We Are Training Our Kids to Kill

The author Dave Grossman, in his essay “We Are Training Kids To kill, talking about how he believes that media and modern day technology and violent video games are reasons for child violence worldwide. Grossman goes on to relate and use his experience in the military to the violence in the youth and younger generation as emphasis. In the article 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 rises 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 states that 2 things are keeping the murder rates lower then they could be medical advances and prisons. I mostly disagree to the prison statement, having the complete lack of capable rehabilitation and constant imprisonment for low end crimes as federal offences, by bringing up the points and ideas of media influence, he gave a “sort of” viable alternative to his own stated preference to imprisonment of violent offenders, which I’m not against, just that his statement came off like prisons were one of the best things going for America, but by lowering the level of violence present in media, and by possibly educating parents into not letting their kids have access to violent media until later on in life one can significantly lower the chance of violent crimes. He also states that killing is a learned skill. While there are