col. Grossman: our youth is being conditioned from childhood by videogames to be "First-Person Shooters, (FPS) and to associate killing, human death and suffering with reward and pleasure.
Videogames are not "games"; they are mass-murder simulators, Grossman says.
Our kids are being wired from childhood by hyper-violent and realistic video games to be brainless killers, precognitively loaded to be potential murderers. And if videogames are training them to be killers, the movies and many TV shows are the propaganda machines of the gang-bangers.
In videogames, kids are being rewarded to kill, but without any of the benefits coming from the disciplinary training of the Army. And this rewarding response to killing another (virtual) human being deactivates our innate resistance to murdering.
Everyone is born with a deep resistance to killing any member of one’s own species; and this resistance is a key factor in combat.
Most participants in close combat are “frightened out of their wits,” says Grossman. But proper operant conditioning reliably influences the midbrain processing of a frightened human being.
Fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations.
Once the bullets start flying, combattants stop thinking with the forebrain (cerebrum) and start thinking with the primitive midbrain. The limbic system and the hypotalamus are in action while killing; whilst the rational brain is deactivated. But even the midbrain processing powerfully resists to the killing of one’s own species; it's a survival mechanism preventing a species from destroying itself.
To overcome this innate resistance to killing other human beings, the military and law enforcement communities have developped operantly conditioned devices using killing simulators in training. Turning killing into a conditionned response.
By the middle of the XXth century, the Human Resources Research Office (HumRRO) of the US Army pioneered a revolution in combat training. This paradigmatic shift would lead warriors firing at bullseye targets to warriors firing at man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit.
Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall observed that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. When left to their own devices, 80 percent of the combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.
But murder simulators produced a dramatic increase in participation in killing. More effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms were developped to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing.
The application and perfection of conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam, says Grossman.
The military’s marksmanship training program, with its pop-up targets, constitutes an highly effective operant conditioning.
Military behaviorists found out how to overcome our innate resistance to murder; they brought way up the percentage of killers among the platoons by incorporating reactive training with humanoid pop-up silhouettes.
Now the video industry has kids playing video games for hours at a time, blasting away at humanoid targets which explode in blood and gore when you shoot them.
In First-Person Shooter videogames, you pull the trigger and the human explodes in high-def blood and gore in front of you. And you do it again and again and again, while eating chips, drinking pop and smelling your girlfriend's perfume. This reconditions the kids to be ready to pull any actual trigger on any living human. Those videogames should be BANNED, restricted to military and law enforcement training.