The Meaning of School Shootings: Part Four (and Last)

My apologies for the wait between parts Three and Four -- my personal life (GDC, finals, projects, etc.) got in the way, as did my desire to make sure that I adequately presented the arguments against my thesis (which meant I had to actually read a couple of books :-)). But we're here at last, and we'll finish off the argument and provide a suggestion for improving our situation.

Re-cap of Parts One, Two, and Three
School shootings are statistically insignificant as a cause of death and injury in America, but they garner an unjustifiably large share of our media when they happen. I contend that we are interested in them not only because "if it bleeds, it leads" on TV, but because we recognize them as aberrant phenomena and, as sense-making creatures, we want to know why they happen and what they mean.

We are addressing part of why they happen -- not the short and long-term triggering events (bullying, childhood abuse, mental illness, all mentioned multiply in comments) but the long-term enabling events which result in murders rather than brawls or other, less socially unacceptable, behaviour? Why shootings? How did we go from fistfights to "rumbles" with knives to guns?

Violent media imagery plays a significant part. Violent media imagery includes movies, TV shows, TV news, music, and video games (computer games, arcade games, and console games). Studies show clearly that consumption of violent media imagery correlates with later violent behavior and that there are at least two mechanisms at work: arousal (which reinforces violent behaviours observed and performed) and desensitization (which reduces barriers to violent behaviour). Statistical examination suggests that between 15% and 37% of the increased aggressive or violent behaviour can be explained by exposure to violent media imagery.

Arguments against violent media imagery promoting violent behaviour often actually support the idea: James Paul Gee promotes video games as very effective teaching tools and arousal is at the heart of his argument. Harold Schechter suggests that all popular media is demonized and that the US has always had extremely violent media in the form of broadsides, dime novels, public executions, and other "savage pastimes". But he acknowledges that children behave differently today consuming both passive and active violent media imagery and that the physical "roughhousing" that resulted from earlier media violence is now missing.

Enabling
In my opinion, the link between violent media imagery and violent behaviour (both by correlation and by method) is well established. Violent media imagery effects (we'll see shortly why "causes" is not the right term) violent behaviour in two ways: it reinforces (via arousal and lack of contextual negative feedback both in story and real life) and it desensitizes (via repetition and contextual positive feedback both in story and real life). Note the common element of contextual feedback, which is covered extensively in Grossman: soldiers kill within a sharply defined context which requires (among other things) approval by an authority figure. Violent media imagery generally fails at "properly" (by which I mean in accordance with either military training or a desire to limit societal violence) contextualizing violence. This is a substantial difference between Schechter's "savage pastimes" and modern media violence: public executions, for instance, were clearly contextualizing non-state violent behaviour as inappropriate and subject to state sanction; even 1950's media like Daniel Boone (cited by Schechter as extremely violent by today's media standards) show a black-and-white view of violence (good violence by state actors and heroes in retribution for bad violence by non-state actors and villains like "Indians") that has context which is missing in much of today's violent imagery.

Viewed in this light, violent media imagery doesn't cause violent behaviour; it enables violent behaviour. As many commenters have noted, other causes (mental illness, abuse, bullying, ...) lead to violent behaviour: what violent media imagery does is make the response to those causes more violent than it would be otherwise.

Training
One particularly frightening enabling factor is the use of video games (yes, here I am explicitly indicting video games as opposed to generalized violent media imagery) for training. The US military and law enforcement have used video games back to Duck Hunt to teach trainees in "shoot / don't shoot" choices (largely "shoot" for the military and "don't shoot" for law enforcement, but the techniques are very similar). As the military uses them, games of this sort can be considered conditioning tools. As the law enforcement community uses them, games like Hogan's Alley are some of the best shoot / don't-shoot training aids available, and are far cheaper than creating a real "Hogan's Alley" like the FBI's training facility.

There is another way these games work, however:

Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal steals a gun from a neighbor's house, brings it to school, and fires eight shots into a student prayer meeting that is breaking up. Prior to stealing the gun, he had never shot a real handgun in his life. The FBI says that the average experienced law enforcement officer, in the average shoot-out, at an average range of seven yards, hits with approximately one bullet in five. So how many hits did Michael Carneal make? He fired eight shots; he got eight hits, on eight different kids. Five of them were head shots, and the other three were upper torso. The result was three dead and one paralyzed for life. I tell law enforcement officers about this when I train them, and they are stunned. Nowhere in the annals of law enforcement or military or criminal history can we find an equivalent achievement. And this from a boy on his first try. (Grossman & DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, pg 4)

Video games are effective training devices. The US military wouldn't use them if they didn't work. Michael Carneal not only hit eight out of eight times on eight different targets, apparently all eight shots were into the "sniper's triangle" of upper chest and head. Impressive. Possibly unequaled. But still odd. Most inexperienced (and many experienced) shooters fix on a single target and fire until that target goes down, sometimes pulling the trigger continuously on an empty weapon.

The normal, almost universal response is to fire at a target until it drops and then move on to the next target. (ibid, pg 76)

There's only one school of shooting that teaches you to stand in one place and put one round into each target's head: video games.

Michael Carneal...never moved his feet during his rampage. He never fired far to the right or left, never far up or down....most video games each you to fire at each target only once, hitting as many targets as you can...And many video games give bonus effects ... for head shots. (ibid, pg 75-76)

Carneal is perhaps the most extreme example, but there are others. Wesley Schaefer in South Carolina, the Jonesboro, Arkansas shootings, and even Columbine have various links to video games ("obsessive" playing of video games, use as an explicit training tool, gaining tactical expertise, etc.). In none of these cases is the training link as explicit or as dramatic, and in none of them do video games cause the violence. But in all of them the training provided by video games enables the activity.

What's To Be Done?

Banning video games or violent media imagery is not on the table. Not only is it un-American, it probably wouldn't work. When you find a course of action which is both immoral and ineffective, it's best to look for other options.

Aside from attacking the actual causes of violent behaviour (mental illness, bullying, abuse, etc.), the best long-term solution is to properly contextualize violence, especially for young people. Soldiers returning from war do not have a significantly higher level of murderous behaviour than the population at large. Their training has enabled them to function in war without loosing warlike behaviour upon the rest of us, largely through dehumanization of the enemy and because of the strong requirement for authoritative orders before firing. These controlling elements are largely missing in most violent media imagery. In fact, much modern media glorifies the hero who breaks the rules in order to violently solve problems.

Consider the difference between Blade (the comic book, movies, TV series, and video games) and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In Blade, the enemy is well defined and, in fact, inhuman (or serving the inhuman vampires). Killing a human in Blade: Trinity is clearly contextualized as a Bad Thing for a variety of reasons. Although GTA:SA is somewhat cartoonish in appearance, there's no dehumanization of enemies at all: they are fellow people, whether innocent civilians, enemy gang members, or even police officers. There is no clear distinction (in the game -- some players may provide one themselves) between civilians and combatants.

Let's be clear: the difference is not multiple forms of media versus video game. The difference is the contextualization of violence as acceptable against a limited class of enemy (one you're unlikely to encounter in real life, I might add) versus the contextualization of violence as acceptable against anyone. In 1950s and 1960s TV, violence was often properly contextualized (for the time: we need not discuss the inappropriateness of accepting violence against Indians or other class or racial grouping that was generally acceptable then) as acceptable when used against certain groups and unacceptable against other groups. We may lament the groups chosen then (or now) and we may consider this distinction irrelevant, but it is actually critical when you look back (see Part Two) at the five factors of Grossman's model for making killing acceptable to soldiers: Demands of Authority, Group Absolution, Predisposition of Killer, Total Distance from Victim, Target Attractiveness of Victim. Context figures prominently in Demands of Authority, Group Absolution, Total Distance from Victim, and Target Attractiveness of Victim.

Several parts of the 1954 Comics Code addressed this contextualization:

• Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals.
• If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity.
• Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation.
• In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal [be] punished for his misdeeds.
• Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader.

The 1954 Comics Code isn't a model I'd like to emulate, but you find ideas where you find them. An informal code for media intended for children (under R, certainly) might be useful.

Unfortunately, "proper" contextualization is culture and nation dependent. Consider Counter-Strike:Condition Zero, in which players play either anti-terrorist units or terrorist cells. From an American cultural perspective, proper contextualization would limit players to playing anti-terrorist units. Other cultural contexts might find more propriety in playing the terrorist forces (although they would undoubtedly be relabeled "freedom fighters" or "Warriors for God" or something similar). Contextualization requires moral choices that many liberals in America are likely to be uncomfortable making. Of course, some conservatives may find contextualization just as difficult: is it OK to use violence against people violating the rule of law in America? Regardless of your position on the political spectrum, there are moral elements present in determining a "proper" context for violence, and there are some positions (ultimate pacifism, for instance) from whom there is no context where violence is acceptable.

Conclusion
Ultimately, school shootings are meaningful because they are aberrant. They focus our attention on changes in our society that normally remain hidden: the pervasiveness of bullying and abuse, the increase in violent media images, the effectiveness of video games as training devices. What we choose to do with that attention and the knowledge that comes from it is the hard question. The harder we look at the system the more complex it becomes, and the more complex it is the less likely simplistic solutions (ban video games, demonize Hollywood) are to work. Complex solutions (reduce abuse by reducing poverty and rebuilding the family, reduce bullying by diversity and education, recontextualize violence as inappropriate in more circumstances) are harder to conceive and immeasurably harder to implement, especially when public policy ideas must be sold in six-second sound bites.

Finding a solution begins with understanding the nature of the problem.


Sources:
James Paul Gee, Why Video Games are Good for your Soul, Common Ground, ISBN 186335574-X, 2005.
Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill, Crown, ISBN 0-609-60613-1, 1999.
Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Back Bay Books, ISBN 0-316-33011-6, 1995, 1996.
Harold Schechter, Savage Pastimes, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-28276-1, 2005.


A Personal Note: when I set out researching this topic, I was of the opinion that violent media imagery was generally irrelevant to violent behaviour. I had worked extensively in video games and been constantly assured that we provided catharsis not conditioning. I ignored facts like the military using video games as training tools (both tactical training and conditioning). I've read some of Grossman's fiction and did not like it. I've followed the stories about Jack Thompson and find him odious, opportunistic, and overly sensational. I started writing this series (originally going to be a single post) with the idea that I would show that school shootings and violence are statistically irrelevant and have no underlying "cause".

But upon reading the source material, my opinion changed as my understanding of the mechanisms deepened. Imagine my surprise when I wrote this series instead. I have read more than a thousand pages on this subject (and have one major work left to read -- it turned out to be unnecessary for this series), and it turned me around 180 degrees. I feel like someone smacked me upside the head with a big pile of bumper stickers saying "if you can't change your mind, how do you know you have one?".

Thanks for reading.

There's more...

The Meaning of School Shootings: Part Three

In parts One and Two we discussed the NIU shooting, the low rate of homicide in schools in America, possible demographic effects upon violent crime rates, studies of Arousal and Desensitization in consumers of violent media imagery, and I introduced you to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and his psychological model of resistance to killing and how the military overcomes the innate resistance 98% of us have to killing other humans.

I want to re-iterate that I have generally been talking about violent media imagery (which can include video games, but is explicitly also movies, TV, TV news, and music as well as video games), not specifically about violent video games. There has been a lot of discussion in comments about banning video games, and that is not the main thrust of this article. Certain specific video games will eventually enter the story, but most of our discussion so far has been about generalized violent media imagery. This part talks explicitly about counter-arguments, many of which deal specifically with video games. I want to make clear that I am talking about video games in this post because of those counter-arguments, not because I want to specifically attack video games.

We have established that there are studies showing effective Arousal upon viewing violent imagery and that Desensitization occurs (that is, over time it takes more violent imagery to create an equal reaction in consumers). It's not surprising, therefore, that we find trends of increasing violence in media:

For one thing, there's more of it. Laval University professors Guy Paquette and Jacques de Guise studied six major Canadian television networks over a seven-year period, examining films, situation comedies, dramatic series, and children's programming (though not cartoons). The study found that between 1993 and 2001, incidents of physical violence increased by 378 per cent. TV shows in 2001 averaged 40 acts of violence per hour.
...

Paquette and de Guise also identified a disturbing increase in psychological violence, especially in the last two years. The study found that incidents of psychological violence remained relatively stable from 1993 to 1999, but increased 325 per cent from 1999 to 2001. Such incidents now occur more frequently than physical violence on both francophone and anglophone networks.

Canadians are also heavily influenced by American programming. Paquette and de Guise found that over 80 per cent of the TV violence aired in Canada originates in the U.S. ... Overall, 87.9 per cent of all violent acts appear before 9 p.m., and 39 per cent air before 8 p.m. -- at a time when children are likely to be watching.

I assume it's unnecessary to cite increasing realism and violence in video games :-).

From the studies and books I have read and cited in this series, I am well-convinced that violent media imagery increases the chances of aggressive and violent behaviour. It's not clear how much, but I find the arguments in favor of Arousal and Desensitization very compelling.

So let's take a look at the other side of the argument.

Counter-Arguments
While I was at GDC (the annual computer Game Developer's Conference) last month (part of the reason this piece is so late), I thought I'd see what the game developer's community had to say about this. So I went to the GDC store and bought the two books they had on the subject: James Paul Gee's Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul and Harold Schechter's Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. I read them cover to cover and I believe I held an open mind about their content.

Why Video Games Are Good For Your Soul
Gee's book is a short paean to the teaching ability of video games, with specific examples (numbers added for easy reference below):

(1) A player's actions and decisions in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night creates a colorful and affect-laden world, a world which recruits the player's feelings, emotions, and interest in powerful ways....Unfortunately, this background of affect -- of feeling, emotion, caring, interest and excited expectation about what will come next -- is treated as entirely unimportant in school. Nonetheless, it is the background without which there is no real learning. (p. 31)

(2) Things are different in a game like Full Spectrum Warrior for the Xbox. This game teaches the player how to be, albeit not a professional vampire hunter, but a professional soldier. It demands that the player thinks, values, and acts like one to "win" the game... (p. 43)

(3) Games like Full Spectrum Warrior allow players to participate in expert knowledge, values, strategies, and skills. They allow players to experience a sense of control -- a partial (but only partial) control over fate and caprice -- in a complex and sometimes dangerous and threatening set of situations. Players experience a certain expert mastery of complexity, risk, and danger. Such a feeling -- often quite lacking in real life -- is exhilarating. (p. 49)

(4) It is important -- and this is something we know from recent research on the mind -- that seeing and action are deeply connected for human beings (Barsalou 1999a, b; Gelnberg 1997; Glenberg & Robertson 1999). (p. 54)

(5) But adding authentic professionalism to a game does not just open up a unique space for strategy, it also opens up a unique space for identity. An authentic professional has values and attitudes, as well as characteristic ways of talking, acting, and interacting, connected to his skill or special skills and knowledge. These values, attitudes and ways of talking, acting, and interacting constitute and identity. In blending with the virtual character -- in acting out of a shared set of skills -- the player takes on this identity. The player gets to play with, think about, and empathize with this identity in an embodied way, since the virtual character is the player's surrogate body in the game world. (p. 68)

(6) Take first- and third-person shooter games as an example, games often derided by politicians and policy makers, e.g., games like Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Max Payne, and Far Cry. Here are just a few (there are many more) of the learning principles that the player is (however tacitly) exposed to in learning the play these games:

• (6a) Learning is based upon situated practice, not lectures and words out of context;
• ...
• (6b) Learning is a form of extended engagement of self as an extension of an identity to which the player is committed;
• ...
• (6c) Problems are ordered so that the first ones to be solved in the game lead to fruitful generalizations about how to solve more complex problems later on;
• ...
• (6d) There are intrinsic rewards (within the game) keyed to any player's level of expertise
• ... (pp. 112-113)
  

It's tempting to just say "Gee says games are great teaching tools" and point out that such a statement would be supportive of the idea that violent media encourages violent behaviour, but I hate to pass up the opportunity to go point by point....

(1) When Gee talks about the effectiveness of affect as a teaching aid (indeed, the requirement that affect be present for learning, he's saying that Arousal is an effective teaching aid. So increased Arousal in consumers of violent media imagery means that learning is happening more easily while consuming violent imagery.

(2) Do we really need several million more Americans trained to think, value, and act like soldiers? And does the game include training and values based upon the Geneva Accords?

(3) Once again, "...is exhilarating" links us back to Arousal. The effective transfer of expert knowledge leads us to the point (below) of successful training.

(4) "...[S]eeing and action are deeply connected for human beings" reminds us that the interactivity of video games makes them even more effective teaching (and training) devices than other (more passive) media.

(5) Players "...empathize with this identity in an embodied way", implying greater connection between the player and their avatar/character.

(6)
(6a) Emphasizing the conditioning effect of shooters.

(6b) Again, emphasizing the connection between the player and avatar/character

(6c) Overgeneralization of game behaviour is exactly what those derisive "politicians and policy makers" are worried about.

(6d) Rewards are an effective conditioning teachnique.

In the end, Gee's arguments sum up to "computer games can be effective learning techniques". And as I already noted, that is an argument in support of the idea that violent media (and computer games in particular) can encourage Arousal and Desensitization (as shown by studies) and potentially transmit game behaviours to the real world. I have no argument with Gee's conclusions -- computer games can be powerful learning tools. The question is: what should we use them to teach?

Savage Pastimes
Most of Savage Pastimes can be summed up as "there used to be really ugly media before TV". Dime novels, murder ballads, and so on. This is immaterial. Our argument against violent media is that studies demonstrate certain effects. We do not claim that current media is uniquely violent, but that it is (as measured by studies) effective at reinforcing certain behaviours.

The remainder of Schechter's arguments against violent media encouraging violent behaviour are a claim that critics of pop media overstate the number of studies showing correlation between violent media and violent behaviours and generic claims that those studies that do exist are flawed. The first is irrelevant (I have made no claims about vast numbers of studies) and the second lacks enough detail to consider. I have found no specific claims that the studies I cite are flawed.

One quote is perhaps worth addressing:

There's no doubt that, for young boys, there's a connection between watching action-packed entertainment and roughhousing. That was certainly true of me and all the other nice, middle-class Bronx-born boomers I grew up with. After watching a few hours of Wild Bill Hickock or the Cisco Kid, we could hardly contain ourselves. We would strap on our leatherette holsters and leap into action, galloping around the house on invisible steeds, taking potshots at each other with our Hopalong Cassidy pistols, throwing ourselves at each toehr and wrestling like bear cubs. The cries of our mothers -- shouting at us (in those pre-PC days) to go play outside if we wanted to act like "wild Indians" -- still echoes in my ears.

Grossman (and others) explicitly argue that it is the lack of this physical release for the Arousal of violent media which contributes to the Desensitization and conditioning of consumers of violent media. Instead of using media imagery in constructive ways, the constant exposure without catharsis is a part of the problem.

If these two volumes represent the best arguments against the idea that violent media has negative effects upon at least some consumers, then the defenders of media have a problem.

I had thought that I'd finish with this part, but I think that's enough for now. I apologize for the long gap between postings and promise that I'll be quicker with Part Four, which should wrap things up. We've now covered all the essential bases except one: how specific arcade games act as enablers (training devices) for shooters and why the military uses even simple games to condition soldiers to fire. Once we know that, we see how the chain operates: from violent media through Arousal, Desensitization, and Conditioning, adding Training to enable some few individuals to perform quite incredible feats of combat shooting without ever having touched a firearm before. Finally, we'll talk about how the decontextualization of violent media imagery contributes to the problem, and how relatively small changes in the content of violent media presentations can make a difference.

There's more...

The Meaning of School Shootings: Part Two

In Part One, I used the NIU tragedy as a springboard to talk about school homicide in general and to ask the fundamental question: Why? Why do we care about school homicide if it’s so rare (the chances of being struck by lightning are far higher)? There was an unexplained rise in violent crime in America from about 1960 to the early 1990s (which has since fallen off). Demographics seem to explain about half that rise. We are discussing the possibility that violent media imagery (TV, movies, music, and video games) may have an effect, short and long term, upon users/viewers, especially younger ones.

Effects of Violent Media Imagery: Arousal
The 1996 study Mortal Kombat(tm): The Effects of Violent Videogame Play on Males’ Hostility and Cardiovascular Responding, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, investigates the relationship of video game play, violence of presented images, and subjects’ cardiovascular (CV) reactivity and hostility. Their conclusions include:

...increased game violence elicited greater CV reactivity and higher scores on hostility measures. Subjects who played MK1 or MK2 had higher heart rate reactivity than those who played billiards. Subjects who played MK2 showed greater systolic blood pressure reactivity than those who played MK1 or billiards. Finally, subjects who played MK2 scored higher on the hostility measures than those who played MK1, who in turn scored higher than those who played billiards.

In this study, MK1 is the standard version of Mortal Kombat and MK2 is the version with the extra gore turned on. Other studies have also found correlations between CV reactivity and hostility scores. Specifically, systolic blood pressure reactivity positively correlates with hostility scores on several inventories.

Measure	SBP	DBP	HR	ACL	Bell	Buss-Durkee
SBP	1.00	0.32*	0.19	0.36*	0.41*	0.23
DBP		1.00	0.03	0.16	0.13	0.13
HR			1.00	0.35*	0.38*	0.47**
ACL				1.00	0.73***	0.83***
Bell					1.00	0.85***
Buss-Durkee						1.00

SBP = Systolic Blood Pressure, DBP = Diastolic Blood Pressure, HR = Heart Rate, ACL = Adjective Checklist, Bell = Bell Adjustment Inventory, Buss-Durkee = Buss-Durkee Hostility Inventory
*p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001

This “greater CV reactivity” is also called arousal. From Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill (Grossman and DeGaetano, 1999):

The faster and the more salient the violent imagery, the more likely it is that our kids will be in states of emotional arousal. It is the fast action and the quick cuts of today’s programming that keep the young brain on alert,in a way very similarly to the soldier who is on alert in the battlefield
...
While violent images are keeping our kids on alert, they just sit there. There is no way to release the energy building up inside them....How do our kids understand and disperse all the feelings that watching violence arouses? Unfortunately, most children and teens don’t get these vital opportunities. There’s no one around to talk with them at these crucial moments. As a society, we have deemed TV and videos our number one baby-sitter.
...
When children start off in an alarm state with high noradrenaline and impulsive behavior, they often revert to low noradrenaline levels and calculating behaviors.

The Influence of Media Violence on Youth, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2003, is a meta-analysis of existing studies of violence in dramatic TV and movies, TV news, music videos and lyrics, video games, and internet participation, and of studies concerning the introduction of TV into communities. From the section titled Arousal and Excitation Transfer:

Media violence is exciting (arousing) for most youth. That is, it increases heart rate, the skin’s conductance of electricity, and other physiological indicators of arousal. There is evidence that this arousal can increase aggression in two different ways. First, arousal, regardless of the reason for it, can energize or strengthen whatever an individual’s dominant action tendency happens to be at the time, Thus, if a person is provoked or otherwise instigated to aggress at the time increased arousal occurs, heightened aggression can result....Second, if a person who is aroused misattributes his or her arousal to a provocation by someone else, the propensity to behave aggressively in response to that annoyance is increased. Thus, people tend to react more violently to provocations immediately after watching exciting movies than they do at other times.

Violence of viewed images correlates positively with arousal. Arousal correlates positively with hostility. Arousal also can cause reversion to lower levels of neurotransmitters like noradrenaline, which leads us directly to desensitization.

Effects of Violent Media Imagery: Desensitization
Influence of Media Violence on Youth defines emotional desensitization as "a reduction in distress-related physiological reactivity to observations or thoughts of violence" and goes on to explain:

...emotional desensitization occurs when people who watch a lot of media violence no longer respond with as much unpleasant physiological arousal as they did initially. Because the unpleasant physiological arousal (or negative emotional reactions) normally associated with violence has an inhibitory influence on thinking about violence, condoning violence, or behaving violently, emotional desensitization (i.e., the diminution of the unpleasant arousal) can result in a heightened likelihood of violent thoughts and behaviors (Huesmann et al., 2003)

Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill:

In American culture, toddlers as young as eighteen months begin with TV programs designed especially for them that contain twice as much violence as adult prime-time viewing.

In addition, violence on TV is rarely realistic or negatively contextualized. According to Influence of Media Violence, 96% of all violent television programs use aggression for simply entertaining the audience. Only 4% have an antiviolence theme. Nearly 40% of violent scenes involve humor, 75% of scenes feature no immediate punishment or condemnations for violence. Almost 45% of programs feature "bad" characters who are never or rarely punished for their aggressive actions. Of all violent scenes on TV, only 16% depict long-term realistic consequences of violence.

Why Does It Matter? It’s Hard to Kill

Despite assumptions of keyboard commandos everywhere, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (in On Killing, 1995, 1996) tells us that it's hard for people to kill each other, even in wartime. According to the best data available, soldiers in the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II had only about a 10-15% effective firing rate. Improved training and conditioning regimens during Korea, Vietnam, and since have raised the effective firing rate to 90-95%. All firing rates are for infantry using individual light weapons.

Grossman's model says that the ability of a human to kill depends upon five factors:

• Demands of Authority
• proximity of authority
• respect for authority
• intensity of demand for kill
• legitimacy of authority
  
• Group Absolution
• identification with group
• proximity of group
• intensity of support for kill
• number in immediate group
• legitimacy of group
  
• Predisposition of Killer
• training / conditioning
• recent experiences
• temperament
  
• Total Distance from Victim
• physical distance
• emotional distance (cultural, moral, social, mechanical)
  
• Target Attractiveness of Victim
• relevance of available strategies
• relevance of victim
• payoff (killer's gain, enemy's loss)
  

Classic military training methods emphasize the first two points: authority and the group. Modern military training methods concentrate on establishing distance and conditioning. Distance, whether physical, cultural, moral, social, or mechanical, correlates with ability to kill. Shooting from farther away makes it easier to kill, as does dehumanizing the enemy (emphasizing atrocities, calling them "gooks" or "dinks" or "huns" or "wogs"). Instead of learning to shoot on a Known Distance Range (KDR) with open grassy areas and bullseye targets, modern armies train soldiers in a “combat simulator” with pre-built firing positions and popup silhouette targets. Even primitive video games like Duck Hunt (with modified graphics and light guns that look like M-16s) are used to condition soldiers to fire upon targets without thinking. This conditioning is largely responsible for increasing the effective firing percentage of infantry with light weapons up to 90-95%.

The "Natural Soldier"
From On Killing:

Swank and Marchand's World War II study noted the existence of 2 percent of combat soldiers who are predisposed to be "aggressive psychopaths" and apparently do not experience the normal resistance to killing and the resultant psychiatric casualties associated with extended periods of combat. But the negative connotations associated with the term "psychopath," or its modern equivalent "sociopath," are inappropriate here, since this behavior is a generally desirable one for soldiers in combat.
It would be absolutely incorrect to conclude that 2 percent of all veterans are psychopathic killers. Numerous studies indicate that combat veterans are no more inclined to violence than nonvets. A more accurate conclusion would be that there is 2 percent of the male population that, if pushed or if given a legitimate reason, will kill without regret or remorse. What these individuals represent...is the capacity for the levelheaded participation in combat that we as a society glorify and that Hollywood would have us believe that all soldiers possess.

These "natural soldiers" (the term is popularized by Gwynne Dyer in War) are those who have no real problem killing under the right circumstances. Because natural soldiers go through the same training program as other soldiers, it is assumed that the difference between a natural and an average solider is temperament. Modern training methods are attempting to turn regular people into "natural soldiers" via conditioning. And while they succeed in increasing the firing rate, the increasing rate of PTSD suggests that conditioning isn't all that is necessary.

What's it All Mean?
Exposure to violent media imagery increases arousal. Increased arousal is a state many people find pleasant and desirable. Over time, increased levels of exposure are required to maintain a given level of arousal, a process called desensitization. Desensitization increases the "distance" between killer and victim and makes it easier to kill and reduces the psychiatric consequences. Conditioning reduces the resistance to killing without necessarily reducing the psychiatric consequences.


In the third and final part, I'll wrap this up with a discussion of the public health consequences of this desensitization and conditioning, talk about how certain types of video games contribute to the capability of shooters, and offer suggestions on reducing the effects of violent media exposure.

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The Meaning of School Shootings: Part One

School Homicides

Some of the names and body counts are all too familiar: Littleton, CO (Columbine)/15 dead, 23 wounded; Virginia Tech, VA/32 dead, 15 wounded; West Paducah, KY/3 dead, 5 wounded; Springfield, OR/2 dead, 22 wounded; Jonesboro, AR/5 dead, 10 wounded...

Some are familiar to a few: Bethel, AK/2 dead, 2 wounded; Moses Lake, WA/3 dead, 1 wounded; Richmond, VA/2 wounded; Gary, IN/1 dead; New York, NY/2 wounded; Granite Hills, CA/4 wounded...

School shootings are a statistically insignificant problem in the US. According to the CDC, there were 116 deaths from homicide at school between 1999 and 2006, a rate dropping from 0.07 to 0.03 per 100,000 every year or 16.5 deaths per year. That's about 1.25 student homicides per month. As a reference, about 100 deaths and 500 injuries (in a larger population) are caused in the US every year by lightning strike. The CDC calculates the rate of casualty (killed and wounded) by lightning in military personnel from 1998 to 2001 as 4.7 - 5.8 per 100,000 person years. From 2000 to 2005 the rate of fatality in auto accidents in the US was between 14.6 and 15.0 per 100,000 person years*. In other words, you're nearly 500 times* more likely to die in an auto accident than a student is likely to be murdered at school in any given year.

* (snapshot of my Excel sheet, data from the links provided)

So if school shootings like the one at Northern Illinois University are so "statistically insignificant", why bother with them?

One reason is that they get splashed all over the news. It's no secret that "if it bleeds, it leads", especially in local TV news. Another is that we find them shocking -- children are not supposed to die by homicide, and they are especially not supposed to commit homicide. Finally, I think because it's hard to see a story about school shootings, especially those committed by kids, and not ask "Why?".

Violent Crime in America

(source: Disaster Center)

Absolute numbers of violent crimes in America peaked in the early 90's (murder in 91, rape in 92, aggravated assault in 93). When adjusted for population, murder peaked in 1980 and both rape and aggravated assault in 1992. Since 1992, the murder rate has fallen 29%, rape has fallen 28%, and aggravated assault 35%. It's clear that the trend since the early 90's is down but not entirely clear if that rate will continue to drop or if it has leveled out, especially in assaults. The sharp rise between 1960 and 1992 is mysterious and interesting. The rate of aggravated assaults increased almost fivefold and has since dropped to about threefold, rape increased about fourfold and has since dropped to threefold. Murder peaked at about twice the 1960 level and has since fallen to near the 1960 level.

There are undoubtedly demographic drivers for at least part of this change. In 1960, 14% of the population was 15 - 24. From 1973 to 1980, it was 19% of the population. Similar 5% changes happen in the 5 - 14 and 25 - 34 cohorts. With finer data buckets, I suspect we might find a decent correlation between violent crime and a specific age group. According to Criminal Justice in America:

Changes in the age makeup of the population are a key factor in the analysis of crime trends. It has long been known that men aged 16 to 24 are the most crime-prone group....Between 40 and 50 percent of the total arrests during [the 70s] could have been expected as a result of the growth in the total population and in the size of the crime-prone age group.

It would take a bunch of leaps to conclude that I understand exactly what the demographic effect is, but I do grok that up to 50% of the arrests might have been caused by demographic effects. So maybe 220 of those 440 aggravated assaults were demographics in action. That still leaves a peak of almost three times the original rate, and us currently at about 144, 75% over the 1960 rate. Where does that increase come from?


Effects of Violent Media Imagery
I have spent much of my professional life (more than 15 years, total) in the video or computer game business. It is a public article of faith in that business that violent video games have no effect upon the behavior of people who play them. There are similar claims made by the movie and TV industry.

But there are reputable studies which conclude the exact opposite: violent screen imagery has a clear effect upon watchers:

Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts.
...
Well-supported theory delineates why and when exposure to mediate violence incrases aggression and violence. Media violence produces short-term increases by priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions, increasing physiological arousal, and triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors. media violence reduces long-term effects via several types of learning processes leading to the acquisition of lasting (and automatically accessible) aggressive scripts, interpretational schemas, and aggression-supporting beliefs about social behavior, and by reducing individuals' normal negative emotional responses to violence (i.e., desensitization).

Youth Violence: A Report of the Surgeon General, released in early 2001, reports:

The most recent and comprehensive meta-analysis of media violence was conducted by Paik and Comstock (1994), who examined effect sizes from 217 empirical studies on media violence and aggressive and violent behavior published between 1957 and 1990. The analysis indicates clearly that brief exposure to violent dramatic presentations on television or in films causes short-term increases in the aggressive behavior of youths, including physically aggressive behavior. Across all the randomized experiments, the unweighted average effect size was large (r = .37).⁴ When only experiments examining physical aggression as the outcome were examined, the effect size was also large (r = .32).
...
A follow-up study of over 300 people in the U.S. sample 15 years later suggested that media violence has a delayed effect on aggression (Huesmann et al., submitted). There was a small to moderate longitudinal correlation between childhood television viewing and a composite measure of young adult aggression (physical, verbal, and indirect aggression) for both men (r = .21, N = 153, p < .01) and women (r = .19, N = 176, p < .01). When the outcome was limited to physical aggression, the correlations were smaller (r = .17 and r = .15, respectively).

It's important to understand what is and isn't being said here. No one is saying that playing a violent video game once or watching an episode of your favorite cop show is going to turn anybody immediately into an axe murderer or serial killer. What is being said is that there is well supported theory about how exposure to violent images might increase the likelihood of later aggressive or violent behaviour and that both statistical and experimental studies validate that effect in the short and long term.

Human behaviour is generally too complex to assign a single "cause" to any given "effect". In the quotes above, the statistical information suggests that media exposure can explain between 15% and 37% of the increased aggressive or violent behaviour.


OK, that's enough for today. In an upcoming post or two, I'll explain the theories of arousal and desensitization and then present some of the studies validating those theories. I'll introduce you to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, former West Point psychology professor and current Professor of Military Science at Arkansas State, who's written extensively on the effects of military training, conditioning, and PTSD, and who now trains medical and mental health professionals in how to prevent killing. Col. Grossman's discipline of "killology" and models of how training and authority break down the innate resistance to killing will help explain how media violence and especially first person shooter video games condition watchers and players similar to the way boot camp indoctrinates soldiers. Finally, we'll talk about how and why media has changed over the last half-century to increase levels of conditioning, and what changes we can make to reduce the effects.

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