tiredInteresting argument being made therein, that's what. Grossman argues that man does not naturally kill (except for the 2-3% that enjoy it, not all of whom are sociopaths) and in fact the act of killing causes psychological damage, which needs to be dealt with unless you want to have battle-fatigued/PTSD-shocked veterans all over the place. Grossman's main thesis is that the damage caused to Vietnam veterans wasn't properly dealt with by society and in fact was aggravated by the actions of many anti-war activists; his secondary thesis is that we are, as a society, replicating the desensitization processes the Army and Marines have used to improve the rate of soldiers who fire their weapons. He criticizes Hollywood and Silicon Valley both for slasher movies and violent video games, positing (imnsho) that these have helped drive up the rates of violent crime in America, along with the decrease in solid families and other societal structures that remind us that violence is reserved for particular instances, not for general use in daily life. Some of the material was familiar to me from Charles Gabriel's No More Heroes, which restricted itself to the effects of military training, but there was a lot of new & interesting material drawn from extensive interviews with veterans of WW2, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf Wars. Worth reading.
Spent the rest of the day reading, playing Civ, and keeping cool.
