Why are American children becoming extremely violent?

By Gwynne Dyer

"...The boy had recently been instructed in pop-up target shooting by his father...."

"...Surprisingly, perhaps, the standard explanation after such multiple shootings -- that the young perpetrators were influenced by films, television, or violent video games -- has been heard less than on previous occasions...."

LONDON (JP): A couple of phrases from the saturation media coverage of the schoolyard massacre in Jonesboro, Arkansas last Tuesday have stuck in my mind. They show how people turn stupid when confronted with murderous violence -- as if they had a psychological need to make the reasons more mysterious than they actually are.

This was the bloodiest school massacre yet, and the killers, at 11 and 13 years old, were the youngest yet. But it is the fourth time in five months that American kids have opened up on their classmates with semi-automatic weapons, and all the schools involved were not in big cities, but in small southern towns.

So let us ask ourselves, in puzzled tones: Could it be significant that this part of the United States, the lower Mississippi Valley, is one of the areas where the survivalists and the paramilitary militias are most numerous and paranoid?

Gosh, that's a tough one, but here's a clue. Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson dressed in camouflage gear before committing their murders. Their getaway van, apart from seven guns and 3,000 rounds of ammunition (all stolen from Golden's grandfather), contained camouflage netting, a crossbow, hunting knives, prepacked food -- all the survivalist paraphernalia.

'God, Guns and Guts Made America Great. Let's Keep All Three', reads a bumper sticker in these parts. Could this be another clue?

The relationship between fundamentalist Christianity and political paranoia in the 'Bible Belt' of the United States is hardly invisible, but there's a taboo against talking about it. (And we shouldn't mention the relationship between fundamentalist Islam, Judaism or Hinduism and the propensity to carry out massacres either, for fear of annoying other devout people). Let's just ponder, instead, the notion that guns make America great.

Half the households in the U.S. contain no guns at all -- but the other half contain an average of 4.5 guns each. Golden's grandfather is not a freak: it's quite normal to have a platoon's worth of guns and ammunition in your house.

Now here's a hard one. Could there be any connection between the fact that there are approximately two long guns and one handgun around for every American man, woman and child, and the fact that around 40,000 Americans a year die from gunshot wounds and another 100,000 are wounded? (This is about the same toll, every year, as total American casualties in the Vietnam war over a decade).

Well, the National Rifle Association says there is no connection, and they should know. (The best cartoon about Jonesboro shows an NRA spokesman explaining that "if the other children had been armed and trained to return fire, they would still be alive.")

To be fair to the NRA, it's perfectly true that it isn't guns that kill people. 'People kill people.' In Switzerland, where the universal lifetime obligation for military reserve service means that there is a fully functional submachine-gun locked away in almost every household, 'people' hardly ever kill each other.

"We have 6.5 million people and around seven million guns in Switzerland," said Frank Leutenegger, a gun lobbyist from Lausanne, in 1996. "We had just 65 deaths with firearms last year -- the lowest murder rate in Europe, if not the world."

So culture does have something to do with it: the Swiss are safe with guns, Americans are not. But the same fascination with violence that makes Americans the people most in need of gun control makes them the least likely to get it -- and since culture changes only slowly, Americans will go on blowing each other away with guns at an industrial rate for at least another generation.

Nothing can be done about that, but this business of kids massacring kids is new, Perhaps something can be done about that. What really got my attention was the fact that Andrew Golden had been instructed in shooting pop-up targets by his father. This is a military training technique, for God's sake. It was devised specifically to desensitize soldiers so that they will kill other human beings without hesitation.

By a sad coincidence, the American soldier who knows most about training people to kill, Col. David Grossman, has been living in Jonesboro for the past couple of years, teaching at Arkansas State University. Years ago he began investigating post- combat trauma in Vietnam veterans, and found that a huge amount of it is due to their unresolved guilt about killing people -- even though these soldiers had been trained to kill by the army.

It is a deliberate training process, for the military discovered 50 years ago that most soldiers will not kill, even in combat, unless you directly address the issue in previous training. Then Grossman realized that these same techniques -- extreme fantasy violence as a means of desensitization, and the laying down of reflex pathways that bypass conscious control (like shooting at pop-up targets) have become rampant in American popular entertainment: films, video games,and even gun clubs.

They don't turn every civilian kid into a killer, but they can tip marginal personalities over the edge. It's all in his book, On Killing, which made it into the best-seller lists when it came out in 1995. Yet nobody took action on his insights then, and they're unlikely to do so now.

Unless you pretend that this is all such a mysterious phenomenon that nothing can be done about it, you would have to take on some of the central shibboleths of American culture.