He’s quite explicit about when men are willing to kill.

Yeah, if there is ‘distance’. Which is by default. If, in a war, you meet an enemy who is pointing a gun at you, the instinctual reaction is to shoot him. 99% cases he speaks a different language, looks different, etc.

Grossman’s ‘point’ has so many caveats that one should rather make an entirely new one – that everyone is reluctant to kill someone who seems just like them?

It’s a nice story (people are basically decent) and he says the things older generations wants to hear ‘videogames bad – cause murder’, even though present-day youth are less violent than their videogame-free antecendents..

That said, Grossman doesn’t simply cite Marshall; he also cites earlier examples, where musket fire doesn’t yield anywhere near the casualties one would naively assume.

That, could just as easily be caused by inaccurate aiming. In some armies the penultimate command in the firing drill was not even aim ‘just level’.

We may or may not swallow his explanation, but it is consistent with a body of evidence beyond

What body?
There’s one set of data from Gettysburg, which can just as well be explained by stressed or shellshocked soldiers messing up and loading the gun multiple times without firing it.

Grossman is out of his dept. He has a degree in education! And this ‘reluctance’ to kill shtick of his is just the tip of the bullshit heap.

He is also in favor of gun control, which is an intellectually untenable and morally repugnant position.

Michael Carneal, the 14-year-old killer in the Paducah, Kentucky school shootings, had never fired a real pistol in his life. He stole a .22 pistol, fired a few practice shots, and took it to school. He fired eight shots at a high school prayer group, hitting eight kids, five of them head shots and the other three upper torso (Grossman & DeGaetana, 1999).

I train numerous elite military and law enforcement organizations around the world. When I tell them of this achievement they are stunned. Nowhere in the annals of military or law enforcement history can we find an equivalent “achievement.”

Where does a 14-year-old boy who never fired a gun before get the skill and the will to kill? Video games and media violence.

( I really wish aiming skill in online shooters translated to the real world, but it doesn’t. It’s a thing which could be easily validated by a simple experiment. Grossman has never conducted any)

He doesn’t say what distance the shots were taken at. It’s all quite disingenuous.

And ‘will to kill’. Is Grossman some kind of emotional cripple who has never been really angry?

Maybe he’s just a really nice guy. This commenter Kirk who met him personally in the US Army thinks so:

He’s a nice, sincere guy. He’s also severely delusional about the fundamental nature of the human race, in my view. Call it being victimized by his upbringing and life experience, or whatever: All I know is that he’s very, very wrong about the basic idea he’s built his post-Army career on

We now know — or strongly suspect — that S.L.A. Marshall made up his data. When Grossman was forming his ideas, S.L.A. Marshall’s work was held in high regard. That said, Grossman doesn’t simply cite Marshall; he also cites earlier examples, where musket fire doesn’t yield anywhere near the casualties one would naively assume.

We may or may not swallow his explanation, but it is consistent with a body of evidence beyond Marshall’s discredited pseudo-study.

(Also, Grossman explicitly mentions a need to fire and contrasts it with an explicit attempt to kill a particular enemy soldier.)

So the sky high homicide rate in pre-civilized societies, the persistent murder fantasies most people have people, that means nothing?

When two animals of the same species fight, they rarely fight to the death

Humans have the capacity to plan ahead and execute rather complex behavior, something found in only very few animals.

Here’s a Canadian take on the firing ratios. The author, a Ph.D. student in military history, claims that (a) S.L.A. Marshall’s firing ratios were probably made up, because no one ever found any data, no one with Marshall back in WWII remembered Marshall asking about firing ratios, and (b) Canadian textual sources indicate that rather officers and NCOs complained more about lack of fire discipline than non-firing.

If they had daggers they’d backstab each other alright.

Grossman claims that a reluctance to kill other humans is natural, but he doesn’t claim that it’s immutable — quite the opposite, really

I know, but what kind of evolutionary mechanism would produce that kind of adaptation?

Furthermore, all the war memoirs I’ve read fail to mention anything like that. The authors often express sadness at having to kill conscripted kids and so on but nowhere one can find a mention of someone ‘not firing’.

With emotional or psychological distance, Grossman says, men are quite willing to kill.

How does that make sense in the case of intra-tribal violence? In such cases the killer and victim were probably family, and fairly close family too.

I’d say that the ‘distance’ exists by default, and one might expect reluctance to kill only to occur in cases where the enemies have spent a lot of time in close proximity, as was the case sometimes in WWI trenches.