Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (20 page)

How did video games and the military ever come to link up? Well,
in World War II only 15–20 percent of individual riflemen fired their weapons in close combat. The problem was that these
infantry had been trained by firing at standard bull’s-eye targets. While this trained them to shoot accurately, it did a terrible job of preparing them to kill actual persons.

Our military has overcome this problem by using something called “operant conditioning.” Now, instead of shooting at a bull’s-eye, soldiers shoot at a man-shaped target that pops up. If they hit it, the target drops down, and once they hit a certain number of targets they’re rewarded. This system was intentionally designed to apply B. F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning” model, which many of us remember from the “rat lab” in Psych 101: stimulus, response; stimulus, response; until the behavior becomes automatic. Like a child in a fire drill at school, we have turned killing into a “conditioned response”—and it has worked. The firing rate went from 15 percent in World War II,
to 55 percent in Korea, to upwards of 95 percent since Vietnam.

Today, this process has evolved into modern, highly realistic “combat simulators” that are now pretty much widespread throughout the military. Research from the Center for the Study of Violence, located at Iowa State University, suggested that “the U.S. Defense Department has
spent $1 billion on games technology that gets soldiers combat ready.” Sergeant Donel Hagelin, an Army “simulator facilitator,” said that “
combat simulators [are] . . . the fastest way to train troops and the easiest way to save money.”

While the games used to train our soldiers are not the same ones you can go buy at your local store, they’re not as far off as you might think.
Rainbow Six
is an off-the-shelf video game about a counterterrorism unit that has to plan out very specific missions in response to terrorist threats. It is such a successful and realistic game that, according to the book
Media Violence and Children,
“the U.S. Army has licensed the game engine to train their special operations soldiers. Furthermore,
the U.S. Army has created their own violent video game as a recruitment tool.”

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.

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 entertainment 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.

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.