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"Teaching
Kids To Kill"
Role
Models
In
the military your role model is your drill sergeant. He
personifies violence, aggression, and discipline. (The discipline,
and doing it to adults, are the safeguard)(Grossman, 1996).
The drill sergeant, and heroes such as John Wayne, Audey
Murphy, Sergeant York and Chesty Puller, have always been
used as role models to influence young, impressionable teenagers.
Today the media are providing our children with role models,
not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and in TV shows,
but in the transformation of these schoolyard killers into
media celebrities.
In the 1970's we learned about "cluster suicides," in which
TV reporting of teen suicides was directly responsible for
numerous copycat suicides of other teenagers. Because of
this, television stations today generally do not cover teen
suicides. But when the pictures of teenage killers appear
on TV, the effect is tragically similar. If there are children
willing to kill themselves to get on TV, are there
children willing to kill your child to get on TV?
Thus we get the effect of copycat, cluster murders that
work their way across America like a virus spread by the
six o'clock local news. No matter what someone has done,
if you put their picture on TV, you have made them a celebrity
and someone, somewhere, may emulate them. This effect is
magnified when the role model is a teenager, and the effect
on other teens can be profound.
In Japan, Canada, and other democracies around the world
it is a punishable, criminal act to place the names and
images of juvenile criminals in the media, because they
know that it will result in other tragic deaths.
The media has every right and responsibility to tell the
story, but do they have a “right” to turn the killers into
celebrities?
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Read
a different article:
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Encyclopedia
of Violence, Peace, and Conflict, Volume 3, p.159
© 1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction
in any form reserved.
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