There is a peculiar truth about war: even in the thick of battle, most trained soldiers cannot bring themselves to fire directly at another recognizably human being. Military psychologists have been studying this phenomenon since World War II. Lt. Col. S.L.A. Marshall’s Men Against Fire (1947) reported that only about 15%-25% of frontline infantry actually fired their rifles directly at the enemy, even when their own lives were in danger.
Later research revised the figure upward, suggesting that roughly forty percent of soldiers could overcome that hesitation. But even so, more than half could not. That invisible barrier, the moment when conscience outweighs command, proved stronger than training, fear, or duty.
In response, both the military and law enforcement changed how they trained. Paper bullseyes became human silhouettes. Then pop-up torsos. Then digital simulations. The goal was simple: to make the act of firing at a human shape automatic, instinctive, unburdened by empathy. To increase the percentage.
Why is it so hard to kill another person? Because recognition stops the hand. The moment you see another human as fully alive, as a mirror of your own being, your body and soul revolt. Empathy fires first: the brain registers the other’s pain as your own. Conscience follows, carrying every lesson civilization has ever taught about the sanctity of life. Even the most hardened soldier feels that ancient restraint. The act of killing demands not only aim, but the temporary silencing of what makes us human.
And yet — in the most recent wave of assassinations and shootings, whether the perpetrator is recognizably insane or not, there seems to have been no hesitation at all to pull the trigger. Donald Trump’s ear was nearly shot off; a few millimeters to the side, and he would have been dead, throwing the nation into chaos. Charlie Kirk was killed with a single, deliberate shot. Rep. Steve Scalise was gunned down on a baseball field. A man armed with a rifle waited outside Justice Kavanaugh’s home and planned to murder other Supreme Court Justices. These are not battlefield reflexes. They are executions carried out by civilians who, in another age, would have recoiled from the act.
Why, when it is so hard for soldiers to fire upon human beings despite thousands of hours of conditioning, is it now so easy for these random actors to murder?
Part of the explanation is desensitization. Several of the attackers spent much of their time in virtual worlds, where digital avatars die and respawn without consequence. For most people, that’s harmless recreation, even a way to release stress. But in a few unstable minds, it erases the distinction between simulation and life; a person becomes a moving target rather than a soul.
But video games are a minor element in this desensitization; the true culprit is as old as war itself. In the wider culture, language has begun to train people to think of the other side as monstrous, inhuman, vermin. Political rhetoric that paints whole groups as existential threats strips away individuality until opponents sound less like neighbors than contagions. When leaders, commentators, or entertainers repeat such imagery year after year, the moral brake weakens. Once someone stops seeing his countrymen as human beings with whom he must share a future, the trigger feels lighter.
A small selection of the rhetoric that has been lobbed at Republicans and conservatives (bolding mine):
- “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” Hillary Clinton, 9/9/2016
- “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Barack Obama, April 2008
- “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.” Joe Biden, 9/1/2022
- “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…” Peter Strzok, 8/26/2016
- “I’m going to say one thing: F*** Trump. It’s no longer ‘Down with Trump,’ it’s F*** Trump.**” Robert DeNiro, 6/10/2018
- “At some point maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members in the GOP.” Hillary Clinton, September 2023
- “The Trump supporters are not Americans. The MAGA crowd is a disease we have to eradicate.” Keith Olberman, 1/21/2021
- “The traitors of the GOP are like Hitler’s brownshirts.” Bette Midler, 1/7/2021
- “Trump’s base — these people — are the Confederates, the fascists, the Nazis. They are not conservatives in any American tradition.” Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project, August 2020
- “The question is: how are we going to really, almost deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?” Katie Couric, January
Abstraction kills empathy. It is far easier to hate a type, particularly a demonized type, than a face.
The leftist impulse to box people up, defining them by race, class, gender, or politics, is an attempt to make the unpredictable human world tidy and controllable. But the cost of tidy categories is compassion. Once we stop seeing the face, we start seeing the label. I can’t see people as categories, nor do most conservatives I know. Every person is their own story, their own improbable miracle. And that sense of particularity is the strongest moral defense a culture has.
I don’t mean we can’t hate those who do evil. There are people in this world whose actions earn hatred the way others earn love. But that’s the point, it’s earned, not inherited. It’s the difference between moral judgment and prejudice. When you hate a person for what he has done, you still recognize him as a person. When you hate a class of people for what you’ve been told they are, you’ve stopped seeing human beings at all.
That, more than anything else, explains the sudden lightness of the modern trigger finger on the leftist's hand. When abstraction replaces the human face, conscience no longer has jurisdiction. The impulse is to destroy the perceived threat, and that threat is no longer seen as human.
What Else Is Breaking the Brake
Narrative Collapse: For generations, Americans shared at least a rough moral story, a sense of belonging to something larger than the self. That story has fractured. When people no longer believe they are part of a moral order, conscience loses its anchor. Ideology rushes in to fill the vacuum, and killing becomes a way to “save” the world rather than destroy it.
Social Atomization: We are the loneliest society in human history. Family, church, and civic life once taught empathy by forcing people to live face-to-face. Now the isolated seek belonging online, where outrage is community and validation comes in clicks. An assassin rarely has real neighbors, only followers.
Ideological Moral Licensing: Every utopian movement grants itself moral permission to do harm “for the greater good.” When politics becomes religion, murder can masquerade as virtue. The killer does not see himself as evil; he sees himself as a savior acting in a world that refuses to listen.
Cultural Nihilism: The desire for fame has replaced the desire for meaning. When a culture denies eternity, notoriety becomes the only immortality left. Each new assassin livestreaming his crime is proof that even infamy feels better than invisibility.
The Breakdown of Formation: We medicate pain but rarely cultivate virtue. Moral formation, the slow shaping of character through family, faith, and responsibility, has withered. In its place stand therapy, grievance, and self-esteem. Without formation, conscience becomes an untrained muscle: it twitches, but it cannot resist.
Together, these forces form a deadly sequence:
- Desensitization trains the reflex.
- Rhetoric provides the target.
- Atomization removes accountability.
- Ideology supplies moral license.
- Nihilism fills the void with spectacle.
When all of those converge, the ancient brake that once stopped the soldier’s hand no longer functions—and the unthinkable becomes easy.
We can’t legislate conscience, but we can keep it awake. Refuse the easy label; speak of people as people (yes, even Joy Reid and Eric Swalwell). Look again at the faces you’ve been taught to despise and remember that civilization depends on that pause — the breath between thought and action, the instant when empathy says stop. If we lose that moment, nothing else we build will matter.
