The National Rifle Association invited a guest speaker to its annual meeting this year to address a curious topic: mass killings.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired West Point professor who specializes in so-called killology, his own term for the psychology of taking a life, hosted a seminar at the NRA's annual meeting over the weekend that advocated for increased gun purchases in order to combat a generation of "vicious killers," Think Progress reported.
“Can anyone deny that we’ve raised the most vicious generation of killers the world has ever seen?” Grossman asked the NRA audience, Think Progress' Kira Lerner reported. “They’ve given us crimes that children have never dreamed of. They’ll give us crimes as adults in our darkest nightmares we never imagined.”
In his book, "Assassination Generation," Grossman argues that violent video games and movies are corrupting young children's minds and raising them to become monsters capable of carrying out the most horrendous mass killings the country has ever seen.
“The one factor the killers have in common: every one of them dropped out of life and immersed themselves in the sickest movies and the sickest video games,” he said in his speech at the annual meeting. “The guns have always been there. The sick movies and the sick video games are creating sick, sick kids.”
Grossman does not attribute a dearth of adequate gun control measures for the rise in mass shooting rampages, however. His solution to what he describes as a killing epidemic is to donate money to the NRA's lobbying arm. "We have never needed you and the NRA like we need you now," he told attendees at the NRA convention.
At one point in his seminar, he rhetorically asked his audience what the country can learn from recent mass shootings. “Can we take the lessons learned in Columbine and Jonesboro or Virginia Tech? Can we take the lessons learned on 9/11, Pulse Nightclub in Orlando? Or do we have to wait until our kids die?” he asked. “Do we have to wait until our friends die to take action?”
“Do we have to wait until our friends die to take action?”
The lessons Grossman learned from Columbine and Virginia Tech are not the same derived from research which shows that gun-free schools are safer and dramatically reduce gun violence.
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