Death of a nation

'In the 1950s and 1960s, students brought knives to high school, whereastoday they bring .22s. But those .22s were pretty much always present at home. What makes today's children bring those guns to school when their parents did not? The important ingredient may be the systematic process of defeating the normal individual's age-old, psychological inhibition against violent activity toward one's own species. Desensitization, conditioning, and vicarious learning is unleashing an epidemic, a catch off of a gun, and with the same results? --Major Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little, Brown and Company, 1995)"