Glenn Beck: We're Training Our Kids to Be Killers
Glenn Beck craves attention like any pop-media celeb, so naturally he couldn't help but point his wagging finger at Grand Theft Auto IV last week. "We're training our kids to be killers," opined Beck during the slickly produced portion of his nightly CNN primetime broadcast called The Point. "And we are training our sons to treat women like whores."
Here's how Beck claims he "got there," quoted from the above clip:
If you think that video games are just harmless fun, which everybody always says, you should know that our military, our leaders at the Pentagon, have never seen it that way. It started back in World War One. Young soldiers, we sent Americans out to the front lines over in Europe, and they wouldn't pull the trigger, even there on the front lines with people charging them, they would not pull the trigger. It seems hard to believe in today's world, but killing each other is actually not a natural human instinct. Senior officers found if they trained the soldiers by putting a human silhouette on the bullseye during target practice, they could actually condition men to shoot more easily.
The technology progressed. So did the training techniques. Paper targets evolved into electronic simulations, and welcome to the great great grandfather of the video game developed by the Pentagon. The method proved so successful, that the military's firing rate, first time you had to shoot a human being, went from 15% in World War 2 to 55% in the Korean War, to over 90% in Vietnam, and now that number is almost 100. I want to make one thing clear before we go any further. I am not blaming all of society's problems on video games. That would be stupid to do. It is the entire pop culture. It's music, it's movies, it's radio, it's television, it's all of it. According to the Journal of American Medical Association, just television, the introduction of television in the 1950s caused a doubling of the homicide rate in America. These are all just small pieces of the same small nightmarish puzzle.
Let's take a closer look at Beck's screed.
What Beck cites about wars and firing rates comes from "research" conducted by the highly controversial Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, author of the 1996 book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, and someone who claims to be a specialist in "killology," a self-coined neologism purported to be "the study of the psychology of killing." Grossman calls first-person shooters "murder simulators" and believes there's an analogue between training soldiers to actually kill and playing video games, particularly first-person shooters.
The problem with Grossman's allegations about video games is that soldiers know they may actually have to kill someone, someday, that they're being explicitly trained to be capable of doing so. Whereas someone playing a video game clearly isn't playing that game for the explicit purpose of picking up a weapon -- any weapon -- and committing an act of violence -- any act of violence -- against another human being. Intentionality is the essence of the psychological difference, and completely alters the neurological relationship between stimulus, training, reaction, and sensitivity. If you don't view what you're doing as training to actually kill someone, it's not (training). Could it by the way make you a sharper shooter? Perhaps. But since when did being able to fire a gun more accurately become a bad thing? I'm personally a fan of neither the NRA nor guns in general, but since when did this become an indirect indictment of guns employed in a recreational capacity? What's next, skeet shooters as dormant criminal minds? Shooting clay pigeons for sport as training to harm (as opposed to hunt -- note the crucially important distinction) the real thing?
I can't find good data on the JAMA article, but I'm researching it now. What Beck claims the article says appears to be what it actually says, but that study was published in 1992, and the latest media studies research appears to say quite the opposite, i.e. exposure to violent programming may actually reduce one's proclivity for violent activity.
Moreover, Beck fails to mention the fact that the rise of electronic gaming -- now bigger than the film industry -- has in fact paralleled the decline of violent crimes in this country over the past two decades.
Read that again: Some of the most violent games ever produced have steadily increased in popularity at the same time as violent crime has declined in the U.S., across the board. Explain that, Beck (and Grossman).
Beck's piece is so misrepresentative -- and I haven't even gotten to the clip where he interviews Jack Thompson -- that I'm embarrassed for serious researchers like Cheryl Olson and Lawrence Kutner, who according to GamePolitics.com, will be appearing on Beck's CNN program tonight to promote their new "violence in games" myth-busting book, Grand Theft Childhood.
You can contact Glenn Beck (at CNN) here.
Re-Play
Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
Please don't give Glen Beck the exposure and attention that he craves.
If he truly cared about life and the sanctity of it, he wouldn't be supporting this misguided 'war on terror' in Iraq.
Why is this guy training his kids to be killers? My kids played these games when they were kids and one is a plumber and the other is a chef,Oh and im a truck driver and I still play the shoot them up games.
Wow, you people really get irritated when it comes to someone dissing one of your precious games. How dare he? What an irresponsible thing for Mr. Beck to have an opinion! I hope that we can genetically engineer people in the future to be mindless and opinionless, because people thinking for themselves is just dangerous...
I have a 360 and GTA4. I love the game. And I not only support Beck's right to free speech and to have an opinion, I think he is right on his basis on the content in the game and where he thinks video game bloggers are losers. Get a life and stop bitching. It's not like Beck took your game away or he's advocating to ban it. ALSO-the more you make a bigger issue out of it the more of an issue it will become, which could result in an Adult rating or banning the game. So for the sake of your precious lives devoted to the front of a computer screen, just shut up about the whole story he ran on CNN and go back to your games.
Not gonna happen tyork, not when he goes on a widely viewed cable news network (compared to the tiny audience I have here) and reduces GTA IV, literally and repeatedly, to "A game where you can get a hooker and then have sex with her and beat her to death with a baseball bat."
Because I guess that's all anyone ever does in GTA IV. All the other stuff about there being, you know, an actual *game* to play? Great Big Rockstar Conspiracy. None of it really exist, apparently. We're all deluding ourselves when we think we see a city with stuff to do like check out comedy clubs and go on friendly missions and putter around the highways and byways checking out the scenery. Nope, it's all just Hookers, Sex, and Bats.
And that's why my I wouldn't change a punctuation point in my tiny little blip of a rant.
Like my friend jjgard says.....
I played and still play shoot them up games, I love them, and haven't killed anything in real life....... and don't pretend to......
All my friend love shoot them up.... they haven't killed anything.......
Might he be thinking about killing somebody because he plays this kind of games???? Or he treats his wife/girlfriend (whatever) like a whore because of the game?????
I believe he should dig up in his mind to try to see what's wrong with him!!!!!!
I know I'm 100% OK
I am actually a big fan of Glenn Beck, GTA not withstanding. He is completely wrong when it comes to this area. About Iraq, I wasn't watching him back in the days before the war started so I don't know what his views were. I do know that he supports our soldiers, almost to a fault, but shouldn't we all? I watch is program every day and I haven't seen or heard anything about his views on Iraq specifically.
He is really the only true conservative voice on tv. As a conservative I agree with the majority of his views, but he is completely wrong (and ignorant?) about video games.