I woke this morning expecting to read reviews of the newest Batman movie. My 16-year-old son had been counting the days to the premier and was in attendance last night. I had seen that Tyler Segan, our local hockey star, had put out word that he was looking for a date and had gotten hundreds of responses. I was actually thinking about Heath Ledger, who is perhaps my favorite actor of all time for his roles in Brokeback Mountain and as the Joker just before dying of an overdose. The deep dark part of masculinity that Ledger showed in his Joker role seemed somehow connected to his tragic end only months later.
What I didn’t expect was to hear that a Colorado boy had sent tear gas into a packed theater before opening fire in a mass murder rampage. My wife informed me of this over my coffee as I worked furiously on a bunch of trivial fatherly duties.
Honestly, I tried to ignore what she had told me. I didn’t want to hear about another young, white male who had gone supernova, imploding in on himself to such an extent that his only solution was to kill himself and take as many people with him as he could in some cosmic scale cry for help gone horribly wrong. I kept coming back to Heath Ledger as the Joker in my mind’s eye.
Then I began to think about the list–the horrible long list–of similar incidents in the last decade of young people being massacred at the hands of an insane murderer. I tried to come up with one female involved in one of these mass killings. And I couldn’t think of a single one.
So I am left with the question of what is going on with our boys that they exclusively are prone to the strike to such powerful, insane, derranged, and hurtful forces that would cause some tiny fraction to come up with a plan to go into a school or a movie theater or an isolated island to kill as many innocent children as possible?
At its most basic core, the Good Men Project was founded to explore the answer to that question. Unfortunately, as last night demonstrates, we have an awful long way to go.
About Tom Matlack
So I am left with the question of what is going on with our boys that they exclusively are prone to the strike to such powerful, insane, derranged, and hurtful forces that would cause some tiny fraction to come up with a plan to go into a school or a movie theater or an isolated island to kid as many innocent children as possible?
Because boys are usually taught that they can’t look for other forms of help and support (and it doesn’t help that there really aren’t that many other forms of help and support) while at the same time being raised to embrace violence.
When boys are left with desperately few options and those few options are extreme is it really shocking that they take to those options?
It seems that when people do extremely violent things like that there is some sort of past ailment, disease, trauma, abuse, harassment etc… that came before it. Well guys have the “luxury” of being simultaneously told that there are no other forms of support to treat those things, we shouldn’t look for those other forms of support to treat those things, and violence is the answer to those things.
At its most basic core, the Good Men Project was founded to explore the answer to that question. Unfortunately, as last night demonstrates, we have an awful long way to go.
Perhaps but I think you folks have a good start. One thing that will really help is to show these boys that there are other, much less destructive ways, to deal with the pain and confusion.
“our boys”, its the kind of saying people use to describe our very brave soldiers who out their lives on the line to defend the freedom and democracy that so many of us take for granted.
they might be your boys, they certainly arent mine, and i’m sorry to have to tell you this the “good men project” isnt going to stop murderers murdering, rapist raping, its just not, despite your good intentions. wouldnt it be interested if the person who committed this atrocious crime was in fact only at liberty because of some liberal policy to stop banging up wrong-uns, you know the kind of policy you’d support, based on the prison rape blog post.
get your ducks in a row guys. they are tossers like this gunman out there that no amount of posturing, hugging or liberal minded do-gooders is going to solve.
We do have a long way to go but having these honest discussions helps us to address the problem. Boys are more often exposed to violence but not allowed a healthy outlet to express their anger. We have to be more proactive in supporting boys with mental and emotional pain to get the help they need.
Marie, I’m with you completely.
I will third that.
Marie,
I agree 100%. I don’t know what it is in society that says men can’t be victims or show pain (except for the allowed male expression of anger).
According to this US Preventive Services Task Force, there is a draft or medical screening of women (but not men) in interpersonal violence.
http://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf12/ipvelder/draftrecipvelder.htm
Conversation is great, but the powers-that-be just go on doing whatever the hell they want for their own reasons.
I think you should ask your 16 year old. Your own question supposes that he is exposed to the same forces that makes a small fraction of people do such horrible things.
In the mean time let’s conveniently blame video games. I say this with the heaviest sarcasm I can. The need to immediately react, rationalize, and explain away this incident by the 24 “news” cycle is actually going to do more harm. By the time enough time has passed to grieve, accept and then try to understand what was really happening, the new cycle will have tacked it on a boogey man like video games and moved on.
Marc I actually do talk to my 16 year-old about it a lot. He is one of the most honorable young men I have ever met. He sure didn’t get it from me since I was a total mess at his age. He goes to a Jesuit high school (over my objections since I am not Catholic) which has been a place where his character has blossomed. He really takes to heart the idea of service and becoming a man for others. He is set on going to West Point because he wants to serve his country. This caused my family, Quaker pacifists, heart failure. But I respect and love him for the young man he is becoming. And he and I both mourn the senseless loss of life. And yes, I was careful not to give any answers. Because I have none.
I guess what I meant to say was that I hoped you would share his thoughts here with us, beyond mourning, once enough time for reflection has passed.
Something tells me that it wasn’t 16 year old you that raised him.
This is a risky comment, because it is perhaps too early to theorize. For starters, I live in Colorado and I’m stunned. I also love the Batman movies for the same reasons lots of other boys and men love them. I get a rise out of violence in my entertainment, gun-related or otherwise, and I’m not sure yet what that says about me or my conception of masculinity.
At the risk of being too politically charged, I would like to offer this idea: gun/violence culture. Not guns and violence themselves; the world has had both for eons. I’m talking about the culture thereof, which I believe is different.
I work for a military-tech company. We design products that integrate into soldier systems and weaponry. One of our employees was touring his kid through the plant recently and the kid’s eyes went wide when he saw one of the assault rifles sitting on an engineer’s desk. We were conducting testing on a new design, and the kid was ecstatic. I didn’t know (and can’t remember) the model of the gun; he knew it cold and could tell me how many rounds per second it fired. I asked the kid how he knew so much about it (you know where this is going): Modern Warfare 7 (or whatever version we have now).
Again, I am not talking about the video games themselves, or the guns themselves. We have always had these with us. I’m merely talking about the culture that has arisen around that stuff that I think matters more. The culture celebrates weaponry and violence to a level never seen before, where the protagonist hero can rampage without any consequence — in fact, he is rewarded for doing so.
Just some scrambled thoughts on an emotionally cloudy Friday morning.
Rob one of the most important things we have tried to do here at GMP is to report on the realities of war, with no political agenda whatsoever, through the work of folks like Michael Kamber (Pulitzer Prize nominated photo journalist for the NYT): http://goodmenproject.com/author/michael-kamber/
If we live in a world where Navy Seals and video games rule supreme we miss the point of the real violence occurring on the ground all around us. I have had long conversations with my son about this and he has read all of Kamber’s work and many others. It doesn’t change his desire to serve but it does mean he has a realistic view of what that means.
Quick question: How old was this kid?
As a long-time video game fan (who happens to play the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games and other of its ilk), I have long advocated to anyone that will listen, that the ratings system on video games is quite possibly the most important one to follow. However, parents who grew up more in the Atari era (Atari was on it’s way out as I matured in my video-game-dom; I belong more to the Nintendo-era and beyond @ the ripe age of 31), have this conceptualization of video games as being “for kids,” so they will frequently allow their kids to play games that not only display violence but allow kids to interact with violence in a way that can be therapeutic for a teen (in my opinion). Without a moral foundation upon which to stand, it can create a fascination with the tools of the game without a care for the side-effects.
As men, I’m sure we’ve all experienced at least one moment of rage. Adrenalin-flowing, heart-pounding, cloudy-headed rage. And maybe we’ve punched a wall or kicked a chair -OR- allowed it to fuel our endeavors in a video game in a fashion where no one and nothing gets hurt IRL (in real-life). For those of us who are old enough to have seen photos and video footage of war, we can conceptualize the horrors and differences of real life and the things that happen in video games.
Chris, I’m 45 and have played video games all my life since space invaders came out when I was about 11. I have great memories of my parents taking me to the neighborhood pizza joint and playing as much as I could on the Asteroids coin-op machine.
As much as I enjoy videogames, I agree that there are a lot of sandbox games (like grand theft) and some shoot-em up games that are a little troubling.
First off, there is not moral component of having demerits or something else when you do something evil, and the graphics are becoming quite astoundingly real. They are becoming so real, that even I (an extremely docile guy) can’t help to wonder what it looks like if a bullet were to *really* split somebody’s head.
I think video games may be a factor, but as Mike and Tom have said I think it is about hopelessness for young men who are more and more often being told society has no role for them. Society also mocks and minimizes men’s pain or suffering. When you give somebody no hope and deny them traditional tools or safety net to work through their problems, you’re sitting on a powder keg.
Men are 80% of all suicides, yet that barely gets a blip in the mainstream media. If (as a society) we only gave a little bit of a shit when men self-harm and tried to correct it, then we would also catch those who may be on the verge of harming others.
I think hopelessness and helplessness are the drivers pushing this issue, but that possibly video games may be (one of the many) the component that gives these boys / young men the idea to direct their dysfunctionality outward rather than inward.
Maybe, just maybe….boys brains are wired differently…
Maybe in a world of zero tolerance for fighting kids cannot equate violence with actual pain and bloodshed- because they haven’t learned the bloody nose and busted knuckle lesson.
In a world where boys no longer carry pocket knives and everyone who carries a pocket knife has cut the shit out of themselves at least once blood is a red gel pack in a movie.
Maybe in a world of censored news coverage and little hunting kids have no idea what a .30 calibre bullet actually does.
In a world where everyone who participates gets a soccer trophy and all children are born with a brimful bucket of self esteem, it might just suck to realize there are a whole lot of people better suited to being doctors than you.
it may suck so badly for some kids that they would have done it anyway. Mayhem might have been something other than an alien concept for some kids, kids that were able to ride it out until their brains stop percolating…
And check it out, be proactive, gun violence in the US is down this decade under this President when guns are more accessible than they have been in the past 50′yrs.
A personal anecdote:
My two boys (4 and 7) are obsessed with guns. It concerns me and we talk about the power of guns, how dangerous they are, and talk about the victims in ways that we hope build empathy.
My parents were hippies, my dad and two generations back of men were COs (registered conscientious objectors to the war), they marched on Washington, did the sit-ins, the whole thing. My father is a true pacifist as is my grandfather.
So my brother is born in 1973 and he’s OBSESSED with guns, grenades, etc. My parents didn’t let him have toy guns or even pretend with guns made out of sticks. Finally after nonstop battles against the stick guns and pinecone grenades, my dad made him a wooden gun. When he was about 10 he got a BB gun only for use with Dad around.
He was obsessed with weapons until he was like 12. Then in his late teens he became a pacifist, worked for Amnesty International and the Campaign to Ban Landmines. Then he realized being a pacifist did nothing to stop world wide violence so he went to Columbia and is now an internationally famous expert on weapons trade. He’s even written books and tons of articles… He’s on CNN and NPR all the time! I bet he’s on TV today or this weekend.
He started small, wanting to talk about gun violence, then went bigger, to land mines, then he realized that the problems are systemic, so he went as big as you can go, so as to make the biggest amount of change.
So my two points: First, it takes both big (global, meta) and small (local, narrowly focused) solutions to make REAL change.
Second, an interest in guns is not that much different than an interest in Star Wars or Legos. Gadgets, machines, loud noises, social acceptance (affirmation) of your hobby, etc. Our boys (and some girls) are going to love guns. It takes good parents to teach them that the interest isn’t what’s bad, it’s the misuse. We must teach our children empathy above anything else in the world.
As much as I’m for some degree of gun-control, it was this young man who chose to kill these people. And I would be the reasons are many, and they are profound. We must approach this holistically, and with an eye on the intersection of gender, mental illness, and our culture of violence. No one answer is going to do it. We need to think BIG.
Like many of you, I learned about the tragedy over breakfast and first thought about the victims, then about my own children and grand children, then wondered about the gunman, and beginning to reflect on the larger issues. Its so good that there is a place like The Good Men Project where we can share our personal pain, our hopes for the future, and our commitment to help bring about a world where men’s pain is heard and addressed in such a way that a young man wouldn’t feel so cut off from his life and from others that he would take his rage out on innocent people. Thank you Tom for creating this forum and continuing to share your own hopes, dreams, and commitment for a better world for men, women, and children.
Thanks for being part of the community Jed.
We live in a society which believes the availability of weapons is more important than the availability of mental healthcare. These results are easy to predict and should therefore be unsurprising.
@Jake I’m going to steal this…..
Nuff said
The problem was, we used to have tons of available mental health ‘care’. The people who ran it – the psychiatrists and psychologists – used it as a slave-labor system. When they weren’t looking for pretty female patients to turn into sex slaves. Or simply beating them. Oh, and the government used it to lock political prisoners up without recourse.
The psychiatric profession did this to themselves. They couldn’t stop acting like mad scientists or the wardens for 70′s-era WIP films. So now we can’t force people to get treatment, and it’s hard to get people committed.
It’s still better now than it was then.
Bingo. And there are many layers to that statement. Brilliant.
I think there is a bit of revelation/irony that (sadly) these people were killed during a movie which sort of promotes this action. Furthermore, that the gunman (apparently) opened fire during a gun fight scene of the movie. Fiction turns to reality and it’s at that moment the true terror and horror is revealed to us, that which we usually casually observe with some popcorn and a soda. Is it not somewhat disturbing on its own how there type of actions are regularly viewed as “entertainment”?
As you say Tom, there are no answers. We have no idea the background to all this. In truth, we probably never will. Shocking as it is, these events are abberations. Think back to the 77 murdered by Andre Brevik in Norway. The act of a single person, devastaing the lives of hundreds. Thankfully we don’t wake up to these headlines every day. The work we need to do starts at home. My youngs sons are becoming young men. I can sit and worry about their place in the world, or I encourage them to learn and grow and express themselves.
It we choose to make tv, films and video games the scaepgoat in all this we miss the opportunity to connect with the issues that really matter to the young men in our lives.
Rannoch obviously that is the whole point of what we are aspiring to here at GMP.
Is it wrong to look into the role of the media in this horrific act especially given the context of this movie and video games like it?
These movies are symptomatic of young males current obsession with hopelessness, death, nihilism and anarchy. It might be impractical to place blame on the media but I think a lot of us are internalizing these angry dark hopeless, inhumane worlds and then we’re returning to a ” Real”world where we are less then nothing.
Let’s not forget that Andre Brevik trained his mind by playing countless rounds of Call of duty’s infamous airport massacre scene “No Russian”.
Lets consider for a moment how The Dark Knight series (all of 3 movies) focus almost exclusively on a charismatic nihilistic killer determined to prove that there is no morality, that life is meaningless and that anarchy is the one true justice.
What I’m left wondering is that if it’s all too possible to immerse yourself into these profoundly dark worlds and not have a traumatic disassociation with reality?
Either way I see nothing wrong with verbally calling hollywood to the carpet on this issue or the gun nuts. We can’t put out a message of being Good Men if we don’t vocally challenge the the toxic concepts that are already out there.
I completely agree that the work starts at home. Where is the parental involvement? People are talking about the violent video games and movies – a lot of parents are buying the games and driving them to the theater, I’d wager.
I’d also be *really* curious about these shooters’ relationships with their male parent or guardian. Is there one? Do they communicate? Are these “men” passing down positive advice and values? Are they guiding them toward different (and more acceptable) outlets for frustration, anger, etc?
In America, violence and killing are entirely reasonable and appropriate ways to deal with people and problems.
I defy anybody to look at our law enforcement, our justice system, our foreign policy and our popular entertainment and tell me any different.
As opposed to where? Africa? the Middle East? South America? 17 people in dead in a movie theatre in Mexico is a delay for the 2nd showing.
“As opposed to”? No, just like Africa, the Middle East or South America: A culture of violence begets violence. I don’t know why Americans are so shocked at the notion.
What is even more baffling is to hear the gunman dropped out of medical school recently.
Why is that baffling? The sense of failure from something like that could easily push someone over the edge.
Maybe we ought to ask ourselves “what has changed since or parents’ time?” We never had these issues “back then.” Gun proliferated then. Even when I was in Jr High in the early 70s, I could bring a .22 rifle to school for after-school hunting. Kids brought BB guns in. One friend of mine brought in a Japanese War bring-back handgun for 8th-grade show-n-tell. No CBS, ABC and NBC camera crews ever showed up.
WHAT THE FARG HAS CHANGED???
People have changed, thus kids are materially different. Kids are raised no longer by Mom, but by nannies, daycares, relatives whom are NOT Mom. When they get older, MTV raises far too many kids.
Movies and TV use guns recklessly to an insane degree.
We send them to schools with idiots for teachers and admins who will ruin a child’s life for drawing a picture of a gun, a knife, a boob or a dick. We live in a world we allowed to be driven by fool’s hysteria!
For Shnik’s sake!!!! Save me from the fuktards who blame the hardware! But YOU know the gun lobby will NEVER look at behavioral issues. They only blame the hardware in their shallow and feeble attempts at “doing good,” or even worse…hating the 2nd ammendment and guns.
For the record, “we never had these problems back then” is factually untrue:
http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu/violence-in-schools/school-shootings.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#1960s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers
This is something that happens from time to time. I don’t think we can realistically address it by pretending it’s something new.
“This is something that happens from time to time. I don’t think we can realistically address it by pretending it’s something new.”
Yes, it does happen from time to time. My question is, what makes people think these killing rampages will stop just by making guns harder to get for everyone? Attacking gun owners does nothing to address the causes, all it does is (maybe) force them to change tools, perhaps to something like suicide bombs (which would be far more dangerous).
Another question I have, and I honestly don’t know the answer to this, but how often are these shooters actually using registered guns?
So many lives!
Yes, we should examine this case and previous cases (such as the ones you mentioned)….
What are the factors? The causes?
(1) Genetics? Is there something in their genes? Violent or psychotic or homicidal tendencies passed along in their DNA? Is something lurking in their family DNA? Do we all have violent tendencies that have perhaps served previous generations well during war or colonial times, but have now become too much to handle in our now genteel lives?
(2) Hormones? Biology or physiology? Louise Brizendine’s book, “The Female Brain”, makes a lot of interesting observations between the brains and functions and personalities of the sexes….Does the rush of testosterone/androgens at the onset of puberty transform sweet little boys into raging bulls? Is it all chemical overload? Does the surge of certain chemicals trigger the flood of neurotransmitters to certain parts of our brains making certain people less able to inhibit violent and murderous impulses?
(3) Environment/Home Life/ School Incubator: What did the guy with the AK see around him that made it seem okay to him to do this? Was he just modeling violent behavior of gun-toting friends and relatives …or bullies around him? Did he go to church? Did he not go to church? Did he go to church and then got violated and is now enraged and full of revenge?
(4) Psychiatric?Mental Illness? Antisocial Disorder? History of Conduct Disorder? Is he schizophrenic and hearing voices inside his head to kill? Was he on hallucinogens or other illicit substances?
(5) Has he exhibited bizarre or cruel behavior before? What do his former teachers and relatives say about him? What were the warning signs that something was wrong?
Oh dear…
(1)Genetics? No, if it was genetics this would have manifested more in previous generations. Evolution isn’t that fast.
(2)Hormones? See above, not to mention that arguments that gender is fundamentally biological doesn’t exactly allow for the possibility of women’s lib. After all, didn’t you know that women are genetically/hormonally unsuited to men’s roles such as intellectual discussion and decision-making etc.
(3)Environment?Yep. This is the only possible reason that this kind of occurance could spring up over the course of a generation. This doesn’t excuse painting church as some kind of psycopath factory though.
(4)Mental Illness? Doesn’t explain why mostly men are doing it. Doesn’t explain why it didn’t tend to happen 50 years ago.
(5)Previous behaviour? Symptoms aren’t causes.
Peter,
I’m sorry, but mental illness absolutely CAN explain why men mostly do the shooting: depending on the study men are somewhere between three and ten times more likely than women to develop mental illness in the first place.
This is most likely the best explanation as school shootings are hardly anything new (see Noah’s comment with links up thread, school shootings date to the 1960s, some possibly older). Because we see this behavior in kids today, as well as kids from previous generations, it is actually difficult to blame the environment: it has changed so much yet the behavior remains.
“it is actually difficult to blame the environment: it has changed so much yet the behavior remains.”
Its to general, we need some specifics. What do thise people have in common? what connects them? what happen in their life? is there some similarity? point of convergence? were they raped? bullied or what? threaten as outcasts maybe, if yes why? what was the episode in their life that made them go kaboom? can we identify this, then we already have half of the solution.
@Mike: Ok, but I would still expect between 1 in 4 and 1 in 11 shooters to be female in that case. I’m not excluding mental health as a factor (someone who kills that many innocent people is, defacto, mentally unwell) what I’m saying is that it doesn’t fully explaing why this seems to be a man only thing.
@Ken: All very good questions.
Peter,
First there have been female shooters, Brenda Spencer and Laurie Dann both come to mind. This means that if ratios of mental illness really are something like 1:10, then mental illness could potentially explain the entire phenomenon.
Second, on virtually all standardized measurements, men show greater variance than women, and this has always been the case. Men are more likely to be successful, but also more likely to be imprisoned. More likely to be the top student, but also more likely to fail out, etc. There is no reason to think this is not just te tail-end of the bell curve manifesting itself, with men responsible for more extreme acts of violence as a result.
“More likely to be the top student, but also more likely to fail out, etc”
This may have been the case, but I would argue it is not anymore. The education system has been tweaked to raise girls scores up and bring boys scores down, resulting in girls doing as well as boys … at the top. But those boys who were at the bottom are even further bellow, and the boys who were in the middle are now at the bottom, with virtually all the girls above them and only a small handful of other boys even able to keep pace with the girls. This has to be demoralizing and damaging, to have your entire gender appear to be inferior scholastically… and these kids don’t realize it is because the education system is stacked against them. Add in all the other issues raised, and you have a serious problem
Mark,
I’m not saying that the education system is fair, but the fact remains that the variance for boys is still greater than the variance for girls. This is true across cultures and countries:
“Higher variability among boys is a salient feature of
reading and maths test performance across the world.
This difference in variance is higher in countries that have
higher levels of test score performance.”
From: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp288.pdf
The *mean* girl’s score has shifted, but this is about variance.
I’m fully aware of the variance, and if you do not understand how the mean shifting in favour of girls relates with that variance, then you allow the harm this all causes to boys. I’m not aware of the precise numbers, so I’ll use some chosen at random to demonstrate my point.. Lets say boys variance tends to fall between 35-115 (for a variance of 80 points) with the average at 75. Lets say girls tend to fall between 55-95 (for a variance of 40 points), again, with an average of 75. Girls have a much smaller variance, but still average the same. Boys can see they fall bellow girls, but also above them, with an average about the same as girls. Now, artificially shift all girls up 10 points and boys down 10 points, You maintain the same variance, boys now being 25-105 (still 80 points) and girls at 65-105 (still 40 points), but now girls average appears 20 points higher than boys average, and no the best boys can offer is no better than the best girls can offer, while the worst of boys are way bellow the worst of girls (almost at 1/3rd)… in fact, boys average is sitting at the worst of girls (65). Now, how can this artificially inflation, and the corresponding outcomes, NOT harm boys self esteem, confidence, etc? It’s because of this difference in variation that artificially inflating one can dramatically harm the other.
My point was, due to this artificial inflation, the top boys and girls are appearing much much closer, and the bottom is growing much much larger. I don’t think it is so easy to say the boys are still more likely to be at the top, now that boys have been torn down and girls propped up to balance the top scorers. And to clarify, I’m talking school marks, AKA students, not actual IQ’s
” it is actually difficult to blame the environment: it has changed so much yet the behavior remains.”
Has it really? for men at least? Because the while we have more technology and gadgets, and women’s roles have changed considerably, men still seem to be restricted as much or more by their environment as they ever were.
@ Lela
“(2) Hormones? Biology or physiology?”
When I was younger, I was on the juice. I know a bunch of other guys who used different “dietary supplements”. There were days that I was just pissed off. Not at anything or anyone in particular, but just wanted to fight. A friend of mine told me that when he was on the stuff, he always wanted to either fight or f*ck. I didn’t feel the cold. I’d go out in the dead of winter with a jacket on and didn’t feel a thing. I could also absorb being hit better and didn’t feel pain as acutely.
I had a friend, who was just a giant teddy bear, using steroids. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, but had flashes of anger. He threw a 6′ 200 something pound guy across the locker room one time for no reason. None of that would explain a mass shooting, though. We wanted to physically beat someone. To hit and to some extent even get hit, a gun would not have satisfied that. I think the Chris Benoit incident had something to do with “roid rage”.
Because there are still forces out there that tell a man that his problems are his own and nobody cares what they are, leaving the ones who need lots of help to possibly conclude “no one cares about my life therefore i care little about theirs.” Or that they shouldn’t burden others with their problems because men are disposable. The inherent societal support for women, which sometimes gets on women’s nerves (“this is how you do this” type of stuff), is not extended to all people, leaving some men to self medicate or brood in dark places. In the end for the few with tremendous problems, mental or emotional, there may only seem to be only two choices left; take myself out of the game, suicide, or take others out to try to break the system.
We need to start recognizing the trouble signs for boys and the potential causes of these signs by asking the right questions so that of the thousands if not millions of men with problems, the fraction of a percent that commit these acts can find another path or are given the refuge and sheltering that they require for our good and theirs. This is a massively complex issue so lets start with the easy stuff, put your feelings aside and when you see trouble signs in anyone don’t quickly jump to anger/defensiveness/punishment instead ask “what lead them to this,” “what are they feeling,” “why did they feel this way,” and maybe we can move along the paths to a cure for what is deeply ailing people today.
Mass incidents are usually perpetrated by the mentally disturbed and it is near impossible to pinpoint potential perpetrators, but we shouldn’t forget that with the current homicide rate there are ~40 people a day murdered in the US. If we could stop just one of these by giving people’s problems the respect they deserve and the help to overcome them, it would be a major victory for all of us and another step to move forward from.
Excerpt:
“I didn’t want to hear about another young, white male who had gone supernova, imploding in on himself to such an extent that his only solution was to kill himself and take as many people with him”
The DC sniper was black and I believe the Virginia Tech shooter was asian.
I have always found that ‘anger’ and ‘sadness’ are two different expressions of the same emotion, and that it’s very easy to turn one into the other. However, I think that boys are more likely to be told that crying and sadness denotes weakness. Rather, I think that girls are more likely to be encouraged to express the emotion as sadness, and boys as anger. I personally find that expressing it as anger is usually more productive and less harmful. However, when the emotion is extreme, sadness manifests itself as self-harm, while anger is more easily manifested as harm to others. I won’t say that one method is better than the other, but I think that’s why men are more likely than women are to be the ones to go on wild killings.
I would argue that men aren’t allowed to express their anger as much as society pretends. Male anger is viewed as a no no.
Why is it that these kinds of mass shootings have only happened in the last thirty years or so? Can anyone think of a similar incident prior to 1970?
Non-soldiers didn’t use to have access to automatic weapons. Without the ability to fire many shots very quickly, you can’t have mass killing.
And I’d like to know what valid reason any civilian has for owning a machine gun. Hunting? You use a rifle. Self-defense? A handgun. Why is anyone allowed to buy weapons that can kill this many people??
Agree wholeheartedly. I am fine with the right to bear arms. But I see no reason for a civilian to have military-grade weapons with the potential to do so much harm. My brother-in-law is a bit of a gun nut. I’m not sure of his entire arsenal but I know he does have an AK-47. I mean, if you like guns and collect them, that’s fine… but keep them locked and stored on display or something. For fuck’s sake don’t USE them.
That’s just my personal opinion, by the way. I don’t know enough about gun control laws or anything to say it “should be” one way or another. Just that the thought of ordinary civilians having these kinds of weapons is disturbing to me.
A militia not being able to arm themselves with military weaponry is a pretty useless militia.
Not true.
Fully automatic weapons have been strictly controlled in the US since 1934. Semiautomatic weapons have been available since the early 1900′s, so I don’t believe availability of certain kinds of guns is the cause of the increase in mass shootings in the last 30-40 years.
Is this directed at Tom, or people in general or towards some1 else?
John D: Was that comment a reply to mine above?
The first part is directed at Tom (I also forgot to mention Amy Bishop who in 2010 shot and killed 3 and wounded 3) as he couldn’t recall any women being involved in any mass shootings in the last decade.
The second part is directed at several people who said that these things never happened before.
I think you are too steeped in your own task to shed some objective light on this topic. “Our boys” are not doing this. A better question would be to ask what is the tipping point of people going mad and committing atrocities and how can we prevent it? Creating a gender divide obfuscates the topic. There have been notorious mothers who have killed all their children. Men commit more violent crimes because we live in a patriarchy, not because they are men. And most people in society don’t come anywhere near committing crimes like this. These cases represent the darkest of humanity but don’t speak at all to the masses. Of course it is tragic and it’s always sensationalized when many people die in one place, but rogue killers are not as much a threat to humanity as are many other things that we accept on a daily basis.
I’ve been saying for years that the pattern of mass shootings, and violent crime in general, in constantly overlooked. The strong pattern that it is boys and men should incite us all to interrogate what it means to be a man, and contemporary expectations of masculinity. Surely, media-driven masculinity and the social pressure to be manly has something to do with it. That much should be obvious, yet we constantly explain such shootings as the behaviour of thugs or people who have gone mad or have ‘snapped.’ (I can only think of one open-fire incident where a girl or woman was the perpetrator. It happened in San Diego in 1979 and inspired the Boomtown Rats’ song, I Don’t Like Mondays.)
Until we can name the problem as masculinity as it is socially practiced, expected, and rewarded, we won’t get very far in addressing violence crime, including mass shootings.
Wow. What a bunch of self loathing man hate!
And black people are more violent too rigghtt??? Nope .Who gets arrested. What’s deemed a crime. Who goes to jail and who gets put on TV is all political. My grandmother was a foster kid for tens of abused kids. None of these singe moms ever spent a day in jail
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