Will the Iraq war give rise to serial killers?

[Shilberu Erikku]

After Vietnam, there was a huge jump in serial killings and here is why:

David Grossman, a former U.S. military psychologist who helped develop programs to train new recruits to become more effective killers, said that the key to military training lies in breaking down the natural human aversion to killing in a process he calls "disengagement." Once this aversion has been removed, it never comes back, and can make it easier for former soldiers to become murderers.

"The ability to watch a human being's head explode and to do it again and again -- that takes a kind of desensitization to human suffering that has to be learned," Mr. Grossman said yesterday.

In earlier wars, many soldiers were psychologically unable to shoot anyone. In order to increase the "trigger-pull ratio," the United States changed the basic training offered to all recruits and draftees so they would be aggressively desensitized to killing.

Some observers believe this may be why mass murders have become far more common in the past 50 years.

In the 1970s, some observers believed that the humiliation and social opprobrium caused by the Vietnam War, led many former soldiers to become mentally unstable, and potentially to become killers.  

[Le Scratch]

I don't feel it's just the desensitizing that does that. If it were that alone, the brutally graphic violence in some video games would be enough to trigger a huge rise in murders - that hasn't happened. I think it's the stigma that was associated with the war and the subsequent trauma it produced that was to blame for the rise in murders. As a per-capita nationwide average, all crime rates have fallen over the past ten years, including murders. The public is merely deceived into thinking that it's worse than it actually is thanks to extensive media coverage, from television to newspapers, of every single violent happening for miles instead of letting police and those involved in the incident take care of it.

The flipside of this is that you have to look at how many of those mass murders are attributed to soldiers and then compare it to the rates of other such crime - chances are, it's about the same percentage as the general populace.  

[Shilberu Erikku]

Le Scratch

I don't feel it's just the desensitizing that does that. If it were that alone, the brutally graphic violence in some video games would be enough to trigger a huge rise in murders - that hasn't happened. I think it's the stigma that was associated with the war and the subsequent trauma it produced that was to blame for the rise in murders. As a per-capita nationwide average, all crime rates have fallen over the past ten years, including murders. The public is merely deceived into thinking that it's worse than it actually is thanks to extensive media coverage, from television to newspapers, of every single violent happening for miles instead of letting police and those involved in the incident take care of it.

The flipside of this is that you have to look at how many of those mass murders are attributed to soldiers and then compare it to the rates of other such crime - chances are, it's about the same percentage as the general populace.

Unfortunately, we tend to live in a society where the media often replaces thought.  

[Le Scratch]

Shilberu Erikku

Le Scratch

I don't feel it's just the desensitizing that does that. If it were that alone, the brutally graphic violence in some video games would be enough to trigger a huge rise in murders - that hasn't happened. I think it's the stigma that was associated with the war and the subsequent trauma it produced that was to blame for the rise in murders. As a per-capita nationwide average, all crime rates have fallen over the past ten years, including murders. The public is merely deceived into thinking that it's worse than it actually is thanks to extensive media coverage, from television to newspapers, of every single violent happening for miles instead of letting police and those involved in the incident take care of it.

The flipside of this is that you have to look at how many of those mass murders are attributed to soldiers and then compare it to the rates of other such crime - chances are, it's about the same percentage as the general populace.

Unfortunately, we tend to live in a society where the media often replaces thought.

That is where good statistics come in handy. Factual evidence is quite a bit more accurate in evaluations than the media is.