-14 Year old Michael Carneal from West Paducah, KY, fires upon a group of teenagers circled in prayer. Hitting 8 people, he killed three and left one paralyzed.
-16 yr old Luke Woodham from Pearl, MS, shoots and kills his mother then goes to his high school and kills 3, wounds 7.
-Mitchell Johnson, 13, and Andrew Golden, 11, from Jonesboro, Ark., trip the fire alarm and kill 4 students and a teacher. 10 others are injured.
-15 yr old Kip Kinkle killed his parents then went on to hit 24 students in his school cafeteria with gunfire-- 2 die.
-18 yr old Eric Harris and 17 yr old Dylan Klebold left 12 students and a teacher dead along with 23 wounded before killing themselves. (McDowell 3-4).
As the CBS President Leslie Moonves stated after the Columbine shootings, "Anyone who thinks that the media has nothing to do with it is an idiot."" (JCal 1) Children are committing mass murder at ages where we don't even have laws to punish them (JCal 5).
What is it that makes our kids shoot to kill in our society and with such accuracy? I believe violent video games play an important role in this recent phenomenon. After researching violence and video games, I quickly learned that violent video games are just part of a bigger picture.
According to Lt Col David Grossman, a former US Airborne Ranger and Psychology professor at West Point, the entertainment industry and media are indiscriminately teaching our children to kill. He realized that the methods our armed forces use to teach our recruits to kill on the battlefield are the same methods our kids are indiscriminately learning from the entertainment industry as they watch and play with violence.
Historians have known that in battles of the past, the actual killing rate during face-to-face combat was surprisingly low. It wasn't until after WWII that a team of researchers, led by S.L.A.Marshall, a US Army Brigadier General and US Army historian during WWII, for the first time in history asked individual soldiers what they did in battle.