|
"Teaching
Kids To Kill"
Killing
Unnaturally
I spent almost a quarter of a century as an Army infantry
officer, a paratrooper, a Ranger, and a West Point Psychology
Professor, learning and studying how we enable people to
kill. Most soldiers have to be trained to kill.
Healthy
members of most species have a powerful, natural resistance
to killing their own kind. Animals with antlers and horns
fight one another by butting heads. Against other species
they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranha turn their
fangs on everything, but they fight one another with flicks
of the tail. Rattlesnakes bite anything, but they wrestle
one another.
When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear
our thought processes become very primitive, and we slam
head on into that hardwired resistance against killing.
During World War II, we discovered that only 15-20 percent
of the individual riflemen would fire at an exposed enemy
soldier (Marshall, 1978). You can observe this in killing
throughout history, as I have outlined in much greater
detail
in my book, On Killing, (Grossman, 1996), in my three
peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries, (Grossman, 1999a, 1999b,
and Murray, 1999) and in my entry in the Oxford Companion
to American Military History (1999).
That's
the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage
of soldiers are willing and able to kill. When the military
became aware of this, they systematically went about the
process of “fixing” this “problem.” And fix it they did.
By Vietnam the firing rate rose to over 90 percent (Grossman,
1999a).
|
|
|
|
Read
a different article:
|
Encyclopedia
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
©
1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction in any
form reserved.
|
