Recent school massacres have heightened the attention of communities throughout the nation, and Loveland is no exception. We on the Loveland City Council take the responsibility for the safety of our students seriously, and I am certain the Thompson School District does as well.
I write to call your attention to an aspect of the students murdering fellow students that is largely absent from the discussions. The issue that is largely unaddressed is the impact first-person shooter video games have had on virtually training our youths to kill. I invite the reader’s attention to the book by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill.” The opinion of many is that Lt. Col. Grossman is one of the foremost authorities in the field of human aggression and the roots of violence and violent crime, including school massacres.
I spent a career in the military. In my experience, the first thing is to define the problem and then apply appropriate actions that will mitigate or alleviate the problem. The cry for the banning of a particular weapon or repeal of the Second Amendment does neither. That is not to say that our hands are tied and nothing can be done. I believe there are actions that will eliminate the risk to our children in all communities. But, it requires the action of the kids as well as the parents.
A little history: In 5,000 years of recorded history, 500 years of weapons using gunpowder and 150 years of repeating weapons, never was there an instance in which a student committed multiple murders in a school environment until 1975. In that year a student in Canada committed the very first act of multiple murders killing a fellow student, a teacher and himself. Later in the 1970s a high school girl murdered two adults and wounded 13 students at a school in San Diego in 1979. In the decade of the 1980s two more instances of school massacres occurred, one in Finland and one in the United States. School massacres exploded during the 1990s.
So what changed from 1975 on? What is different is the advent of video games, specifically the first person shooter video games. The single link among all the school shooters is their obsession with first person shooter video games. For example:
• The Columbine murderers were devoted players of Doom, achieving “berserk mode.”
• The Sandy Hook murderer logged 83,496 kills in the video game Combat Arms, including 22,725 headshots.
• In West Paducah, Ky, in 1997, the 14-year-old murderer was obsessed with violent games. He had never fired a gun before he stole a pistol and shot eight of his classmates with five headshots and three to the upper torso.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is one of the foremost authorities regarding school shootings. He states: “There is a generation out there that has been fed violence from its youngest days and has been systematically taught to associate pleasure and reward with vivid depictions of inflicting human death and suffering. These young people are coming to our old folks’ homes, our movie theaters … our kindergarten classes, our little league games, our hospitals, and day care centers.”
Lt. Col. Grossman is not alone in his warnings. The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry signed a joint statement: “At this time, well over 1,000 studies … point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children.”
School boards throughout the nation have banned guns from our children’s schools, even concealed carry by those responsible for the safety of the kids. In the vernacular of my military experience — they have created a target rich environment.
What do the murderers want? They want success and need only two things.
•Helpless victims that can’t fight back.
•No one who has a gun.
That is exactly what every gun free zone provides for the murders.
We, as a community, need to each take the action we can to protect all in our community. Students, parents, school board, City Council, citizens all have a role in ensuring the safety of our children. As a community we need to stand united to take on the billion-dollar video game industry that capitalizes on the marketing of killing. Space does not permit specifics at this time.
Steve Olson is a member of the Loveland City Council, representing Ward III.