Are We Training Our Children to Kill?

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Lt. Col. (retired) Dave Grossman, a military psychologist who teaches at Arkansas State University, is the author of the book ‘On Killing.’ The research in this and his follow-up book, ‘Teaching Our Kids to Kill’ (Crown Books, September 1999), offers sobering thoughts about what passes for children’s entertainment. His seminal article, which originally appeared in several journals (this one is from ‘Christianity Today’), is so important that we wanted to share it with you (with Dave’s kind permission).


I am from Jonesboro, Arkansas. I travel the world training medical, law enforcment, and U.S. military personnel about the realities of warfare. I try to make those who carry deadly force keenly aware of the magnitude of killing. Too many law enforcement and military personnel act like "cowboys," never stopping to think about who they are and what they are called to do. I hope I am able to give them a reality check.

So here I am, a world traveler and an expert in the field of "killology," and the largest school massacre in American history happens in my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas. That was the March 24 schoolyard shooting deaths of four girls and a teacher. Ten others were injured, and two boys, ages 11 and 13, are in jail, charged with murder.

My son goes to one of the middle schools in town, so my aunt in Florida called us that day and asked, "Was that Joe's school?" And we said, "We haven't heard about it." My aunt in Florida knew about the shootings before we did!

We turned on the television and discovered the shootings took place down the road from us but, thank goodness, not at Joe's school. I'm sure almost all parents in Jonesboro that night hugged their children and said, "Thank God it wasn't you," as they tucked them into bed. But there was also a lot of guilt because some parents in Jonesboro couldn't say that.

I spent the first three days after the tragedy at Westside Middle School, where the shootings took place, working with the counselors, teachers, students, and parents. None of us had ever done anything like this before. I train people how to react to trauma in the military; but how do you do it with kids after a massacre in their school?

I was the lead trainer for the counselors and clergy the night after the shootings, and the following day we debriefed the teachers in groups. Then the counselors and clergy, working with the teachers, debriefed the students, allowing them to work through everything that had happened. Only people who share a trauma can give each other the understanding, acceptance, and forgiveness needed to understand what happened, and then they can begin the long process of trying to understand why it happened.

Virus of violence

To understand the why behind Jonesboro and Springfield and Pearl and Paducah [and Littleton, Colorado], and all the other outbreaks of this "virus of violence," we need to understand first the magnitude of the problem. The per capita murder rate doubled in this country between 1957 (when the FBI started keeping track of the data) and 1992. A fuller picture of the problem, however, is indicated by the rate people are attempting to kill one another, the aggravated assault rate. That rate in America has gone from around 60 per 100,000 in 1957 to over 440 per 100,000 by the middle of this decade [1990s]. As bad as this is, it would be much worse were it not for two major factors.

First is the increase in the imprisonment rate of violent offenders. The prison population in America nearly quadrupled between 1975 and 1992. According to criminologist John J. DiIulio, "dozens of credible empirical analyses leave no doubt that the increased use of prisons averted millions of serious crimes." If it were not for our tremendous imprisonment rate (the highest of any industrialized nation), the aggravated assault rate and the murder rate would undoubtedly be even higher. [DB & CL: whether prisons are a deterrent or a solution is a matter of controversy, of course, but that is a separate issue.]

The second factor keeping the murder rate from being any worse is medical technology. According to the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps, a wound that would have killed nine out of ten soldiers in World War II, nine out of ten could have survived in Vietnam. Thus, by a very conservative estimate, if we had 1940-level medical technology today, the murder rate would be ten times higher than it is. The magnitude of the problem has been held down by the development of sophisticated lifesaving skills and techniques, such as helicopter medevacs, 911 operators, paramedics, cpr, trauma centers, and medicines.

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Continued

However, the crime rate is still at a phenomenally high level, and this is true worldwide. In Canada, according to their Center for Justice, per capita assaults increased almost fivefold between 1964 and 1993, attempted murder increased nearly sevenfold, and murders doubled. Similar trends can be seen in other countries in the per capita violent crime rates reported to Interpol between 1977 and 1993. In Australia and New Zealand, the assault rate increased approximately fourfold, and the murder rate nearly doubled in both nations. The assault rate tripled in Sweden, and approximately doubled in Belgium, Denmark, England-Wales, France, Hungary, Netherlands, and Scotland, while all these nations had an associated (but smaller) increase in murder.

This virus of violence is occurring worldwide. The explanation for it has to be some new factor that is occurring in all of these countries. There are many factors involved, and none should be discounted: for example, the prevalence of guns in our society. But violence is rising in many nations with draconian gun laws. And though we should never downplay child abuse, poverty, or racism, there is only one new variable present in each of these countries, bearing the exact same fruit: media violence presented as entertainment for children.

Killing is unnatural

Before retiring from the military, I spent almost a quarter of a century as an army infantry officer and a psychologist, learning and studying how to enable people to kill. Believe me, we are very good at it. But it does not come naturally; you have to be taught to kill. And just as the army is conditioning people to kill, we are indiscriminately doing the same thing to our children, but without the safeguards.

After the Jonesboro killings, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Juvenile Violence came to town and said that children don't naturally kill. It is a learned skill. And they learn it from abuse and violence in the home and, most pervasively, from violence as entertainment in television, the movies, and interactive video games.

Killing requires training because there is a built-in aversion to killing one's own kind. I can best illustrate this from drawing on my own work in studying killing in the military.

We all know that you can't have an argument or a discussion with a frightened or angry human being. Vasoconstriction, the narrowing of the blood vessels, has literally closed down the forebrain--that great gob of gray matter that makes you a human being and distinguishes you from a dog. When those neurons close down, the midbrain takes over and your thought processes and reflexes are indistinguishable from your dog's. If you've worked with animals, you have some understanding of what happens to frightened human beings on the battlefield. The battlefield and violent crime are in the realm of midbrain responses.

Within the midbrain there is a powerful, God-given resistance to killing your own kind. Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to killing its own kind in territorial and mating battles. When animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. But when they fight any other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything, but they fight one another with flicks of the tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything, but they wrestle one another. Almost every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind.

When we human beings are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths--who by definition don't have that resistance--lack this innate violence immune system.

Throughout human history, when humans fight each other, there is a lot of posturing. Adversaries make loud noises and puff themselves up, trying to daunt the enemy. There is a lot of fleeing and submission. Ancient battles were nothing more than great shoving matches. It was not until one side turned and ran that most of the killing happened, and most of that was stabbing people in the back. All of the ancient military historians report that the vast majority of killing happened in pursuit when one side was fleeing.

In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Patty Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment (The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazingly, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel.

In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. And so he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.

During World War II, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.

That is the reality of the battlefield. Only a small percentage of soldiers are able and willing to participate. Men are willing to die, they are willing to sacrifice themselves for their nation; but they are not willing to kill. It is a phenomenal insight into human nature; but when the military became aware of that, they systematically went about the process of trying to fix this "problem." From the military perspective, a 15 percent firing rate among riflemen is like a 15 percent literacy rate among librarians. And fix it the military did. By the Korean War, around 55 percent of the soldiers were willing to fire to kill. And by Vietnam, the rate rose to over 90 percent.

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Continued

The methods in this madness: Desensitization

How the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive, because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture.

Brutalization and desensitization are what happens at boot camp. From the moment you step off the bus you are physically and verbally abused: countless pushups, endless hours at attention or running with heavy loads, while carefully trained professionals take turns screaming at you. Your head is shaved, you are herded together naked and dressed alike, losing all individuality. This brutalization is designed to break down your existing mores and norms and to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence, and death as a way of life. In the end, you are desensitized to violence and accept it as a normal and essential survival skill in your brutal new world.

Something very similar to this desensitization toward violence is happening to our children through violence in the media--but instead of 18-year-olds, it begins at the age of 18 months when a child is first able to discern what is happening on television. At that age, a child can watch something happening on television and mimic that action. But it isn't until children are six or seven years old that the part of the brain kicks in that lets them understand where information comes from. Even though young children have some understanding of what it means to pretend, they are developmentally unable to distinguish clearly between fantasy and reality.

When young children see somebody shot, stabbed, raped, brutalized, degraded, or murdered on TV, to them it is as though it were actually happening. To have a child of three, four, or five watch a "splatter" movie, learning to relate to a character for the first 90 minutes and then in the last 30 minutes watch helplessly as that new friend is hunted and brutally murdered is the moral and psychological equivalent of introducing your child to a friend, letting her play with that friend, and then butchering that friend in front of your child's eyes. And this happens to our children hundreds upon hundreds of times.

Sure, they are told: "Hey, it's all for fun. Look, this isn't real, it's just TV." And they nod their little heads and say okay. But they can't tell the difference. Can you remember a point in your life or in your children's lives when dreams, reality, and television were all jumbled together? That's what it is like to be at that level of psychological development. That's what the media are doing to them.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the definitive epidemiological study on the impact of TV violence. The research demonstrated what happened in numerous nations after television made its appearance as compared to nations and regions without TV. The two nations or regions being compared are demographically and ethnically identical; only one variable is different: the presence of television. In every nation, region, or city with television, there is an immediate explosion of violence on the playground, and within 15 years there is a doubling of the murder rate. Why 15 years? That is how long it takes for the brutalization of a three- to five-year-old to reach the "prime crime age." That is how long it takes for you to reap what you have sown when you brutalize and desensitize a three-year-old.

Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. Hundreds of sound scientific studies demonstrate the social impact of brutalization by the media. The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that "the introduction of television in the 1950's caused a subsequent doubling of the homicide rate, i.e., long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually." The article went on to say that “if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults" (June 10, 1992).

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Continued

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is like the famous case of Pavlov's dogs you learned about in Psychology 101: The dogs learned to associate the ringing of the bell with food, and, once conditioned, the dogs could not hear the bell without salivating.

The Japanese were masters at using classical conditioning with their soldiers. Early in World War II, Chinese prisoners were placed in a ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind them. And one by one, a select few Japanese soldiers would go into the ditch and bayonet "their" prisoner to death. This is a horrific way to kill another human being. Up on the bank, countless other young soldiers would cheer them on in their violence. Comparatively few soldiers actually killed in these situations, but by making the others watch and cheer, the Japanese were able to use these kinds of atrocities to classically condition a very large audience to associate pleasure with human death and suffering. Immediately afterwards, the soldiers who had been spectators were treated to sake, the best meal they had had in months, and to so-called comfort girls. The result? They learned to associate committing violent acts with pleasure.

The Japanese found these kinds of techniques to be extraordinarily effective at quickly enabling very large numbers of soldiers to commit atrocities in the years to come. Operant conditioning (which we will look at shortly) teaches you to kill, but classical conditioning is a subtle but powerful mechanism that teaches you to like it.

This technique is so morally reprehensible that there are very few examples of it in modern U.S. military training; but there are some clear-cut examples of it being done by the media to our children. What is happening to our children is the reverse of the aversion therapy portrayed in the movie ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ In ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ a brutal sociopath, a mass murderer, is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent movies while he is injected with a drug that nauseates him. So he sits and gags and retches as he watches the movies. After hundreds of repetitions of this, he associates violence with nausea, and it limits his ability to be violent.

We are doing the exact opposite: Our children watch vivid pictures of human suffering and death, and they learn to associate it with their favorite soft drink and candy bar, or their girlfriend's perfume.

After the Jonesboro shootings, one of the high-school teachers told me how her students reacted when she told them about the shootings at the middle school. "They laughed," she told me with dismay. A similar reaction happens all the time in movie theaters when there is bloody violence. The young people laugh and cheer and keep right on eating popcorn and drinking pop. We have raised a generation of barbarians who have learned to associate violence with pleasure, like the Romans cheering and snacking as the Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum.

The result is a phenomenon that functions much like AIDS, which I call AVIDS--Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome. AIDS has never killed anybody. It destroys your immune system, and then other diseases that shouldn't kill you become fatal. Television violence by itself does not kill you. It destroys your violence immune system and conditions you to derive pleasure from violence. And once you are at close range with another human being, and it's time for you to pull that trigger, Acquired Violence Immune Deficiency Syndrome can destroy your midbrain resistance.

Operant conditioning

The third method the military uses is operant conditioning, a very powerful procedure of stimulus-response, stimulus-response. A benign example is the use of flight simulators to train pilots. An airline pilot in training sits in front of a flight simulator for endless hours; when a particular warning light goes on, he is taught to react in a certain way. When another warning light goes on, a different reaction is required. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response. One day the pilot is actually flying a jumbo jet; the plane is going down, and 300 people are screaming behind him. He is wetting his seat cushion, and he is scared out of his wits; but he does the right thing. Why? Because he has been conditioned to respond reflexively to this particular crisis.

When people are frightened or angry, they will do what they have been conditioned to do. In fire drills, children learn to file out of the school in orderly fashion. One day there is a real fire, and they are frightened out of their wits; but they do exactly what they have been conditioned to do, and it saves their lives.

The military and law enforcement community have made killing a conditioned response. This has substantially raised the firing rate on the modern battlefield. Whereas infantry training in World War II used bull's-eye targets, now soldiers learn to fire at realistic, man-shaped silhouettes that pop into their field of view. That is the stimulus. The trainees have only a split second to engage the target. The conditioned response is to shoot the target, and then it drops. Stimulus-response, stimulus-response, stimulus-response: soldiers or police officers experience hundreds of repetitions. Later, when soldiers are on the battlefield or a police officer is walking a beat and somebody pops up with a gun, they will shoot reflexively and shoot to kill. We know that 75 to 80 percent of the shooting on the modern battlefield is the result of this kind of stimulus-response training.

Now, if you're a little troubled by that, how much more should we be troubled by the fact that every time a child plays an interactive point-and-shoot video game, he is learning the exact same conditioned reflex and motor skills?

I was an expert witness in a murder case in South Carolina offering mitigation for a kid who was facing the death penalty. I tried to explain to the jury that interactive video games had conditioned him to shoot a gun to kill. He had spent hundreds of dollars on video games learning to point and shoot, point and shoot. One day he and his buddy decided it would be fun to rob the local convenience store. They walked in, and he pointed a snub-nosed .38 pistol at the clerk's head. The clerk turned to look at him, and the defendant shot reflexively from about six feet. The bullet hit the clerk right between the eyes--which is a pretty remarkable shot with that weapon at that range--and killed this father of two. Afterward, we asked the boy what happened and why he did it. It clearly was not part of the plan to kill the guy--it was being videotaped from six different directions. He said, "I don't know. It was a mistake. It wasn't supposed to happen."

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In the military and law-enforcement worlds, the right option is often not to shoot. But you never, never put your quarter in that video machine with the intention of not shooting. There is always some stimulus that sets you off. And when he was excited, and his heart rate went up, and vasoconstriction closed his forebrain down, this young man did exactly what he was conditioned to do: he reflexively pulled the trigger, shooting accurately just like all those times he played video games.

This process is extraordinarily powerful and frightening. The result is ever more homemade pseudosociopaths who kill reflexively and show no remorse. Our children are learning to kill and learning to like it; and then we have the audacity to say, "Oh my goodness, what's wrong?"

One of the boys allegedly involved in the Jonesboro shootings (and they are just boys) had a fair amount of experience shooting real guns. The other one was a nonshooter and, to the best of our knowledge, had almost no experience shooting. Between them, those two boys fired 27 shots from a range of over 100 yards, and they hit 15 people. That's pretty remarkable shooting. We run into these situations often, kids who have never picked up a gun in their lives pick up a real gun and are incredibly accurate. Why? Video games.

Role models

In the military, you are immediately confronted with a role model: your drill sergeant. He personifies violence and aggression. Along with military heroes, these violent role models have always been used to influence young, impressionable minds. Today the media are providing our children with role models, and this can be seen not just in the lawless sociopaths in movies and TV shows, but it can also be seen in the media-inspired, copycat aspects of the Jonesboro murders. This is the part of these juvenile crimes that the TV networks would much rather not talk about.

Research in the 1970s demonstrated the existence of "cluster suicides" in which the local TV reporting of teen suicides directly caused numerous copycat suicides of impressionable teenagers. Somewhere in every population there are potentially suicidal kids who will say to themselves, "Well, I'll show all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV, too." Because of this research, television stations today generally do not cover suicides. But when the pictures of teenage killers appear on TV, the effect is the same: Somewhere there is a potentially violent little boy who says to himself, "Well, I'll show all those people who have been mean to me. I know how to get my picture on TV too."

Thus we get copycat, cluster murders that work their way across America like a virus spread by the six o'clock news. No matter what someone has done, if you put his picture on TV, you have made him a celebrity, and someone, somewhere, will emulate him.

The lineage of the Jonesboro shootings began at Pearl, Mississippi, fewer than six months before. In Pearl, a 16-year-old boy was accused of killing his mother and then going to his school and shooting nine students, two of whom died, including his ex-girlfriend. Two months later, this virus spread to Paducah, Kentucky, where a 14-year-old boy was arrested for killing three students and wounding five others.

A very important step in the spread of this copycat crime virus occurred in Stamps, Arkansas, 15 days after Pearl and just a little over 90 days before Jonesboro. In Stamps, a 14-year-old boy, who was angry at his schoolmates, hid in the woods and fired at children as they came out of school. Sound familiar? Only two children were injured in this crime, so most of the world didn't hear about it; but it got great regional coverage on TV, and two little boys in Jonesboro, Arkansas, probably did hear about it.

And then there was Springfield, Oregon, and so many others. Is this a reasonable price to pay for the TV networks' "right" to turn juvenile defendants into celebrities and role models by playing up their pictures on TV?

Our society needs to be informed about these crimes, but when the images of the young killers are broadcast on television, they become role models. The average preschooler in America watches 27 hours of television a week. The average child gets more one-on-one communication from TV than from all her parents and teachers combined. The ultimate achievement for our children is to get their picture on TV. The solution is simple, and it comes straight out of the suicidology literature: The media have every right and responsibility to tell the story, but they have no right to glorify the killers by presenting their images on TV.

[cassina1212]

Why Our Children Kill
Springfield Oregon. Four dead and a multitude wounded. The aggressor? A fifteen year old boy. The reason he did it? Complex yet simple. Follow as I lead you through it. Pass the word, talk with your leaders. Call D.C. Tell them "enough is too much!"

Bill KlintOOn got on the news and said he did not understand why this happens. The locals went on a gun turn in spree. The liberals are all agitated crying for more and more gun control laws. Will ANY of this help? NO! Will it make things worse? YES!

First off, lets take a real look at what happened in Springfield. Lets take a look at the actual events that led up to this tragic loss of life and the destruction of a small community's feelings of safety. And then lets compare it to the government's response and then, we can clearly see the use of those killed and wounded to push an anti American agenda of governmental abuse, growth and tyranny the likes of which Adolph Hitler mapped in his writings so many years ago.

The base problem here is that it is already illegal for kids to take guns to school. It is already illegal for kids to have hand guns. It is already illegal for kids to shoot each other. As a matter of fact, it is illegal for any concealed carry permit holder, an adult, to take a gun into a school. It is illegal for ANYONE to shoot school kids (Anyone EXCEPT Janet the baby killer Reno and her jack booted, Military clothed, Nazi thugs, ala-Waco)

So, its already against the law to do these things. That's fine by me. I do not condone gunning down children. Even when it is done by the government who is sworn to protect those children. Nobody should be allowed to do that. But, they cry for more laws against guns.......

Ask yourself, your legislators, your politicians and your police this, "Since it was illegal for a child (or anyone) to have a gun at school, and since it is illegal to shoot kids, why do we need another law? You did NOT enforce pre-existing laws and arrest this little murderous terroristic cretin the day before when he not only had a gun at school but had a STOLEN GUN at school. You turned him loose to murder his parents and then go into the school and kill other peoples children! Why, if you wont enforce laws already on the books, do we need another law? What good are your laws with no enforcement to back them up?"

You see the problem here? Everything that happened in Springfield could have been stopped if the police would have simply enforced the laws we already have. A boy is found to have a gun at school. A STOLEN GUN at school. You don't suspend him pending expulsion, you arrest him for possession of a stolen firearm. You throw his ass in jail and you lock him up for possession of stolen goods, illegal possession of a firearm and taking that firearm, illegally, onto a school campus. End of story.

What is the excuse they give for turning him loose after he was caught? "We don't have the room for him" is one excuse. Well, then let a kid go who was smoking dope. MAKE ROOM! He had a gun, a STOLEN gun, on a school campus. What more do you NEED to lock the little cretin up?

Now lets look at the other parts of this problem. For many years the government has been frittering away the parents ability to discipline their own offspring. Now if you spank your child, say for stealing guns and taking them to school perhaps? YOU go to jail. How many times have parents been jailed either for hitting their child or for being accused of it? A lot more than you ever want to know.

So, parents are no longer allowed to discipline their children. What is the governmental answer they are pushing in the wake of Springfield? To hold the Parents responsible for, the violent acts of the children! God above, how stupid can we be? If we are going to hold the parent responsible, should we not first allow them the tools necessary to guide, educate and discipline those same children? If they are to be held responsible, should we not first give them the authority they need to stop this insanity in the first place?

If a parent can not have the authority to punish the child for their transgressions, HOW can we hold that parent responsible when that child does something like this? We took away their ability to punish the child, to guide them, yet now somehow they are responsible for his actions? How many out there have been told, when grounding a child or otherwise trying to discipline them, "I am going to call the police on you". Now here is something that should scare the hell out of us! Try to discipline your recalcitrant child and they threaten to call the police on you? What insanity is this? they cause this problem and then want to hold US responsible for it?

I got it! Lets hold Bill KlintOOn responsible for the terrorist bombings in Ireland! He has no authority to punish those who do it, but hey! What the hell! Lets hold HIM responsible for the actions of those he is not allowed to discipline and guide. It is the same thing they are trying to do to parents today. And it is, to be blunt, INSANE!

So, there, in part, is the reason we have these things happening. Kids steal guns and take them to school because they KNOW they will not be punished. And they feel free to kill other kids for the same reason. If you hold the parents responsible, you wont curb it, you will make it happen more. Why? Because children are children and some of them WILL do these things to get their parents in trouble. PERIOD!

Again, we see government CAUSING the problem and then trying to punish the population for the problems they themselves caused. Anyone see a problem in that?

[cassina1212]

Information on Kids and Violence



Warning Signs of Kids who Kill
Cruelty to animals & smaller children
Morbid fascination (beyond normal for juvenile males) with violence and death
Fascination with fire /fire-setting
Threats or talk about killing or harming others
Considered "weird" or dangerous by peers
Uncontrollable temper tantrums, especially at early ages
Narcissistic, thinks others have no rights
History of enuresis (bedwetting)

ORDER your copy of
"The Scarred Heart"


* Note, though, that many children possess one or
more of these signs without becoming killers.
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I have broken down the types of juvenile killers into different categories, each with their own unique set of characteristics. These are the school killers, cult-related killers, parricidal killers and gang-related killers. Following are some of their distinguishing characteristics of school killers cult-related killers, parricidal killers and gang-related killers:


School Killers:


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1) They tend to kill and injure multiple victims in a single incident. They don't just target one person as part of an individual dispute, but launch into a shooting spree that results in many deaths and injuries.

2) They usually have no secondary criminal motive such as robbery, their primary goal is to kill or harm others.

3) They tend to be younger, most youth murderers are 15 or over, but school shooters tend to be no older than 14.

4) Have a history of social problems, they tend to feel rejected and feel others are out to get them.

5) They tend to have extreme narcissistic features as opposed to low self-esteem. Narcissists often want to punish or defeat anyone who threatens their favorable image of themselves (APA monitor).

* Many school killings take place in areas of the world that we think of as safe, such as Japan. What is unusual is that many of the Japanese students use a knife as their weapon of choice as opposed to a gun in the U.S. Boys tend to use a gun as a tool for murder more often than girls, who tend to use knives.

A study from the National School Safety
Center at Pepperdine University found:
School shooting deaths by year

55 in 1992-1993
51 in 1993-1994
20 in 1994-1995
35 in 1995-1996
25 in 1996-1997
40 in 1997-1998.




Cult Killers


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Some experts have estimated that there could be as many as 50,000 cult-related killings each year in the United States. However, Charles Ewing, a forensic psychologist, points out that this is an unusually high number and would mean that all of the 20,000 or so known homicides as well as an additional 30,000 unknown homicides would have to be cult-related (Ewing, 1990).

1) Youth involved in Satanism tend to be more disturbed and present more often to therapists. They have usually suffered some type of trauma, and tend to have symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

2) There are also indications that teens involved with Satanism tend to suffer more from Mood Disorders such as depression or manic-depression or from Personality Disorders such as antisocial qualities or conduct disorder.

3) Depression plays a major factor in whether teens join satanic cults. There is a strong correlation between involvement with dark areas of the occult and the loss of meaning, hope, and faith. Many teens who join satanic cults have despairing beliefs because of insufficient family or community nurturance (see Sparks, 1989).

4). Other studies have found that adolescents involved in the occult tend to be sensation seekers and at the same time to be more alienated from their school, town and social institutions.

Parricidal Killers



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1) Parricide is the killing of one's parents; "patricide" is the term used for the killing of one's father and "matricide" is the killing of one's mother.

2) The common thread that experts find in most parricides is that the child has been sexually or emotionally abused by one or both parents. Typically, the abuse by a father is physical abuse, while in cases of matricide, the abuse is of a sexual or psychological nature.

3) Precise figures are lacking, but estimates suggest that parricide accounts for about 2% of all homicides committed in the United States.

4) For every one child who has killed his or her parents or parent, there is another who has attempted and not succeeded. Youth who attempt parricide and those who commit parricide are close cousins. They share in common an abusive home environment, youth and parental alcohol or drug abuse, a runaway history, problem behaviors and school difficulties.

5) When a victim survives an attempted parricide, it is often due more to luck and weapons choice then to a differing motive in the child perpetrator. Studies have shown that one difference for those who attempt parricide is a stronger affective component at the time of the killing--that is, the attempters seem to "feel more" than those who actually commit parricide. The latter tend to have more of a thinking component to their behavior when committing their crime, which perhaps accounts for their success (Flanigan, M., 1993).

Gang-Related Killers



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1) Research investigating why female gang members participate in violence found the following results: Girls who were violent felt "pumped up" and "powerful" during the act of violence and when they were exposed to community violence. When committing violent acts, girl gang members did not experience sadness, helplessness, care about their future, nor did they have hatred for their victim's weakness. Instead, they feel pumped up, powerful, and respected by their friends. The subjects used in one such study used violence to feel powerful while combating hopelessness. Many of the girls in this study did not expect to be alive at the age of 25 (C. Ashen, 1997).

2) Reasons why gangs engage in violence are numerous and include protecting or expanding the gang's turf, recruiting new members, keeping members from leaving the gang, gaining respect or dominance over others, enforcing rules, and serving as a counterpoint or check on moral restraints or a moral conscience.

3) It is beneficial for gangs to see normal moral restraints on violent impulses as weak or dysfunctional. This is because if a member had to sit and ponder on his or her decision to harm someone, it would be too risky. As a result of peer pressure to be violent, a gang member can often develop "psychic numbing" regarding acts of brutality. This programming for violence might be why gang members kill without feeling remorse, and actually take pride in their violent actions (Randolph and Erickson, 1998).


Interesting facts about violent kids:



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Increased youth involvement in violence is evident from an analysis of official juvenile offending rates over the past decade from 1986-1995. Violent Crime Index offenses are those that involve murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

• Juvenile arrests for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter increased 90%.

• Girls are becoming increasingly involved in aggressive crimes: In 1995, females were responsible for 15% of the total juvenile arrests for Violent Crime Index offenses with the most extensive involvement in aggravated assault arrests (20 percent).

• From 1991-1995, female juvenile arrests for Violent Crime Index offenses increased 34 percent, nearly four times the male juvenile increase of 9 percent (Kelley, Huizinga, Thornberry).

• Since 1987, African Americans have outnumbered Caucasians as juvenile homicide offenders. By 1994, 61% of juvenile homicide offenders were African American and 36 % were Caucasian (Snyder et al. 1996).

[cassina1212]

With the recent Michigan shooting of a first-grader by her classmate, we present this article, written in the wake of the Colorado killings.

The 1999 tragedy of a high school shooting in Colorado continues to trouble us long after the event.

Why is it that of all of the tragedies that dominate the headlines, the events at Columbine High School are particularly disturbing?

The answer is because it happened to a bunch of kids at school.

Schoolchildren still have an aura -- a smile of innocence that somehow encapsulates the American Dream. In the heart of a child lies the kernel of potential from which germinates society's most precious hopes for the future.


The beautiful innocent smile of a child can turn into a twisted grimace of hate and frustration.

But when the decadence of the adult world is so great that it seeps into the mind of a child, then that beautiful innocent smile can turn into a twisted grimace of hate and frustration. Our hopes for a better tomorrow are smashed, and all the pride in our technological advancement seems to shrivel into nothingness.

That is why we are so disturbed. Because if our supposedly innocent children are capable of such heinous acts, what does this say about the adults from whom it all trickles down?

FROM WHENCE THE PROBLEMS?
Judaism teaches that whatever occurs in life, there is a lesson to be learned. So what should society's response be to Colorado? Is it really metal detectors that will solve the problem?

Perhaps we should ask ourselves why 50 years ago the top problems in America's public schools were:

talking out of turn,
chewing gum,
making noise,
running in halls,
cutting in line,
dress code infractions, and
littering.
And today the problems are:

drug and alcohol abuse,
pregnancy,
suicide,
robbery,
rape, and
assault.
Perhaps we should consider the overall effect of a society that teaches:

objectification of woman (pornography),
disloyalty (adultery),
lack of commitment (divorce),
rights over responsibilities (frivolous lawsuits),
the blind pursuit of every whim (the unregulated proliferation of violent video games, funereal rock music, comic-book fantasies and apocalyptic films).
TRICKLE-DOWN THEORY
The solution is not armed guards at schools, weapons sweeps, or a ban against wearing long blacks coats (as Denver school authorities imposed following he shootings).

Rather, it is getting adults to set examples for their children. The Hebrew word for parent comes from the root "teacher." And that is what we are, whether we like it or not.

There is a custom that the father of the Bar Mitzvah boy recites a blessing after his son reads from the Torah. The blessing states:

Blessed be He Who has relieved me of the responsibility for this child's transgressions.
However, the custom is not to mention God's name in reciting this blessing. Why not?

Because perhaps the blessing in not fully accurate. Because even though the child is now technically an adult, the parent may still be responsible for the child's future transgressions (either directly or indirectly). Because perhaps the parents taught the child the improper behavior through bad example, or perhaps the parents did not try to correct the negative behavior.

CREATED IN GOD'S IMAGE
So what point does it all boil down to? What one shift can society make to turn this ship around?

It's a basic spiritual issue.

Newsweek reported that the Colorado killers asked two female hostages a question: "Do you believe in God?" When the hostages answered "yes," the gunmen shot them at point-blank range.

One forensic psychiatrist, specializing in children who commit multiple murders, examined the eight such crimes committed by U.S. schoolchildren in the last three years. His conclusion? The common denominator amongst these children is that they had no connection with God.


One forensic psychiatrist found the common denominator among child killers -- they had no connection with God.

The Sages, too, teach that belief in God is the primary deterrent to murder. How so?

The Ten Commandments are divided into two tablets. The first tablet (commandments 1-thru-5) speak about our relationship with God. The second tablet (commandments 6-thru-10) speak about our relationships with our fellow man. The two tablets are parallel: The first commandment - "Believe in God" - corresponds to the sixth commandment - "Don't murder."

What's the connection?

Every human being is created with a holy, divine soul. We are not meaningless hunks of meat hurtling on a rock through space and time. We may be uncomfortable with the primacy of man -- because of the responsibility that that entails. But the alternative is that by teaching our children that they are no better than animals, they will treat each other as such.

ALL ONE UNIT
But it goes deeper than this. The recognition that God encompasses everything teaches that in the spiritual dimension, there are no conventional boundaries between entities. We are all one.


If you're slicing a carrot and cut your finger, do you cut your other hand in revenge?

When we appreciate this, then hurting the other guy -- "paying him back" -- is as ridiculous as hurting yourself. If you're slicing a carrot and accidentally cut your finger, do you take the knife and cut your other hand in revenge? Of course not. Why? Because your other hand is part of you, too.

Love of God is the most primary value to teach our children. Here are some practical ways to do it:

Open a discussion of "Who is God" and how to build a relationship.
Institute family prayer at mealtime.
Take a walk through nature and appreciate the genius of the Creator.
When we love God, we love His children who are created in the image of God.

[cassina1212]

MAKE IT REAL
Of course, love of God is fictitious if it doesn't translate into care for others. Imagine the irony of a "believer" shooting abortion doctors, or burning "infidels" at the stake. True love of God brings greater love for humanity and greater humility, not indignant self-righteousness.

To teach kids to care for others, they need to experience the joy of giving. The Torah says that "the external awakens the internal." This means that even if you find it difficult to love others, you can still do things that demonstrate love -- with the understanding that this will ultimately affect your inner self.

Here are some practical suggestions:

Volunteer to serve meals at a homeless shelter.
Make an effort to spare others financial loss.
Visit some patients at the local hospital.
Don't embarrass anyone - especially in public.
Don't gossip about others.
Invite your friends to a Shabbat dinner.
Show respect to the elderly.
Find a poor person in your community, and undertake to assist him.
Children are only a reflection of the adult world in which they live. What happened in Colorado should serve as a warning about the effect that society is having on our children.

As there is always good in everything, perhaps this tragedy can strengthen our children in the path of Torah, making them shining examples for the next generation.

[cassina1212]

Two more US children face murder charges
By our reporter
31 July 1998
In a practice which is now becoming commonplace in the United States, two more children have been indicted on murder charges, one 11 years old, the second only 10.

The 11-year-old boy from northern California is being tried in the city of Martinez, in the San Francisco Bay area, for the shooting death of a playmate. The child shot 13-year-old Larry Kiepert on June 6 with a high-powered rifle.

The boy appeared in court handcuffed and shackled. He colored with crayons while the proceedings took place. He admits to having fired the rifle from his window, not knowing that it was loaded. The defense is calling the shooting an accident, pointing out that the bullet went through window blinds and Kiepert's fence. The boy would not have been able to see his friend.

The prosecution claims that the boy had aimed for Larry through a powerful scope, brushing the blinds aside, in retaliation for having been wounded by Larry with a BB gun three days earlier.

As is regularly done in cases like this, the boy was questioned by police outside the presence of his parents or lawyer, in violation of his constitutional rights. The judge in the case, Lois Haight, will have to rule on the admissibility of that evidence.

The second murder case is in Orange, New Jersey, near Newark, where a 10-year-old boy was charged July 29 with murder and aggravated sexual assault in the beating death of a four-month-old girl who had been left in his care by the baby's teenage mother.

The 18-year-old mother, Rhakida Daniels, had left her daughter with the boy while she ran out to a nearby fast food restaurant. When she returned she found the baby unconscious in a crib. The cause of death was a fractured skull.

As in the Nathaniel Abraham case in Pontiac, Michigan, the authorities and the media are ignoring the role that social conditions play in creating such tragedies. No one asks why the United States leads the industrialized world in children killing children.

In both of the latest cases the prosecutors are taking the position that the accused children should be treated as criminals. In the New Jersey case, Essex County Prosecutor Patricia Hurt has also brought criminal charges against the mother of the four month old, charging her with child endangerment for leaving her baby with the 10 year old.

[cassina1212]

When children murder

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Posted: October 3, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern


© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

Charlie Young had something in common with most of us. He was an American citizen entitled to basic freedoms, including the pursuit of happiness. But Charlie's pursuit was cut short last week when 16 boys between the ages of 10-18 savagely beat him to death in a Milwaukee neighborhood called "Little Beirut."

Charlie Young's fate was sealed when he pushed a 14-year-old friend of a boy that hit him with an egg late on a Sunday evening. The 10-year-old egg-thrower told police that he was hanging around the streets unsupervised looking for trouble. At 11 p.m.! On a school night!

The boy also admitted beating Mr. Young with a tree branch at the same time his gang beat the man with bats, chairs and wooden beams. All the boys watched and listened as Mr. Young's blood flowed out of his body and his screams filled the air.

In the courtroom as the 10-year-old was arraigned sat his parents. They do not live together. According to press reporters, the father denied his son had done anything, even as the boy confessed to the court.

If I were the prosecutor in this case I would charge the 10-year-old's parents with criminal neglect. Maybe I would lose the case, but I'd definitely send a message.

The reason Charlie Young is dead is that America did not protect him. Our society allows neighborhoods like Little Beirut to exist all over the country. It is a sad fact of life that the police often do not enforce the law the same way in the poor neighborhoods that they do in the more affluent areas. Open-air drug dealing is tolerated in many places, as is vandalism, public intoxication and casual brutality.

But you don't see any marches to protest that. You don't see Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton demanding that crime be punished or that strict truancy laws be imposed. If it had been 16 white boys that had killed Charlie Young, mass demonstrations would have taken place. But because there is no racial component here, Charlie's murder is not worth a protest.

The brutal truth is that until the citizens of Little Beirut and other such places begin demanding accountability for acts that are destroying their environments, nothing will change. Until the "under siege" poor form an alliance with police and demand help from the media and the politicians, chaos will reign.

Society can impose order in these free-fire zones by doing the following. First, prosecute quality-of-life crimes such as street drug dealing, vandalism, child abuse and neglect, and public intoxication. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and the NYPD accomplished an enormous drop in crime by doing this.

Second, mandate by law that all truancy be reported to the police by public-school principals.

Third, arrest parents for neglect if their children fail to attend school or are unsupervised late at night. Remember, every parent has an opportunity to contact the authorities if his or her child is uncontrollable. It is a parent's duty to do that.

Fourth, encourage church leaders in the neighborhoods to organize programs in which citizens can report criminal behavior directly to the clergy – who in turn would contact the authorities. This sets up a "safe space" for the informer and gives people a sense of empowerment. After all, most Americans that live in these blighted neighborhoods are good people. They just need a system in place that they can trust.

All the pie-in-the-sky social programs will not impose order on streets dominated by criminals. Only force and organized resistance to irresponsible behavior will allow change. America has lost a legion of callow youths because their parents let them down. Now things must be stabilized in neglected neighborhoods so the next generation might have some safety and some hope.

If discipline is not imposed, the brutal merry-go-round will continue. But one rider will be missing. His name is Charlie Young.

[Paula]

The Jamie Bulger child killers, John Thompson, Robert Venables aged then 10. Location Liverpool railtrack.

Like Mary Bell, these killed, but together. Adults had seen in a poor deprived area the lad in play they thought such is the normality of brothers hitting each other and othe siblings in hyerarchy. The images of boys and of girls in play is of normal everyday fights or play acting. Kids take care of other kids.

However, bring in 'abandonment rage' as 'salient wanting as Dave alludes to in operant conditioning. How did it work for the child Ian Stewart later to call himself Brady, Robert Black. Ted Bundy.

Each adult male child of this ilk could be in frozen child operant conditioning and yes the cortical fibres crossing messages from one side of the brain do have restriction in fight or flight situations as battle preparedness.

However, the environment as contexts are factors that make one kill with another, or singly. The Bulger case highlighted this sibling in fighting and own amusement in videos and playing on railway lines so Jamie died there as it was normal play area to them. Why is the question, it was a play acting of extreme conditioning to violence, videos like Chucky were banned after as similiar in the method.

Some form of sexual mind buzz, like wanting the excitement that comes with winning, not losing. That zing in kids with no zing in their lives can be created by others winning in mock games, in cruelty and in roleplay of those winners. A duet of such people causes the fizz of one trying to win the other on points, a goading occures and one cannot back out. We see it all the time more rationally in poker players at the table where the adrenalin and neural chemicals make dehydration and upset the ionic balance in the brain. One such condition is Wernick Korsakoff syndrome where the brain is challeged by alcohol and fact and fiction are fused by the brains abnormal load of one chemical.

Carlson's physiology of Behaviour explains this in text books. In reality the lived experience of deprived inner city poverty and fight for survival is a more defined knowledge once this knowledge is known. Sadly the kids who kill do not know why and when in time, it is a set of environmental circumstances and chemical imbalance. I wonder of the diet of these two then. It would have been a dehydration mind and a soaked body excess salt, low carbohydrate, and high e numbers.

Brady took proplus and drank white wine sporadically and had a low fat ratio. His early childhood days take in his need for high altitude and clean air, which later he took to washing his hands as radical germ association. Hence if each child is operant conditioned and is in a none supportive environment where it cannot achieve, be praised, that child will take on the animal hunter and killer mentality. This is the sadist in the child. We create it in society, we train 16 year olds in the military to kill, and cajole, inflict pain and persecute till they get it right and others laugh or ostracise as Dave says in the psychology of alternative sociopathy.

A child can be just as programmed to kill and not have military training and an objective. All he or she needs are television, dvd and video and games as a normality, a life of dehydrated, mentally unstimulated minds that are not turned on by mere schooling for they see a world of competition at home. A mind stagnates into violence when it is idling over with repetative abusive words, sounds, and images, it becomes a retort that is a snarl, a sblack person, or a rictus reation as silent world of revenge.

Therefore, does dehydration cause the behaviour or does the behaviour demand dehydration as ionic imbalance in salient wanting?

Do children have brains that have neurons that 'fire' as a cry for attention as in abandonment rage seeing others who get this attention called love that is alien to them.

They are cuckoos and cannot fit into a nest so make one as sociopath with each chemical action that brings a stage of love and belonging to something. This would explain animal cruelty as loving a dumb animal and not them, not seeing them really is a challenge and a sob, or anger in the mind, nothing to do with heartbreak. More to do with neurons short circuiting sending frustration, confusion and planning agenda's not of societies norms.


They can be retrained when it is known the intake they were subjected too and they know why they behaved that way in rejection of the bad for life protagonists. Rehabilitation is about learning from the lives of desensitised in whatever field is open as the environment is one we created for them.

[Paula]

Five Teenagers Charged with Man's Murder



Gary Rae was stabbed outside his home in Hailsham, Sussex


Five youths have been charged with the murder of a 40-year-old man who was beaten to death outside his flat.

Gary Rae, from Hailsham, East Sussex, died in hospital after he was found bleeding heavily outside his home on Sunday night.

William Devall, 18, of Meadow View, Hailsham, and Shane Challice, 18, of South Road, Hailsham, are accused of his murder along with three other teenagers.

The other youths are a 15-year-old boy and two 17-year-old boys who have not been named.

All are due to appear at Eastbourne Magistrates' Court.

Two further youths, who had been arrested in connection with the attack, were released without charge.

[paula]

Two Released in 'Hanging' Case

Woodland behind the Earlsheaton Medical Centre where the boy received his injuries

Two boys arrested in connection with the attempted murder of a five-year-old have been released without charge.

Five children, all aged between 11 and 12, were questioned by police in connection with the attack on Anthony Hinchliffe who was found with "horrific" ligature-type marks around his neck after being taken from his mother's garden and led to nearby woods where he was injured.

Three of the children - two girls and one boy - remain in police custody.

A West Yorkshire Police spokesman said: "Of the five juveniles arrested in connection with this matter, three remain in custody.

"Two boys who had been detained in connection with the inquiry have been eliminated and released."

Detectives - who are treating the incident as attempted murder - have refused to confirm reports that the youngster sustained his injuries through being hanged.

The incident bears chilling similarities to the 1993 murder of Merseyside toddler James Bulger, who was led away by two 10-year-old boys while waiting for his mother outside a shop.

Anthony was found in a distraught state by his 22-year-old cousin Tracey Jones and a member of the public on Tuesday in a wooded area close to the Earlsheaton Medical Centre in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire.

As well as the ligature marks there was bruising on his body.

The boy's father, Mark Hinchliffe, who lives apart from the Anthony's mother, said he believed his son had been taken from his garden and led to the scene where he was injured.