Author: Dave Grossman

This is not David Grossman the Israeli novelist. Dave Grossman is a retired American army lieutenant colonel who coined the word killology and wrote On Killing, which argues that most people carry a deep resistance to killing and that modern military conditioning has been designed to override it. The historical spine of that case is S. L. A. Marshall's claim that few American infantrymen fired their weapons in the Second World War, and Marshall's research methods have since been seriously challenged. Grossman's police training seminars, which teach officers to expect lethal encounters, have drawn heavy criticism for encouraging exactly that expectation.