Don't bother. Grossman is so full of shit his eyes are brown. I remember when he testified before a congressional committee and said with absolute confidence that the cause of teen violence was playing violent video games like "DOOM" (the original Doom. The cartoony one that my grand-daughters laugh at).
Repeatedly refers to video games as murder simulators, engages in some ridiculous "well in MY generation...", and packs in heaps of pseudoscience. His book is less about "The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" and more about the twisted and perverse views of Freudian sexuality and its link to killing.
The book’s foundation is SLA Marshall’s long debunked fabricated statistics from “Men Against Fire.” From this foundation of horseshit, he build a wall of more horseshit. Draws a correlation between the training methods employed by the US Army and the increase in solider aggression (an illusion based on the previous Marshal data), he manages to both condemn and praise the increased lethality of the US military both at the same time.
The book slaps a hideous roof on this monument to bad science by hiding behind no less an authority than Jack Thompson. If the name Jack Thompson sounds familiar, it’s because he was the Florida lawyer who made national headlines in the mid-2000s with his crusade against violent video games. A crusade which ended with Thompson’s disbarment and disgrace.
"The Media Violence Scam" https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/6516728246.pdf
Never knew that about Grossman and videogames, sound like a retard. I only read about 1/4 of the book so far, and he is mostly quoting researches and experience from other people, some things make sense to me some don't.
He does have a tendency to jump to conclusions based on experiences from just a few people he talked to, for example "anyone who experiences combat and doesn't shit their pants is a cold blooded psychopath". Could be that happened to him first time he played Doom.
I was an 18B in the 10th SFG(A) when his book came out. A copy showed up in the team-room one day and everybody ended up reading it at some point. Almost everyone on the team were combat vets and every single one of us concluded that he was full of shit.
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