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Dave Grossman: First-Person Shooter Videogames Should be Banned
January 4 | Katechon

Posted on 01/04/2013 5:43:51 PM PST by Katechon

Dave Grossman

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.

first person shooters

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.

bullseyes

Image 1602

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.

turn the tv off


TOPICS: Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: banglist; massacres; newtown; sandyhook; shooting; vanity; videogames; violence
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To: Katechon
1. The pop-up silhouette training you refer to as a "murder simulator" existed well before the late seventies.

2. If the use of "murder simulators" began with the generation of warriors who fought in Korea, why did it take until the late Seventies for the murder sprees to start?

3. If "the Army and the Police" were using pop-up silhouettes, why were kids who were not able to get access to that training killing people in the late Seventies?

4. Why weren't any of these cops and soldiers conditioned by "murder simulators" going on shooting sprees in the late Seventies.

5. You claim to be in Thailand. As I understand it, Thailand has had one major school shooting, and it was just a few years ago. Is there a ban on FPS video games? If not, why are there shootings here and not there? Same thing in Israel, which went 34 years between school shootings.

121 posted on 01/04/2013 6:59:31 PM PST by Mr. Silverback (Don't worry about the cliff. We're going to all land on some rich guy's wallet.)
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To: thackney

I played Xenodaga and tried to destroy reality once.... But I settled for making clean water in Fallout 3 instead.

Of course the hooker in New Vegas was kinda cool...


122 posted on 01/04/2013 7:00:22 PM PST by Norm Lenhart
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To: JRandomFreeper

Mr. Bonney was on the correct side of the law. The Murphy Dolan gang were the ones who should have been hunted down like dogs.


123 posted on 01/04/2013 7:01:35 PM PST by sean327 (God created all men equal, then some become Marines!)
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To: Norm Lenhart

I played the text-only Avalon Hill “B-1 Nuclear Bomber” on my super awesome cassette drive hooked up to my sweet Atari 400.

I have not been able to live out my fantasies of nuking a variety of Soviet cities.


124 posted on 01/04/2013 7:02:15 PM PST by Strategerist
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To: Mr. Silverback
Is there a ban on FPS video games?

In Thailand? One of the homes of blackmarket intellectual property?

Sure. On paper. But the bosses and the gangs aren't going to put up with that. If someone insisted, they might have an accident.

/johnny

125 posted on 01/04/2013 7:04:32 PM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: Strategerist

You are REALLY old school!

I started with Night Driver on the 2600. The Arcade game Tempest took most of my teenage money and I have been a drooling adolescent every since ;)

Played Centepede on a Trash80 once though...


126 posted on 01/04/2013 7:05:06 PM PST by Norm Lenhart
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To: backwoods-engineer

Exactly.

To make the same point, I ask one simple question:

How can one defend the 2Nd Amendment and in the same breath condemn the 1St?

This is exactly what the liberal press and other libs do, only in reverse.

They condemn the 2Nd while defending the 1St.

This country has become the Ship of Fools.


127 posted on 01/04/2013 7:06:15 PM PST by old curmudgeon
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To: dirtboy
I did all kinds of first-person shooting of my friends with my toy guns long before video games

See this old TV commercial, I actually remember seeing this as a kid.

When Toys Were Toys And Boys Were Boys

I'd say a culture that actually encourages the horrific murder of infants has much more to worry about than video games... (That said, I do not like those games but don't support banning them)

128 posted on 01/04/2013 7:06:28 PM PST by Bobalu (It is not obama we are fighting, it is the media.)
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To: JRandomFreeper

I’ve been waiting for him to address Hentai and tentacle porn games. Japan has no monopoly on those...


129 posted on 01/04/2013 7:07:01 PM PST by Norm Lenhart
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To: sean327
Tell it to Gov. Wallace.

/johnny

130 posted on 01/04/2013 7:07:24 PM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: Strategerist

Exactly right, to the best of my knowledge. Look at Hitler and the way his father Alois treated him and look at what he became.

Head injuries ? Well, there was the Chris Benoit incident....


131 posted on 01/04/2013 7:07:24 PM PST by Absolutely Nobama (The Doomsday Clock is at 11:59:00......tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.....)
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To: Norm Lenhart
tentacle

I know where that is going.

I gave up calamari because I saw one of those.

/johnny

132 posted on 01/04/2013 7:09:18 PM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: JRandomFreeper

They kinda make FPS games look like My little pony by comparison, don’t they?

But he seems OK with them. Hasn’t commented on FREAKING RAPE SIMS that flood the Asian market...

I wonder why?


133 posted on 01/04/2013 7:11:30 PM PST by Norm Lenhart
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To: Bobalu
I'd say a culture that actually encourages the horrific murder of infants has much more to worry about than video games.

Amen. How many Einsteins, how many George Washington Carvers have been killed while still in the womb? We (as a nation) have killed the blessings that God sent us.

/johnny

134 posted on 01/04/2013 7:12:37 PM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: old curmudgeon

I forgot to add to my post:

If we do not wish to lose our freedom, we must learn to tolerate our
neighbor’s right to freedom even though he might express that freedom
in a manner we consider to be eccentric.


135 posted on 01/04/2013 7:14:14 PM PST by old curmudgeon
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To: JRandomFreeper

Abortion is fine. Just don’t play Call of Duty. That would be wrong.


136 posted on 01/04/2013 7:14:36 PM PST by Norm Lenhart
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To: C210N
If we are to ban anything, it should be a 1st amendment restriction on the press to publicize the name of any mass shooter. They are intent on suicide, and know their key to fame is in the number of killed before they themselves are killed and the enemedia’s insistence on spreading their name. They want their name to live in infamy, towering above the previous mass murderer’s count

AMEN

Obviously, you've heard a Grossman seminar or two.

He refuses to name those evil minions, preferring to remember their victims while letting the perpetrators fade into obscurity.

GROSSMAN IS THE REAL DEAL!!!

137 posted on 01/04/2013 7:17:09 PM PST by lightman (If the Patriarchate of the East held a state like the Vatican I would apply for political asylum.)
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To: Norm Lenhart
It's gotten very quiet.... I expect the blowback was more than it or it's handlers expected.

Maybe we aren't as divided as they expected.

/johnny

138 posted on 01/04/2013 7:18:27 PM PST by JRandomFreeper (Gone Galt)
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To: All

Seems like something is missing...

Like the troll who left without ever answering a simple question.


139 posted on 01/04/2013 7:19:01 PM PST by Norm Lenhart
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To: Katechon
No they are not rare

Shootings where a teen kills a large number of people (more than two) with a firearm are indeed rare by any measure. But they are even more rare when one considers your premise that they are driven by video games. For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare sold 13 million copies, not counting piracy. If we could tie even 13 mass shootings to it, that would mean it was less than a 1 in a million risk. Can you point to 13 mass shootings that have occurred since 2007 and prove that this game was a major factor in them? Unlikely, and that's just one game. Halo 3 sold 11 million.

It's true, as you say, that Grossman is not only talking about mass shootings in schools. But what's foolish is that you're taking a group of people (urban gang kids) with pretty much every single pro-criminal indicator in their life you could ever come up with-- poverty, poor education, absent fathers, fathers and older siblings in the prison system, drug use in their immediate environment, glorification of gang and drug activity in their musical culture, welfare culture, etc.--and blaming their behavior on a game that is also played by legions of non-gang kids who don't have any of those indicators and never kill anyone.

If you really think that the violence in the black community is being caused by video games instead of liberal policies and lack of father figures, you need to explain why the kids without those problems are also not killing people. You need to explain, for instance, why a Boy Scout troop in my area has an annual cabin campout where they spend the whole weekend playing these games, and not a single one of any color has been in trouble with the law, much less shot another person. You need to explain why Chicago has twice as many firearm murders as Houston despite being the same size and racial mix...did Halo 3 and Call of Duty sell twice as many copies in Chicago?

140 posted on 01/04/2013 7:21:21 PM PST by Mr. Silverback (Don't worry about the cliff. We're going to all land on some rich guy's wallet.)
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