Training Kids to Kill Essay

Article 1: We Are Training Our Kids To Kill In the article “We Are Training Our Kids To Kill”, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is very disturbed regarding today’s youth. He starts off by mentioning about the cluster of suicides that occurred in the 1970’s due to local TV reporting numerous teen suicides. This led to numerous copycat suicides by teenagers that had seen the stories on the news. Once they researched this and discovered the rise in suicides were linked to the news articles, the networks pulled it from the air. As a result, the suicide numbers went down.

Grossman goes on to say that the average child watches way too much TV in the home on a weekly basis. So they learn more from TV than they do their parents and teachers combined. Due to this fact, we need to be careful what we put on TV. Children are very impressionable and vulnerable and can be persuaded very easily by what they see. He mentions that there is too much violence portrayed not just through the news networks but all other types of shows and video games as well. The author views video game violence as something that needs to be outlawed. “Violence is not a game; it’s not fun; it’s not something we do for entertainment. He goes on to say that, “Violence kills and maims”. In my opinion he clearly thinks that children are being conditioned to violence and possibly even to kill through the negligence of the media, the TV networks, movies, violent video games, and even the lack of parenting. I agree with him on this matter completely. I do feel that violence is often glorified because it brings in a lot more money than it would without it. Some people might be getting reprogrammed by all the killing and violence in games and on TV. They may be desensitized actually to the point where they could kill someone without a second thought.

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I feel they are really targeting our young boys the most. It could possibly be to get them conditioned to be a part of the military when they are old enough. This could be why they make so many military style video games with very realistic characters in the game killing other people. They make it actually seem fun in the game to run around killing everyone. One point that the author mentioned that I highly disagree with him on is his stand on gun control. I do feel that American’s have the right to bear arms. If the criminals have guns then others would be defenseless without them.

People do however, need to use wisdom and always put safety first with gun ownership. Owning a gun doesn’t give you the right to abuse it and go on shooting sprees. However, I still feel that there are plenty of people in our society that should not be allowed guns. I think they need to be more proactive with background checks and past crimes to keep the guns out of the hands of those people. Also, people shouldn’t be allowed to buy guns as easily as they do. They need to have better records kept and shouldn’t be allowed to be sold to third parties. Of course not everyone follows the rules all the time.

If they did, our country would be perfect. To summarize my final thoughts, I would like to say that parents need to start taking more control over what their children see and do. It definitely starts in the home. Kids are like sponges and soak up everything around them. So it’s time we started trying to get back to basics and spend more quality time with our children instead of allowing them to become couch potato video maniacs. If we all pitched in to set better standards and were better examples for them, I feel the whole world would be a much less violent, safer, happier and all around better place to live in.

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