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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 2278511" data-attributes="member: 1645">Not if you're in a trench.  Or behind a wall.Again, there's plenty of evidence that many men in combat choose not to shoot at the enemy -- or choose to shoot over the enemy's head -- despite the fact that they are under attack.  Soldiers are not robots, and they're not chess pieces, and most have an extreme aversion to killing.You may want to read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316330116/" target="_blank">On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society</a>, by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman.  Or you may want to read his short essay, <a href="http://www.killology.com/article_agress&viol.htm" target="_blank">Aggression and Violence</a> for the gist.  A sample: Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. Key weapons, such as *flame-throwers, were usually fired. Crew-served weapons, such as *machine guns, almost always were fired. And action would increase greatly if a nearby leader demanded that the soldier fire. But when left on their own, the great majority of individual combatants appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.More: Ardant du Picq's surveys of French officers in the 1860s and his observations about ancient battles (Battle Studies, 1946), John Keegan and Richard Holmes' numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout history (Soldiers, 1985), Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War (Acts of War, 1985), Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low firing rate among Napoleonic and American *Civil War regiments (Battle Tactics of the American Civil War, 1989), the British army's laser reenactments of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations, all confirm Marshall's fundamental conclusion that human beings are not, by nature, killers. Indeed, from a psychological perspective, the history of warfare can be viewed as a series of successively more effective tactical and mechanical mechanisms to enable or force combatants to overcome their resistance to killing other human beings, even when defined as the enemy.</blockquote>

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