Curious paradox. We think we are violent but we are not. Since at least the civil war folks have been baffled. I remember reading about a Civil War General who could not understand how his men could “miss” so many shots. He put up a sheet and had the entire regiment fire at it and there were 500 holes in the sheet but when that regiment fired at the enemy only a handful of them dropped.
Fact is, we AREN’T killers. Even soldiers have to be TRAINED to kill. Only sociopaths can kill without blinking. The problem we have with violence, IMHO, is we abhor it, which is a good thing in a sense, but it turns us into victims. What we need to do is distinguish between the sociopaths and the rest of us. We let the sociopaths have a monopoly on violence. We would have LESS violence, ironically, if we “normal” folks learned to use violence appropriately (I.e. “More Guns, Less Crime”) but we just have “other things to do”.
I don’t know that I can accept that. The history of every civilization I’ve studied, from Egypt to Mongolia, is a history of war, conflict, and conquest. Even primitive tribes battled each other constantly. And a lot of that warfare was conducted up close, face to face. You looked your enemy in the eye and watched him die when you rammed a spear into his guts.
And then there was the oppression of one’s own fellow citizens, whether in the form of feudal tyranny or outright slavery. The Roman practice of decimation, the Terror of the French Revolution, the Holocaust, Attila, Genghis, the Shoguns ...
If man is not by nature murderous, it sure doesn’t seem to take much to make him so.
What you are seeing is a product of Christian civilization, not human nature.
Man by nature has no problem killing other humans.