Remember the movie American Sniper, which had a pro war protagonist and glamorized exotic gun play and killing as heroic? Some of the dialogue was inspired by an essay written by Dave Grossman, an Army Ranger and former psychology professor at West Point, who created and popularized the science of killology. He goes around the country training groups of police. Here he says that sex after killing is a real high. Sounds like Charlie Manson to me, but you take a listen.
Dave Grossman, who trains police departments across the nation, tells a group of cops, the best sex is after killing a person. He calls it a “perk of the job,” followed by laughter from the police in attendance.
This is policing in America. pic.twitter.com/QkaEVOQcUX
— Travis Akers (@travisakers) April 22, 2021
“I am a sheepdog under the authority of the great Shepard. Endowed by my creator with inalienable rights,” Grossman continued at his Pleasant Hill training, leading up to a rhetorical crescendo. “Empowered by my constitution to keep and bear arms. Inspired by my forefathers to fight for this land I love. I am a sheepdog under the authority of the great Shepard! And this is as far as the minions of hell are going!”
The sheepdog term is interesting. The inference is that the yous and mes are sheep, the world is full of wolves, and only the sheepdogs will protect us dummies from ending up in a curry tonight.
If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed. […]
We know that the sheep live in denial; that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids’ schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are dozens of times more likely to be killed, and thousands of times more likely to be seriously injured, by school violence than by school fires, but the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their children is just too hard, so they choose the path of denial.
The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.
Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn’t tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, “Baa.”
Now this is where the sheepdog analogy falls apart. A sheepdog changes the direction of the herd, keeps them together, brings back the ones who wander off. It is closer to an usher than a cop. You could stretch to call the sheepdog a correctional officer. The sheepdog doesn’t protect the sheep by identifying all on his own who among them is the wolf — or even a black sheep, for that matter — and then ripping those to shreds on the spot and leaving them in the field. Aye, there’s the rub. The sheepdog cannot hurt even the lowliest little lamb, we are told, he is empowered only to kill the big bad wolf. Trouble is, this isn’t a fairy tale where all the animals are clearly differentiated, the wolves and sheep here are members of the same species. And to give a cop, or anybody, the license to decide who amongst us is a wolf and can be executed at will and without due process is insane.
We would do well to have a real sheepdog, that could enter a situation and set the sheep all going the right direction, in harmony. I say bravo to that. That’s not what we’re seeing in police work in America circa 2021. Grossman’s manifesto is closer to giving a sociopath free rein to be a sociopath because he is the superior man by dint of brute strength and doing those weaker than him a favor. And brute strength is everything. Get your clubs and let’s head back to the cave, listening to this sociological pablum.
Additionally, Grossman is probably one cop who is livid that the 17-year-old girl took the damning video of George Floyd’s murder in the street, because he goes on to decry exactly that. This is chilling. We live in a technological world where the night has a thousand eyes and that’s a real drag for people who are used to cloaking their sins in darkness.
“The only way you make a frightened person behave in a certain way is to drill it into him. To make it a conditioned response.” Sounds like that sci fi movie Soldier doesn’t it? Small wonder that in 2019, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey announced that the city’s police officers were banned from participating in “fear-based, warrior-style” training and Grossman doesn’t speak there any more.
Fear is the basis of all of this. That is the common thread. People must believe that the cities — and the schools — are war zones, and that only the warrior cops can save them from immediate extermination. You mix that psyche with gun fetishism and it begins to make sense why we are where we are in this country.
If you are not “emotionally, psychologically and spiritually prepared to snuff out a human life in defense of innocent lives,” Grossman advises that this may not be the line of work for you. And the corollary to that is that you must also feel comfortable being judge, jury and executioner right there in the street.
You must be able to rationalize that the person you just killed is the black sheep — pun intended — and deserves to die so the white sheep will be safe. And then after you’ve killed somebody, you can go home and have great sex. So glad to know homocide is an aphrodisiac. Learn something new every day.
Yet another reason to cheer on the erectile dysfunction COVID creates for this group when they inevitably catch it.
He doesn’t even understand his own words. He said, “Any sheepdog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. ” I guess this means he approves of the Chauvin verdict, amirite?
Oh my God! Sociopath training school!
It is scary. And making the media the enemy. This enemy of the people dirge has to stop. I think that’s the most dangerous contribution Trump made, was to disparage the press and get right-wing media rolling with disinformation and ignoring actual breaking news stories.
The path of denial aptly describes guys like him and other so-called 2A supporters. They are in constant denial about the danger the presence of so many guns in society poses.
His extension of the “good shepherd” analogy is blasphemous.
Too many police these days operate somewhere between “Kill em all and let God sort em out” & “Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.” And, within THAT those cops possess a mindset somewhere between “Wannabe Hero” & “Avenging Angel.” Worse, it’s become common to train them this way if not in police academies then via this kind of post academy training.
It’s true that it’s both stunning and downright scary how fast a seemingly typical, run-of-the-mill encounter with the public can turn dangerously bad for a cop. Teaching them how to keep their guard up without being uneccessarily threatening and therefore escalating tensions (which can lead what would have been a peaceful interaction into something bad) is no easy task and never has been. But it used to be done. It’s like they don’t even try anymore.
If you’re old enough as in having seen four or five decades past high school think back. I’ll give an example that although I haven’t looked closely I think still holds true. State Troopers, the guys who spend almost all their time on the job out there on highways working by themselves. A lot of that time is on Interstate highways pulling over vehicles with out of state plates. Even in daylight hours it’s dangerous as hell. Yes, you’ve radioed in that you’re making a stop and where as well as the location and the tag # and why you are stopping the vehicle. But for the most part, unless the plates come back as stolen or there’s some other information in the system that says “uh oh” that State Trooper is on their own. In so many states, those vehicles passing through contain people transporting everything from guns to drugs to even poached wildlife and fish headed for city markets. Driven by criminals, many of which have proven violent in the past. State Troopers know all this, and have always known all this.
Thinking back, how often have you heard or read a news story about a State Trooper making what starts as a routine traffic stop out on the highway blowing someone away? Not very often I suspect and hardly at all (if ever) when you were younger even though things were just as dangerous for them back then. And even if there’s been an uptick it’s nowhere near the amount of shootings during what start as traffic stops as happens with city and county cops.
Maybe, just maybe there’s something in the training those State Troopers got that allowed them to stop a vehicle to give them a ticket for speeding, drunk driving or some other matter that allows them to deal with an often surely, upset or downright pissed off driver (and maybe passengers too) without things getting to the point of shots fired and innocent people getting killed. I could be wrong about all of what I’ve just written and if so I’m sure I’ll get an earful but I don’t think I’m off base. Or that far off base.
I know the feeling of being on-duty and seeing a firearm aimed my way because part of my time on active duty was spent attached to an MP unit. No shots were fired either by me or the guy I was with at the Guard Gate(or a third guy, also an MP who was nearby walking our way and could see both us and the truck and he also drew his weapon when we did), and no one got killed although both the asshole driving and the asshole aiming what turned out to be a pellet rifle probably wished for while we had. The Sergeant Major’s voice carried down from the third deck the next morning as he screamed at them while waiting for transport to come up from Quantico to haul their butts off to the brig to await Courts Martial. I hadn’t even gone through MP training (unlike the guy with me who had) and we kept our wits about us and didn’t kill anyone although we’d have been cleared had we opened fire and done so. There’s a lot more to the story about the threats that were made earlier in the evening by what turned out to be two people in that truck but I won’t bore you with the whole thing. Again, the point is that we would have been fully justified in using deadly force and been cleared for doing so. Instead we used other tools at our disposal to resolve the situation and arrest the idiots without a single shot fired.
Clearly I believe training and a lot more of it on use of force, and especially deadly force is needed nationwide. I also believe that investigation and prosecution of cops when these incidents happen needs to be taken out of the hands of local departments and authorities. Each state should have a unit of investigators and prosecutors to handle these matters. Keep in mind that MN Attorney General Keith Ellison took over this case. I rather doubt that had the local D.A handled the prosecution we’d have gotten second degree murder. IF an indictment had come down (tossup in my view despite the video) the most that MIGHT have been obtained (or even charged) would have been manslaughter and at the lowest possible degree under the laws of MN.
Unless and until we can get rid of the “better to be tried by twelve than carried by six” mentality not much will change. It’s going to take a lot more successful prosecutions in a lot more places to make too many cops and those responsible for training AND supervising them to change.
His comment about how the “sheep” are willing to “accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids’ schools” and then goes on to complain how they don’t want armed cops patrolling those very same schools. What he fails to note is that, well, no one’s actively promoting the idea of putting firemen in schools to ward off fires JUST IN CASE a fire happens to break out. He also happens to overlook the idea that most schools ban kids from carrying matches or lighters for ANY reason (usually, it’s only high schools which allow underage students to smoke–even though most of those students can’t legally buy tobacco products–which let their teenage students carry matches and lighters; you won’t, however, find elementary schools that let kids carry them) and, in most schools, it’s only teachers and other legally responsible adults (or legally accountable adults) who have access to fire-making products (chemistry teachers with bunsen burners, etc).
But, I’ve also never heard of fire fighters going around and randomly killing people that they believe set a fire (whether intentionally or accidentally) or blasting busybody spectators with fire hoses. Can we say that no cop has ever shot someone while in pursuit of someone SUSPECTED of a crime?
Lots of people with small hearts these days. This trainer should be sued by those his students harm for no good reason.
There are many things wrong with this…but let me just say that I knew a sheepdog who was a prized companion of a family I know and passed away this last year, and the portrayal of sheepdogs in those statements are just plain wrong and stupid.