Dave Grossman

(1956 — )

Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman is a retired professor of psychology and military science and a former Army Ranger who has recently founded a new field of scientific study he calls "killology," which investigates how and why people kill each other during wartime, the psychological costs of battle, the root causes of violent crime, and the process of healing that victims of violence must go through (see www.killology.com). Following a B.S. at the Columbus College in Georgia (where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) and an M.Ed. at the University of Texas, Grossman joined the Army, where he rose quickly through the ranks to lieutenant colonel and served as a professor at both the United States Military Academy at West Point and as chair of the Department of Military Science at Arkansas State University. The author of three books—On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (1995), Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie, and Video Game Violence (with Gloria deGaetano, 1999), and On Combat (2004)—he spends nearly three hundred days a year on the road each year consulting and giving workshops about combat and violence. He also writes military science fiction and will soon publish a new book end Two-Space War. His advice to students using The Prose Reader is to avoid a steady diet of violent visual images, which “will lobotomize the brain and make thinking and writing more difficult.  If you cleanse your mind (particularly the frontal cortex) with periods of contemplation and reading, you will become a much better writer.”

Related Readings and Other Background Information

• Heins, Marjorie. "Blaming the Media." Media Studies Journal. 14.3 (Fall 2000): 14-24.
• Hogan, Marjorie and Miriam Bar-on. "Media Education." Pediatrics. 104.2 (Aug. 1999): 341-344.
• "Media Violence." Pediatrics, 108.5 (Nov. 2001): 1222-1227.
• Sherry, JL. "The effects of violent video games on aggression. A meta-analysis." Human Communication Research 27.3 (July 2001): pg unknown.
• Strasburger, Victor C. and Edward Donnerstein. "Children, adolescents, and the media: Issues and solutions." Pediatrics. 103.1 (Jan. 1999): 129-140.
• Villani, Susan. "Impact of Media on Children and Adolescents: A 10-Year Review of the Research." Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 40.4 (Apr. 2001): 392-401.

"We Are Training Our Kids to Kill"

Killology Research Group Biography: Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman Children and TV Violence Violence in the Mass Media Violence Issues