Big Game Hunting: A Former Soldier and Expert on Killing Sets His Sights on Violent Video Games

By Ted Gregory, Chicago Tribune Staff Writer

In his black cowboy boots, jeans, and tweed sport coat over a denim shirt, Dave Grossman looks downright disarming. He laughs quickly and intensely and, when the situation calls for it, dips into a deep well of quips that reporters crave.

Dave Grossman also knows more about killing than just about anybody. And, in particular, virtual killing. What makes him newsworthy these days is his argument that ultraviolent video games are helping transform children into unflinching, deadly accurate killers. It's a point that elevates his profile above almost everyone else in the debate about media violence.

"So, these kids would send me death threats," Grossman said on a recent visit to Chicago. "It almost always goes like this: 'You say violent video games make kids violent. That's not true and it makes me so mad, I'm going to kill you.' " And Grossman started laughing that infectious, almost wild laugh that suits his wild, wide blue eyes so well.

His message clearly is gaining momentum. President Clinton last spring said Grossman bears listening to. He has been profiled on "60 Minutes." Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan and US senators are supporting his work to curb sales of violent video games. His speaking schedule is booked for eight months. As Grossman picks up speed, he poses a greater threat to the $6.1-billion-a-year video game industry.

Until his retirement in February 1998, Dave Grossman was Lt. Col. David Grossman, United States Army. As a teenager and as a young adult, he now says, he was violence prone. He enlisted in the Army in 1974. He rose through the ranks to training sergeant in the 82nd Airborne Division, then to infantry company commander, where he led soldiers patrolling the jungles of Panama before the US invasion in 1989.

Along the way, he earned a college degree with an emphasis in military history, then a master's in education. He taught psychology at West Point. He's a member of Mensa and the author of two books: "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" and "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie & Video Game Violence."

So, what you have in the framework of an Arkansas hayseed is a highly educated man who knows killing as thoroughly as literature professors know William Faulkner. It makes the experts uncomfortable.

For the last two years, Grossman has been traveling the country, teaching about killing, while leading an institution with the peculiar-sounding name, Killology Research Group.

He teaches cops, teachers, superintendents, and physicians. He talks to local Rotary Clubs and PTAs. He'll talk to anybody about it, sometimes for free, sometimes for his negotiable fee of $5,000 a day.

"I teach them what we know about killing," said Grossman, 43, during a recent stop in Chicago, "what enables killing, what our psychological responses to killing are. How we turn it on and off in our soldiers . . . and how we're doing the same thing to our kids.

"In fact, a significant chunk of "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill," published last fall and co-authored by media consultant Gloria DeGaetano, is something of a treatise on the dangers of violent video games.

Essentially, Grossman starts with research that shows video games are addictive. Then, he argues that the "first-person shooter" games use "operant conditioning," a repetitive stimulus-response training (think flight simulators for pilots) that almost matches the military's method of desensitizing humans' aversion to killing other humans while it hones reflexes.

Grossman goes on to state that several military and law enforcement training simulators--the Army's Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator, Fire Arms Training Simulator, used by law enforcement agencies--are more or less identical to violent video arcade games.

Then he cites the horrifying anecdotes of school shootings in Paducah, Ky., and Littleton, Colo. In both cases, and in other youth shootings, Grossman said, the shooters were avid video game players.

Beyond his military training and education, the compelling aspect of Grossman's theory is that you can almost see him as one of those vulnerable kids who might have spent thousands of hours playing Doom or Quake or any number of ultraviolent video games he now contends are dangerous.

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Grossman was an "Army brat" whose family lived in North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Nebraska--never in one place for more than 18 months. He brawled nearly everywhere he went and immersed himself in Zane Grey novels and science fiction.

"I just would never take anything off anybody," Grossman recalled, "and I didn't mind getting the daylights beaten out of me if I could hurt the guy bad enough that he'd hesitate to do it next time.

"He said he was a C+ high school student who left early and worked on a wildcat oil rig in Nebraska for a few months before returning to high school to graduate. Then, he enlisted in the Army.

He got married, had three sons, and kept moving but stayed married. He entered Columbus College near Ft. Benning, Ga., at night, and for his first college paper he wrote about how the military uses operant conditioning and denial defense mechanisms to enable killing. That started him studying killing, he said. He wrote "On Killing" en route to teach at West Point

Then in 1994, he took a teaching job at Arkansas State University, in a town of about 46,000 people in the northeast corner of the state. A town named Jonesboro.

Four years later, two boys gunned down 15 people in a local middle school, killing five, and infamy descended upon Jonesboro. Grossman found himself called on to brief teachers and administrators on how to deal with the aftermath. The experience motivated him to write "Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill," which he was working on when the Columbine High School shootings occurred a little more than one year later.

That effort served to illuminate his understanding of violence, Grossman said. But over the years his work also has forced him to come to grips with his failings as a parent.

"I blew it with my kids," Grossman said. "My oldest boy never lets me forget how I let him sit there and watch some movie, I think it was 'It.' They're up there in the Arctic and this monster's coming. My boy's about 5 years old and he's crying and he's crawled under the seat and I said, 'C'mon, knock it off. It's just a movie.' And, today, I realize that was shameful. I am truly ashamed of that. But, you know, people don't just one day wake up and say, 'Wow, I was a jerk!' It takes a while for you to sneak up on it and say, 'Wow, you know, I shouldn't have done that! I'm going to do a better job with my grand babies."

He's waiting for grandchildren and active in his local Baptist church with his wife, Jeanne--when he's home. He's on the road six days a week speaking against violence in the media.

But, for all the emotional and seemingly logical pull his arguments have, Grossman seems to lack universally accepted research that draws a direct correlation to violent video games and violent behavior in children.

Even those who believe Grossman is on the right track said the evidence is sparse.

"I think we're still at the if point," said Jeanne Funk, a psychologist at University of Toledo who has been studying the effect of video game violence on children and young adults for 10 years. "I believe that we will find that it is a factor, but I just don't believe we've found it yet."

She said her research indicates that "the effects are subtle, and some of the relationships seem to be more long term and built up over a period of time." She added that "it's premature to start enacting laws and take severe or drastic actions before we have more information."

Dan Snyder, a former Marine sergeant who designed training simulators for the military, said the commercial games actually teach bad training habits and are so lacking in context that they are nothing like military training. "If your real targets are sprites on a screen and you're handling a plastic pistol that shoots beams of light," Snyder said, "these games will make you ready."

And, those from the Interactive Digital Software Association, the leading organization representing video and computer game manufacturers, used even stronger language.

"The leap from taking animated characters out in a fantasy environment to the fact that these games translate into real world behavior involving real guns and shooting real people is something that nobody comes close to," said Doug Lowenstein, president of the association. He noted the Australian government's five-year study of computer games found "at best only weak and ambiguous evidence" that violent games bring violent behavior.

Many Grossman critics also argued that the games clearly are fantasy, that other factors, including dysfunctional parenting and children with delayed emotional and intellectual functioning, are more serious factors in youth violence. A few opponents said the violent games actually provide a healthy outlet for aggressions and a harmless way for adolescents to rebel.

Grossman maintains that most of the criticism is from media spin specialists whose observations amount to snipping at the fringes of his otherwise tightly woven principles.

"This concept of these things being fantasy is interesting," Grossman said, "because the Holy Grail of this industry is realism, seeking ever greater levels of realism. And, when the child spends more waking hours playing the game than he does anything else, what becomes fantasy and what becomes reality?

"People tell me, 'you can't tell me that a 6-year-old in Flint, Mich., couldn't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.'" Grossman said, recalling the Feb. 29 shooting in which a 6-year-old boy shot and killed a classmate. "And I say, 'Well, you know, how many adults do you know who think professional wrestling is real?"

The thing that both sides agree on is that children should not be playing the graphically violent games. In fact the association six years ago formed the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which places warning stickers on game packages.

The problem is getting retailers to enforce those ratings guidelines. Illinois Atty. Gen. Jim Ryan is leading the effort to pressure store owners. In the spring, he called for stores to stop selling the most graphic video games to children.

That call prompted Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck and Co. to pull the most graphic games from their shelves. Legislative action is pending in Tennessee and Indianapolis. And, on May 24, nine US senators, Democrats and Republicans, sent a letter to Target, Best Buy, Circuit City and K-Mart asking them to follow Ryan's recommendation to stop selling violent video games to children. Grossman believes more will follow. And, he will keep traveling and preaching the gospel of violent video vigilance wherever he is asked to speak. He said he's booked for the next nine months. And, whenever the grind starts to get to him, he recalls his days serving Uncle Sam.

"If I were in the Army," he said, laughing, "they'd be treating me a lot worse than this."