This guy is a maniac, and I’m convinced he’s partially to blame for officers becoming so trigger happy.
‘We fight violence. What do we fight it with? Superior violence. Righteous violence.’
Rather than simply conditioning soldiers and police officers to shoot without hesitation, he teaches them to embrace their responsibility to kill. “Killing’s not the goal,” he cautioned in a 2004 interview with Frontline. “But we all understand that killing is the likely outcome.”
Grossman calls his discipline ‘killology’—’the scholarly study of the destructive act.’
The booklet Grossman hands out at his civilian training contains some of the same content that cops receive. There are charts and tables on “perceptual distortions in combat” and “combat efficiency.” A section titled “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” lists Bible verses that distinguish between justified killing and murder.