by Glenn Beck
According to Colonel Grossman, one of the Army’s most widely used and effective simulators is called MACS, “the Multipurpose Arcade Combat Simulator.” This tool, he says, is really “nothing more than a modified Super Nintendo game (except with a plastic M16 firing at typical military targets on a TV screen). It is an excellent, ubiquitous military marksmanship-training device.”
Commonly available video games can perform the same function for children. Modern training for military and law enforcement teaches the two key components for successfully killing another human being: skill and will. These components are developed by putting trainees in highly realistic simulators where they can shoot at targets that represent what they may actually be called upon to kill someday. And that is exactly how some of the most violent video games work as well.
Remember the story earlier in the book about the Kentucky high school prayer group massacre? Many experts, including Colonel Grossman, were shocked at the killer’s accuracy. According to a statement that Grossman made before the New York State legislature, “[A] 14-year old boy who had never fired a handgun before, stole a pistol, fired a few practice shots the night before and came into his school the next morning with the gun. In this case 8 shots were apparently fired, for 8 hits—4 of them head shots, one neck, and 3 upper torso. This is simply astounding [for an untrained gunman].”
The man responsible for the twin attacks in Norway (a bombing in Oslo and then a mass killing at a summer camp) that left seventy-seven dead is one of the most glaring examples of how these games can help make killers more deadly. At his trial the killer tried to make it clear that his video game addiction had no bearing on his rampage, but he also admitted that he used one game in particular as part of his training. According to the New York Times, “[H]e spent four months through February 2010 playing . . . Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, for six hours a day. That game, he said, helped him hone his shooting skills because he was able to practice with the aid of its holographic sight. ‘You could give the sight to your grandmother and she would become a supermarksman,’ he said.”
Grossman also pointed to the recent Los Angeles Jewish day-care center massacre as evidence of video game training: “[T]he shooter is reported to have fired 70 shots, and wounded 5 individuals. This is what should be expected from an untrained shooter.” But this boy [in Paducah] was not untrained—he was an avid video game player. “[H]e ‘stood still,’ ” Grossman said, “firing two-handed, not wavering far to the left or far to the right in his shooting ‘field,’ and firing only one shot at each target, [which] are all behaviors that are completely unnatural to either trained or ‘native’ shooters, behaviors that could only have been learned in a video game.”
In addition to improving overall marksmanship, video games also teach children where they should aim to inflict maximum damage. Brad Bushman at Ohio State University recently published research demonstrating that video game players were able to pick up real guns and not only be more accurate than others, but also notch “99% more head shots.” Bushman points out, “We didn’t tell players to aim for the head—they did that naturally because the violent shooting game they played rewarded head shots.”
The terms “natural” and “shoot a person in the face” do not go together. Humans aren’t born with that instinct. In fact, only a very small percentage of murderers will shoot their victims in the face. The Newtown, Connecticut, killer, who reportedly shot his own mother several times in the head, was one of them.
Many top law enforcement agencies and departments also use a video-game-based training device. FATS, the “Fire Arms Training Simulator,” is, according to Grossman, similar to the violent video game Time Crisis. FATS helps trainees to feel the emotional response that comes from being in an extremely stressful and unpredictable situation.
The New York Times described one scenario from the game:
[In] “Drunk Man With Baby,” a weaving figure appears in an alley carrying an infant in a car seat. Within 10 seconds, he is already upon you, drawing a machete from the car seat. The man ignores all orders to stop and to place the baby on the ground. Then, with one hand, he suddenly lifts the machete to strike while holding tightly to the baby with the other. You have no choice but to shoot him and hope for the best.
That is not far off from many of the situations presented to kids who play a game like Grand Theft Auto, except, in the off-the-shelf version, kids play the criminal, not the hero.
The obvious question is why, if these kinds of games are good for our soldiers and police, they’re not okay for our kids. Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, explains: “Static target practice teaches you how to fire a gun, but it’s not really relevant to the real world. You want officers in stressful situations to revert to their training, and unless you do scenario and role-play training, they’re not going to have the experience to fall back on.”
Our kids don’t have that training and experience to fall back on. Members of our military and law enforcement are subject to an extremely high level of discipline and training. Appropriate use of weapons is ingrained in them. That’s not the case with our kids. All they know is that violence is rewarded in the games and that their parents reward them by allowing them to play these games.
Rage
As I mentioned earlier, a copy of Stephen King’s book Rage, which is about a troubled boy who brings a gun to school, kills his algebra teacher, and holds his class hostage, was found in the locker of the boy who committed the massacre at his Kentucky school. But, according to King himself, this boy was not the only one influenced by this book.
In 1988, in San Gabriel, California, a boy held fellow students hostage with a rifle until he was disarmed by a student and arrested. He reportedly told police that he got the idea from Rage. The following year, a boy in Jackson, Kentucky, held students in his school hostage with a revolver and a shotgun before eventually surrendering to police. The hostage negotiator later said it was as though he were acting out a scene from Rage, the book he’d been reading. In 1996, a boy in Moses Lake, Washington, killed his teacher and two students and then recited a quote from Rage. In a recent essay, King himself admitted that Rage was known to each of these killers.
In response, King had Rage pulled from store shelves and it hasn’t been back in print yet. In explaining his decision he said that the book was a “possible accelerant” in each of these cases, but that we don’t give these kids “blueprints to express their hate and fear. Charlie [the book’s main character] had to go. He was dangerous.” And yet, even after all of this, King still claims that he doesn’t “believe the . . . assertion . . . that America’s so-called culture of violence plays a significant role in kid-on-kid school shootings.”
Do you think someone might be in a little bit of denial?
Scapegoating and Excuses
The people who blame guns for everything—I call them “controllists”—usually believe that those who bring up other issues, like entertainment violence, are simply trying to find a scapegoat. But I think this argument is completely backward. It’s those who close their eyes as to why people pick up a gun in the first place who are scapegoating.
In his essay Guns, Stephen King wrote, “The assertion that Americans love violence and bathe in it daily is a self-serving lie promulgated by fundamentalist religious types and America’s propaganda-savvy gun pimps.” In order to back that up, he claims that some video game sales are slowing down and that “[i]n video gaming, shooters still top the lists, but sales of some, including the various iterations of Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, have softened by as much as 4 percent.”
Stephen King may be a brilliant novelist, but he’s a terrible financial analyst. Even if we take what he wrote at face value, which we shouldn’t, it is still one of the most ridiculous excuses I’ve ever heard. To say that, yeah, okay, violent shooting games are still the bestselling games in America, but some of them are down 4 percent! shows just how far enterta
inment violence defenders are willing to go.
Since King brought up Call of Duty, let’s take a look at some real numbers. In 2009, Activision, the company that publishes the game, reported that their Call of Duty franchise had grossed more than $3 billion in worldwide retail sales. “If you consider the number of hours our audiences are engaged in playing Call of Duty games,” CEO Bobby Kotick wrote, “it is likely to be one of the most viewed of all entertainment experiences in modern history.”
In November, 2010 Call of Duty: Black Ops took in an all-time record $360 million in its first twenty-four hours. It took just forty-two days for the title to gross $1 billion. A newspaper estimated that more than 600 million hours had been logged playing the game in its first six weeks alone and Microsoft had disclosed that their Xbox users log on more than once a day and play for more than an hour each time.
The latest installment of the Call of Duty games achieved an even greater milestone. Call of Duty: Black Ops II, released in November 2012, took just sixteen days to gross $1 billion. To date, the Call of Duty franchise has “exceeded worldwide ticket sales produced by even Hollywood’s heaviest hitters, the Star Wars and Harry Potter series of films.”
King then shifts his focus to movies in an attempt to show that Americans don’t really care that much for violence:
[I]f you look at the dozen top-grossing films of 2012, you see an interesting thing: only one (Skyfall) features gun violence. Three of the most popular were animated cartoons, one is an R-rated comedy, and three (The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spider-Man) are superhero films . . . . Superhero movies and comic books teach a lesson that runs directly counter to the culture-of-violence idea: guns are for bad guys too cowardly to fight like men.
It’s honestly as though he were living in a different world. This entire statement is completely false. Has he even seen these movies? The Avengers and Dark Knight Rises both feature plenty of gun violence—and not just by the “bad guys,” as he claims. In addition, why is he stopping at the top twelve? Maybe because if you look at the top twenty instead, you find Django Unchained and Taken 2, movies that both feature an incredible amount of gun violence? In Taken 2 the protagonist acts as though his gun is virtually melded to his hand.
A Real Dark Knight
The man accused of killing twelve people in Aurora, Colorado, during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises told authorities that he “was The Joker”—the principal villain in the previous Batman movie, The Dark Knight. The killer even dyed his hair to match the Joker’s.
And why does King choose to include only movies with gunplay? Watching violent media can be damaging to children regardless of whether a character uses a gun, or, in the case of The Hunger Games (the third-highest-grossing film in the United States in 2012) kids kill other kids in all kinds of increasingly violent ways. The Hunger Games, by the way, was a young adult book and the movie version was marketed directly to teens.
When it comes to television, King admits that there’s plenty of violence, but then, using every ounce of creativity he can muster, he comes up with another convenient excuse: “There are violent programs on television . . . . But the only one that seems to appeal to teens is AMC’s The Walking Dead. There’s plenty of gunplay in that one, but almost all of it is directed at people who have already expired.”
So the fact that this show has zombies, not humans, being shot at and hit over the head with baseball bats makes it okay for kids to watch? Got it—thanks for clearing that up.
The more King goes through a list of specific titles and genres and tries to excuse them, the more obvious it is that we have the stronger argument. When you have truth on your side you don’t need to do things like explain why killing zombies is really okay or why movies based on comic books shouldn’t count.
* * *
At the end of the book I have some ideas about what we can do, as parents and as a community, to stop the dangerous trajectory we’re on and help the healing begin. It’s about taking personal responsibility for ourselves and our families and applying some old-fashioned common sense. While I have no illusions that it will be as easy as it sounds, I also have no doubt about where we’re headed if we don’t try.
However, we all know that there are two sides to this debate about violence in America: the killer and the weapon. I choose to focus on the former because I firmly believe that people make choices; the weapon is only an instrument used to carry out those choices. We don’t, for example, blame the electric chair for putting an inmate to death; we blame the inmate’s decisions earlier in life that brought him to that place.
A lot of people disagree. They find it easier to blame the weapon—especially when that weapon is a gun. If a boy stabs a cat to death with a steak knife, society doesn’t debate the knife, it debates how the boy got that way. We look at his life, his upbringing, his schooling, his friends, his medications, and what he does in his spare time. But if that same boy uses a gun to kill that cat, everything changes. All of a sudden it’s not about the boy, it’s about the weapon. What kind of gun was it? How many rounds did it hold? How did he get it? Why didn’t it have a trigger guard? While there are certainly legitimate questions to be asked in the wake of a violent act, gun crimes seem to divert attention from where it should really be: on the person committing the act.
One of the most popular arguments made in support of gun control is the idea that other countries have strict gun control laws and very few gun crimes. We looked at why that argument is wrong in Part One, when we saw how Switzerland has lots of firearms but very few gun-related crimes. Semi-automatics can be legally purchased there and, according to Time, “nobody bats an eye at the sight of a civilian riding a bus, bike or motorcycle to the shooting range, with a rifle slung across the shoulder.”
Yet, despite all of that, Switzerland experiences about 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people annually. The rate in the United States is about six times higher.
The difference between the United States and Switzerland is not the guns; it’s the people and the culture. “Social conditions are fundamental in deterring crime,” Peter Squires, professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton in Great Britain, told Time. Squires has “studied gun violence in different countries and concluded that a ‘culture of support,’ rather than focus on individualism, can deter mass killings.”
Unfortunately, that argument, even from a guy in Great Britain, is not going to persuade those who believe that the only thing that can deter mass killings is a ban on the weapons sometimes used to commit them.
So, for now, I’ll be happy to end with some apparent common ground that President Barack Obama and I share on this issue. During a recent trip to Chicago, a city riddled with gun violence despite very strict control measures, Obama acknowledged that perhaps guns shouldn’t really be blamed for everything. “[T]his is not just a gun issue,” he said. “It’s also an issue of the kinds of communities that we’re building.”
And, I believe, the kinds of kids we’re raising.
* * *
I. The “socialization hypothesis” is the theory that using violent video games predicts future aggressive behavior, while the “selection hypothesis” is the opposite: kids who are already aggressive seek out violent video games. This study found support only for the socialization hypothesis.
THE WAY FORWARD
There are plenty of radical things we can do—and many of them have already been proposed—that will make no real difference. For some people, that’s okay. They would rather achieve a political goal or “do something” bold so they can sleep better at night, even if that means the underlying problem never gets solved.
I’m not one of those people. And I don’t think you are, either.
That doesn’t mean we have to sit on our hands. Far from it. But a reactionary response to a terrible event is how we ended up with Japanese internment camps. And a heavy-handed government-knows-best response is how we ended up with Prohibition
—which, by the way, is still the only constitutional amendment to ever have been repealed.
Come to think of it, there is a lot in common between the way controllists now talk about guns and the way they talked about alcohol before Prohibition. Invoking terms like “public health crisis” and “a moral issue” has been done before, and, of course both alcohol and guns have been targeted as the root cause of whatever is wrong with society.
If we just took the alcohol away, everything would be solved.
That’s not hyperbole; it’s literally the way some people felt about alcohol back then. In a sermon celebrating Prohibition in January 1920, the Reverend Billy Sunday proclaimed:
The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.
Not quite. What actually happened was that liquor went underground. Speakeasy clubs formed (according to the National Archives, 30,000–100,000 such clubs opened in the first five years in New York City alone), mob bosses and organized crime rose to power, and everyone else just got a lot more creative. According to the archives, “People found clever ways to evade Prohibition agents. They carried hip flasks, hollowed canes, false books, and the like.”
Prohibition may have made some people feel good, but it did nothing to solve the underlying problem. Gun control works the same way. There are, however, a couple of big differences between the prohibitionists of the twentieth century and the controllists of today. First, the people behind these efforts have changed. Progressives and Do-Gooders brought us alcohol prohibition, but gun prohibition is being championed by Progressives, Do-Gooders, and the Marxists. This a far more lethal combination.