Trenchcoat Tabula Rasa

While Lt. Col. Grossman does not actually express a theory as to why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold acted out their gruesome and violent fantasies against their classmates, at least in his writings that appear on SKIRMISHER, one might infer that it claims Harris and Klebold--formerly innocent kids--stumbled onto a copy of Doom, and then, through corporate negligence, happened to consume sugar while playing this tasty-but-toxic simulation of mass murder. The diabolic link between CRT bloodshed and a candy rush having been burned into their undiscerning minds, the pair helplessly began stockpiling weapons and manufacturing pipe bombs for at least one year before coming into Columbine High and murdering their classmates with expert though unwanted skill derived from hours of play.

I may have the wrong impression, but Grossman says nothing to distance himself from this bleak, reductionist view; the only time the forebrain appears in his Jonesboro pamphlet is to shut down and let animal reflexes take over (part 3 - Killing is Unnatural). By contrast, building their explosives, gathering their arsenal, and actually carrying out their decision required a surfeit of planning, problem-solving, and foresight, as well as a callow disregard for human life. This was premeditated, with all that implies.

In fact, killers are amazingly absent from the professor of "killology"'s tract. The only time a murderer shows up is in larval form, when a "potentially violent little boy" decides to follow the TV's evil example (part 7 - Role Models).

How and why one becomes "potentially violent" is not addressed, although this brief glimmer of free will and independent thought from within Grossman's otherwise mechanistic maelstrom of flashing lights, vasoconstriction, and Mars bars is interesting in its inconsistency. That one of his babes in arms might suddenly break his strings and make an independent plan to achieve an abstract goal should be nothing short of miraculous if the retired lieutenant colonel actually thought people were the robots he says they are; instead, he makes no note of it and continues having his lecture.

Grossman pays prudent lip service to many potential causes dear to the social sciences (guns, child abuse, poverty, racism), but introduces the heretofore-unnamed factor of "media violence presented as entertainment for children" (part 2 - Virus of Violence).

In support of his claim, Grossman cites a 1992 JAMA article and "the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Juvenile Violence," although the paragraph is unclear as to where the nameless speaker stops and Grossman resumes (part 3 - Killing is Unnatural).

He claims that the media and video games are causal factors for violence, but if you want to discuss proximate cause, if the murderer Grossman testified for hadn't decided to commit armed robbery, no amount of operant conditioning would have put the clerk in his line of fire.

Grossman's claim that the murder must have been accidental in light of the many surveillance cameras is the kind of thing that gives expert witnesses a bad name: was his client indifferent to a conviction for robbery in the first degree, but deterred by a murder rap? Not likely. What is more probable is that the killer never expected to be apprehended and was very unhappy upon learning of the Felony Murder Rule.

Grossman's "Educate, Legislate, Litigate" is another Huxleyan proposal, where a grey, featureless Society helps grey, featureless parents in their responsibility to protect their faceless kids from the depredations of amoral corporations.

Grossman doesn't even seem to think that the "violence industry" is evil as much as blankly money-hungry, only making violent products because it pays well, and that a few sharp jolts of litigation will make it shift, uncomprehending, to a less-destructive subject matter.

His claim that litigation is as "American as apple pie" should not go unnoticed.

Horrid Children

The enthusiastic and heartfelt conclusions of the TV networks, the supermarket tabloids, and Congress that The Basketball Diaries, Natural Born Killers, The Matrix, and Menace II Society, among other movies, and Doom, Postal, and other video games had an unwholesome influence over these kids--though Lt. Col. Grossman probably stretches it to an "irresistible impulse," since it is criminal conduct he has to explain.

First of all, violent crime has been plummeting, as Department of Justice studies indicate, since 1993, the year Doom was released, incidentally. Why does Grossman keep using six-year-old data? More pertinently, what is his explanation for not mentioning the subsequent decrease in violent crime?

Secondly, mass media is much tamer than it used to be. When was the last time you saw a castration in a film? Or a purely gratuitous splatter movie? These things went out with the '70's and have become a shock to the modern viewer.

And long before demon television blighted the landscape, children gathered around "Gang Busters" and "The Shadow," two violent radio shows, and news serials dripping in spilled gangster blood before matinees at the nickelodeon. Violence has always been a part of entertainment, as can be seen in the Police Gazette, Edgar Allen Poe, penny dreadfuls, revenge plays, MacBeth, the Iliad, the Old Testament, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, just to name a few.

Child murderers of good lineage are also nothing new. Lizzie Borden is a fine example, but not half as good as the prep-school thrill killers, Leopold and Loeb, aged 19 and 18 respectively, who planned their slaying of a random classmate for seven months and then, in May of 1924, went out driving, lured 14-year-old Bobby Franks to their car, killed him, dumped him, and faked a ransom note, purely for kicks, and without so much as Pong to lead them on their path to perdition.

Grossman asserts that nothing links Western Europe and North America besides media violence. The dissolution of the family began at roughly the same time in both places; it did not, however, in Japan, which continues to have a comparatively low murder rate (though high property crime) despite incredibly graphic media depictions of violence and sex.

The question remains: Why did Harris and Klebold murder their classmates? My guess is that they were vicious, hateful little monsters. They didn't like the jocks; they made bombs, got guns, and killed them.

This is not at all unique. Why did they play Doom and watch Natural Born Killers over and over? They liked to think about killing jocks, and these were about things pretty close to killing jocks.

Unsupervised access to Doom didn't create that impulse any more than unsupervised access to the phone did. Being forced to go to a high school where they were hated pariahs and singled out for daily abuse probably did a lot to create the urge to murder their tormentors, just like it does with a lot of kids, and just like it does with a lot of adults. Very few go through with it.

When people won't stop being cruel, you want to force them to stop. Children are cruel because they don't think anything they do matters. They are protected from consequences, and they don't know that people can be hurt by their actions. Every child has to learn this anew, and that is why children and teenagers are often selfish thugs and bullies.

And that's my guess as to why Harris and Klebold hated some of the other students at Columbine High, that many of them were also vicious, hateful little monsters. One consistent feature that comes up in the news reports is that the two shooters were constantly and mercilessly teased, ostracized, and mocked by other kids in Littleton, and many of those were the ones that got killed.

Two miserable boys decided to kill their enemies and then kill themselves. That's why it happened.