Mark, thank you for posting Grossman's interesting article! Along with his thought-provoking analysis of the biological roots of violence in the human mid-brain, and the purpose/methods of military/police training, he offers very valuable insight into the explosion of violent behavior occurring among young people in developed nations over the last several decades.

I found his views on the effect of televised/media violence among very young children most revealing, ie."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 Christians were slaughtered in the Colosseum."

Chilling stuff! And I've often noticed, with great dismay, the difference in attitudes toward/acceptance of violence between today's teens/young adults and my own cohort of the 'peace-and-love-stricken' 60's and 70's. This is one of the issues I was hoping to address in the precursor thread "Violence is the American Way?", but it got buried in the backlash provoked by my unintentionally confrontational first post/thread title (sorry about that to everyone!) So thanks very much for bringing it up again here!

If televised violence is the primary source of increasing violence in developed nations, it's certainly not difficult to find the remedy - Turn the d*** thing off! Refuse to support the sponsors of violent shows, and let them, the media moguls and your children know exactly why you're doing it! And that's just two easy solutions off the top of my head, which I'm sure a great number of concerned parents have been doing for a long time now. So it certainly can't be the whole solution though...

daylia