Trying to Write after the Newtown Massacre

I have two pieces of writing to finish today, a chapbook manuscript that I want to submit to a contest and a blog post about Alyssa Royse’s in-so-many-ways-shameful “Nice Guys Commit Rape Too” essay on The Good Men Project that life and end-of-semester work kept interrupting, but I cannot bring myself even to look at them. It’s the day after Adam Lanza murdered his mother and twenty-five other people, twenty of them children, and then killed himself and all I’m feeling right now is despair, and horror and shame and grief, and anger and frustration and then more anger and then anxiety and fear. And all those feelings just keep turning around and around and around in my head and in my gut. My wife and I are both teachers. She is teaching pre-K this year; I teach college. In addition to the way in which any parent would identify with the parents of the children Lanza killed–we have one son–the way any brother, sister, husband, wife, aunt, uncle, friend, neighbor must be identifying with all those whose lives have been torn open by the bullets Lanza used to kill twenty children, six adults, and himself, in addition to that, it’s hard not to think what if someone like Lanza chose to target my wife’s school or my campus.

The State University of New York (SUNY), the college system I work for, has an alert system in place (as do university’s throughout the nation) so that if there ever is a shooter on campus, or some other dangerous and lethal situation, I will receive, as will my colleagues and my students, messages on our cell phones telling us what’s going on and what we should do. Emergency procedures are posted in every classroom. Whether and how much these measures will help if a shooter ever comes to my campus, I don’t know–and I hope I never have to find out–but it is good that the people responsible for public safety at my school are being as clear-eyed as possible about these things.

I don’t know if the New York City Department of Education, for which my wife works, has a similar system in place for its employees and students, or if her school has taken any measures on its own to do what it can to protect itself in the event an Adam Lanza ever walks through its doors; but I am very aware that, demographically at least, someone like that is far more likely to appear in the suburb where I work than in the inner city neighborhood where my wife does. In a paper called “Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings,” authors Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel point out that since 1982, the overwhelming majority the “rampage school shootings” that have taken place in rural or suburban United States have involved a “white boy (or boys) [who] brings semi-automatic rifles or assault weapons to school and opens fire seemingly at random.” The paper, which attempts to answer the question of why this is the case, is worth reading, as is “Connecticut Shooting, White Males, and Mass Murder” by William Hamby, who summarizes Kalish and Kimmel’s conclusions: “It’s called ‘aggrieved entitlement.’ According to the authors, it is ‘a gendered emotion, a fusion of…humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back. And its gender is masculine.'”

I am quoting Hamby’s article, and not the Kalish and Kimmel paper itself, because as far as I can remember, Hamby is the first journalist to introduce into a mainstream discussion of incidents like the Newtown massacre the possibility that masculinity and manhood might have something to do with why they happen and it’s that fact that I want to highlight, not Kalish and Kimmel’s analysis. I’m not the first person to have noticed the fact that killers like Lanza are overwhelmingly men and that this fact is the elephant in the room no one seems willing to talk about. Rob Okun, editor and publisher of Voice Male magazine has also written about it (here as well), and the very fact that Kalish and Kimmel wrote their paper suggests that others too have been noticing the lack of this discussion. What I particularly liked about Hamby’s article, however, is the way he connected the idea of men’s aggrieved entitlement as expressed in the shootings Kimmel and Kalish examine to the “less brutal but equally mind-numbing examples [that we all witnessed during the 2012 election season] of [Republican] white men going mad because they are losing their power.” Hamby doesn’t mention specific instances, but Donald Trump’s “birther obsession” with President Obama comes to mind, as do all the ridiculous pronouncements Republican men, like Todd Aiken, Rick Santorum, and Richard Mourdock made about rape.

Rape. Another kind of violence that is committed almost entirely by men and, outside of the prison system, overwhelmingly against women. One of the most shameful things, for example, about the way Todd Aiken tried to distinguish between “legitimate rape” and whatever other kind of rape he obviously thought existed–in addition to his obvious misogyny–is the way this distinction removes manhood and masculinity from the discussion. This too is the problem with Alyssa Royse’s “nice guys” essay, though I am sure she would like to think she disagrees entirely with the likes of Aiken, Santorum, and Mourdock. In blaming “society” for the mixed sexual messages that, in her estimation, make rape pretty much inevitable, she also avoids dealing with the question of a rapist’s gender, and the logic of that avoidance is no different than the logic which focuses exclusively on the need for better gun control laws or better mental health services or better school security procedures in cases like the Newtown massacre: Men may do these things, but the fact that they are men has nothing to do with it. They are simply people whom society has, in one way or another, failed.

While my initial impulse is to agree with Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel’s analysis of rampage shootings and with the way William Hamby brings that analysis to bear on other aspects of our society, I don’t know that they are right in any objective sense of that term. More to the point, even if they are right, I don’t think that fact will make it any easier to figure out what to do, except perhaps make sure that we are directing our efforts in the right direction. What I know now is that I’m glad William Hamby has brought the discussion of Adam Lanza’s gender a little bit further towards the center of the spotlight, because along with the need for better gun control and better mental health services (which we absolutely do need), if we are not also talking about how being a man might have contributed to Adam Lanza’s becoming the person who killed his mother in her own home and then walked into the school where she taught to kill twenty five other people, twenty of them children, and then himself, we are never going to find a solution.

This entry posted in Men and masculinity. Bookmark the permalink. 

45 Responses to Trying to Write after the Newtown Massacre

  1. 1
    Eva says:

    Thank you. With all the discussion I’ve come across since yesterday afternoon I hadn’t seen anything about this, so I linked to your post just now so it could be added to the discussion.

  2. Pingback: a few inadequate thoughts on recent tragedies « Clare Forstie

  3. 2
    TheSameDog says:

    As far as I can discern from common usage, there are two meanings of the word “entitlement”:

    1) The fact of being legitimately entitled to sth.
    2) Factually incorrect and morally wrong belief in being entitled to sth.

    I seriously hope Kalish, Kimmel and Hamby use the term in its first meaning, because the “sth.” here is basic respect as a human being.

    [distilled by RJN from Royse’s essay]:

    Men may do these things, but the fact that they are men has nothing to do with it. They are simply people whom society has, in one way or another, failed.

    Exactly how one gets failed by society has a lot to do with one’s gender. To be specific – men, and men only, are failed by society through the latter’s refusal to grant them a basic minimum of respect that doesn’t have to be hard-earned. The exact criteria used to decide whether a man deserves basic respect as a human being can of course be separately problematic.

  4. 3
    nikki says:

    Thank you for writing this, and pointing out what badly needs to be acknowledged.

    Exactly how one gets failed by society has a lot to do with one’s gender. To be specific – men, and men only, are failed by society through the latter’s refusal to grant them a basic minimum of respect that doesn’t have to be hard-earned.

    It depends on what exactly is meant by the word “failed”…seems this has more to do with entitlement and privilege (which allows for blindness towards entitlement) as well as being aggrieved about the loss of absolute power than anything else. Society has certainly failed black and brown men living in the city with huge inequalities in economic and social justice, however these mass shooters, white men, from middle class backgrounds, educated have none of these obstacles. Society “lifts up” white men, at the expense of women, minorities, everyone else. Certainly all men are seeped in a culture of violence, yet you don’t see those whom have had to deal with these social and economic injustices all their lives forming MRA and other thinly veiled hate groups…this is almost exclusively a phenomena among white men.

    William Hamby brought up the right wing “freak out” after Romney’s loss this election…like children throwing a tantrum because they didn’t get their way. If a bunch of journalist, pundits, and church going family men alike can become unhinged over a “secret muslim” 1st black president, “sluts” wanting reproductive rights, and “moocher immigrants”, it’s not hard to see where this sort of “unhinging” could go terribly wrong…it’s just infuriating to me that the media and almost everyone else is scapegoating mental illness…yet I still haven’t seen a statement from anyone of any expertise regarding any diagnosis or actual “red flags” that this person was in fact mentally ill. The best I saw was a non-expert “computer security” guy for the district who had also been a computer club adviser talking about how the kid was “shy” and “socially awkward” (and isn’t practically every teenager) and then his brother who lives miles away and hadn’t seen him for years speculated “in retrospect” that he probably had a personality disorder (and, don’t a lot of people complain about how their families are “dysfunctional” or “all messed up”). Everyone else they quoted seemed to say the same thing, he was kinda “nerdy”, “socially awkward” but “smart”. Well, simply being “shy”, “nerdy”, or “socially awkward” does not mean a person is “mentally ill”. Hamby very astutely pointed out, if this person had been muslim or black, the entire conversation today would be completely different, no one would probably even mention mental illness.

    I’m a bit at a loss as to how hardly anyone is pointing out the common connection between all these mass shooters.

    Ironically, or not so ironically…the MRA-ish comments in reply to Hamby’s article (from mostly white males) seem to confirm the very thing he points out.

  5. 4
    LadyProf says:

    The right to possess an automatic rifle makes no sense in the United States. In this country, rights are negative. Citizens have a right of self-defense, but a less potent weapon suffices to fend off an attacker. But throw aggrieved entitlement into the mix, and this peculiar right makes more sense.

    It’s about privileging the privileged. If women or minority men were inflicting this much harm on innocent people, whatever weapons they favored would be taken from them so fast our heads would spin. And it would sound utterly perverse to say anyone’s rights were trammeled.

  6. 5
    Robert says:

    There is no right to possess an automatic weapon. I’d like one; I can’t afford it; sucks to be me.

    Rather, as with other negative rights, the state is forbidden to prevent me from having it. Often our rights, particularly bill-of-rights type rights, are phrased positively in the vernacular (“freedom of religion”) but are enforced and litigated (and usually legislated) in the negative (“Congress shall make no law…”)

    Your last paragraph should probably be quietly withdrawn or rewritten. Minority men ARE the people committing the sizable majority of gun (and other) violence per capita; “we” are not disarming “them” because minority men, like everyone else, have the right to keep and bear arms.

  7. 6
    TheSameDog says:

    It depends on what exactly is meant by the word “failed”

    I did specify what I meant by that word.

    …seems this has more to do with entitlement and privilege (which allows for blindness towards entitlement) as well as being aggrieved about the loss of absolute power than anything else.

    You are apparently using the word “entitlement” in the second meaning.

    Society has certainly failed black and brown men living in the city with huge inequalities in economic and social justice, however these mass shooters, white men, from middle class backgrounds, educated have none of these obstacles.

    But then there are individuals who, for one reason or another, don’t have access to benefits that usually come with membership in some of these demographics. This is often the case with people whose atypical wiring prevents them from conducting social interactions that are operationally necessary to claim the benefits. Combine this with denial (i.e. externalizing the cause of failures in social interactions – a likely complication in those with functioning but undiagnosed autism) , unimpaired ability to develop a sense of grievance, and that development running unchecked due to individual’s lack of access to external emotional co-processing. The bomb is ready.

    Certainly the “undiagnosed autism” part is where the society fails these particular individuals. But tell this to a journalist who will hear “… autism … autism … autism …”, and you get the scapegoating of mental illness you’re rightly complaining about.

  8. 7
    Sebastian says:

    As a black male who did not grow up in the United States, I am utterly disgusted by the way US liberals bring race into discussions which have nothing to with it. In the same ways that racist assholes on the right imply that we are inferior, the hand wringing assholes on the left imply we are somehow superior, morally or otherwise. We aren’t. We’re more rather than less, the same.

    On this board, I have seen people claim repeatedly, and incorrectly, that ‘most serial killers are white’, ‘minority men or women do not inflict harm on innocent people’, ‘all evil comes from the whites’, ‘my black kid’s life will be ended by an evil white man’. I keep correcting them, other people keep correcting them, and the same people keep posting and re-posting the shame bullshit. Fuck you, racist assholes! If the moderators had any decency, they would come down on those racists as hard as they come on the other racists who keep bringing out the other falsehoods. You know, the ones about how we can never be the equal of whites, because we just don’t have it in our something or other. But at the end of the day, they’re all racists who make themselves feel better by describing people of different skin color as fundamentally different.

    Poor people commit crimes, abused people lash out, mentally ill people commit monstrosities, people who have been made to feel powerless snap out. Race has very little to do with it, and a little basic research, especially of events outside of the Unites States will show you this. And yes, many, if not most of these are men. This much is true, our gender is for one reason or another the one that reaches the last refuge of the incompetent at the drop of a hat.

    Why men commit these monstrosities is a good subject to investigate, and it is what Mr Newman started. Try to make it a ‘why white men commit monstrosities’ discussion, and here comes Robert to tell you how, actually, it’s black men who are the murderers. Nice derail, nikki!

    And on a completely separate topic, the availability of automatic weapons (which this particular shooter did not use) has little to do with the frequency of this kind of attacks. In Switzerland, most males are required by law to keep an STGW 90 (fully automatic assault rifle) in their residence. In China, being caught with an illegal firearm will make sure you’ll never see the light of the day again. And guess what? In both Suisse and China, this kind of attacks happen. A lot less, per capita, that in the US, but the perpetrators are very similar, in gender, social status, and even their history. Well, not their race, obviously, but as I said above, that’s racist bullshit.

    Of course, the real difference is that the last two attacks in China had wounded in the dozens, but only a few deaths. Outside of China, the attacks with firearms often result in dozens of deaths. Whether that’s a good enough reason to keep guns out of the populace’s hands, is very touchy subject in the US. Personally, I cannot understand why anyone would want to own an assault rifle in a first world country, but then, my wife did not understand why anyone would own a $65,000 car.

  9. 8
    Sebastian says:

    Here’s an essay which I believe has more insight about the problem that all of the politicians who’ve been foaming at the mouth the last few days.

  10. 9
    RonF says:

    It always fascinates me that inevitably someone will comment after one of these tragedies that automatic weapons should be illegal in the U.S. The fact is that they already are, and that none of these things have been committed with automatic weapons.

    It’s a tragedy, it’s awful, it’s horrible. There’s no clear answer. It’s my understanding that the young man had a history of mental health issues. Certainly steps should have been taken to keep him from coming into possession of guns. Gun safes are available at WalMart, Sam’s Club and plenty of other stores.

    It makes you wonder – why this, why now? Semi-automatic handguns, shotguns and rifles have been sold, owned and used by Americans for decades. It’s not simply their availability that has caused this kind of thing to increase. What has changed? I think part of it is the publicity that the killer gets. I don’t blame the media – it’s natural that when such a thing happens it will get media attention. But what has changed, I think, is the demand for fame, no matter of what kind. Look at “reality” shows. People get on those things and absolutely humiliate themselves – but they become famous, and that makes it all worth it somehow. Is what we have here people who are now willing to kill others and die just to become famous?

    The largest school killing in U.S. history destroyed 46 lives. It was committed in 1927 by a school janitor who set off bombs in the school he worked in. If someone wants to do this they will find a way. What we need to do is to understand why they want to, and how to stop that desire.

  11. 10
    Robert says:

    “This kind of thing” hasn’t increased. Possibly, public perception and news coverage of it has.

  12. 11
    Elusis says:

    “This kind of thing” hasn’t increased. Possibly, public perception and news coverage of it has.

    “Of the 12 deadliest shootings in U.S. history, six have taken place since 2007…. For much of the 20th century there were, on average, a handful of mass killings per decade. But that number spiked in 1980, and kept rising thereafter. In the United States, there have now been at least 62 mass shootings in the past three decades, with 24 in the last seven years alone. This has happened even as the nation’s overall violent crime and homicide rates have been dropping.”

    Source.

  13. 12
    gjdj says:

    As an MRA, I find your balanced perspective on this issue refreshing. Specifically, you aren’t too quick to assume that the Kimmel/Kalish hypothesis is right.

    Undoubtedly there is something to the fact that most school shootings are committed by males and not females. Amy Bishop is an exception.

    I doubt that being white has much to do with it. From Kimmel’s own 2003 paper, 26 of 28 school shootings were committed by whites from 1982-2002.

    Assuming that 80% of the population was white during this period, we’d expect 22.4 of the schootings to be committed by whites. It was 26 – which is higher than expected, but hardly conclusive. If the race was selected randomly, you’d expect 26 or more to be white 6.1% of the time. So it doesn’t even seem to be statistically significant. In recent years, we’ve seen One Goh, Seung Hui-Cho, and Kimveer Gill commit school attacks, so I doubt the more recent data is any more favorable to Kimmel/Kalish’s hypothesis.

  14. 13
    Robert says:

    While normally I yield to no one in believing that blog articles written by journalists are the definitive word on social science trends, criminologists – probably because they were unloved as children – continue to insist that there has been no rise in mass killings.

  15. 14
    Robert says:

    Ah, I see the source of the confusion. Mother Jones, curse your chic progressive glossiness. Their story is rubbish. Just as one example, they talk about ’62 mass murders’ in the last 30 something years. That’s about 10% of the actual total; it’s averaged ~2o per year, perhaps 100 people or so each year.

    MJ essentially cherrypicked a handful of classes of shooting and invented a trend line out of whole cloth. Their dataset is worthless and can support no conclusions, other than “the editors of MJ like to make map plots.”

  16. 15
    RonF says:

    From 11/29 to 12/8 I was in Poland. Business was the original impetus, but my company’s pretty flexible about mixing business and pleasure as long as you pay for your pleasure yourself, so my wife, who is 1/2 Polish, came with and we spent a few extra days there touring Warsaw, Kracow and the village way, way in the south of Poland called Bialka Tatrzanska that her grandfather emigrated from. Stayed with some distant relatives (who could not possibly have been more hospitable), lit a candle on her great-grandfather’s grave and did a whole lot of things I could fill a post with. Suffice to say in this context it was the trip of a lifetime for both of us but especially for my wife.

    One of the things I brought back with me was a vicious cold that finally drove me to the doctor today, specifically to an “Immediate Care” clinic that I’ve never set foot in in my life and only went to because a) they’re on my insurance plan and b) they’re closest of all the places that satisfy a). For those of you who don’t believe in coincidences, when I told the doctor the information in the 1st paragraph his next words were “I was born in Bialka!”

    So, anyway, while I’m waiting to see the doctor, I did something I’ve never done before in my life. I watched “The View”. Of course, they were talking about the shootings, and they had a couple of experts on. One was a criminologist and one was a forensic psychiatrist. I have absolutely no idea of what their credentials were. But there were a couple of common themes. One was that the View women kept saying that the killer had used automatic weapons, which is of course not true. The other is that the experts pointed out that weapons have been around for a long time and that this kind of thing isn’t a function of availability of guns. The forensic psychiatrist said that it’s pretty much always someone who has become alienated from society and blames other people for all his problems (and while often mentally ill is by no means always so). At some point they start to plan to do one of these things and may spend a year planning it before they execute their plan. He says they do it to punish people, and choose children (rather than, say, shooting up their workplace) because it inflicts maximum pain and gets maximum attention and publicity for the shooter and his grievances.

    During this talk they had shown pictures of the shooter. He referenced them to those very pictures and said that if we want these kinds of things to stop happening we should stop showing the shooter’s picture and stop publicizing their name. He pointed out that the Newtown police department has seized the shooter’s PC, found it loaded with journals and statements from the shooter about his motives – and have refused to release any of it, apparently on this very principle. This is something that the media could do that would take no legislative action at all.

  17. 16
    Charles S says:

    Robert,

    The only link you’ve given doesn’t support your claim of 20 mass shootings per year. “He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.” That criminologist also says that they rose between the 60’s and the 90’s (and that there was previous peak in the 20’s).

    2011 and 2012 have had a large number of mass shootings relative to the numbers in the 00’s.

  18. 18
    Sebastian says:

    That’s about 10% of the actual total; it’s averaged ~2o per year, perhaps 100 people or so each year.

    Robert, simple math (100 / 20) shows you that whoever used these numbers, considers a shooting with three-four victims a mass murder. This is stupid.

    By this standard, last week’s shooting 10 miles from my house qualifies. An armed home owner confronted three burglars, killed two and got killed by the third. I do not know about you, but I do not call this ‘mass murder’, and would not have called it so even if the owner had been the last one standing.

    For me, mass murder has to include the willing murder of strangers, and go beyond the specific individuals with whom the killer thinks he has an issue. So someone killing 5 family members, two drivers for their cars and a police officer during arrest is not a mass murder. Someone killing his lover and half a dozen of the customers in her store is mass murder.

    By this definition, 2012 has been a particularly bad year in the US, and both 2011 and 2012 have been very bad in the whole world.

    By the definition of the authors of the articles you are quoting, the overall decrease in gun homicides brings down the total death toll.

    As another example of why the second way of doing things is misleading, and to follow your example of bringing Eastern Europe into the discussion, on Saturday one of my Bulgarian friends was talking about organized crime assassinations in Bulgaria.

    I did not believe what he told us at the party, so we actually looked it up on the spot, and it seems to be true:

    Bulgaria has seen the assassinations of over a hundred people connected to organized crime, with practically NO collateral casualties, and NO arrests. Often, the body counts are over 5, sometimes over 10 (bodyguards). It was actually news when an assassination of a Bulgarian gangster outside of Bulgaria resulted in two civilians being wounded, and if you read the wiki entry, you cannot miss the ‘foreign amateurs’ vibe.

    Now, these are not mass murders. These are either contract killings, or extra judicial death squads, but they have NOTHING to do with people who attempt spread the pain to the world at large.

  19. 19
    Robert says:

    I will inform the FBI that their definition is stupid.

    Yes, the death toll is consistently and persistently down, which to me is the most important thing. More “big spree” murders (if there is such a trend: some journalists say there is, the criminology discipline says there isn’t, and a guy on the Internet says the definition is stupid) taking place in the context of less total murders, would be an improvement, albeit a grisly one.

  20. 20
    Sebastian says:

    I doubt the FBI will change their definition, but that does not mean that I think it’s any less stupid. Of course, as you pointed it out, this hardly matters to the FBI.

    What does matter to this discussion is that it is quite clear that when people discuss the Newtown massacre, and similar killings, they do not intend to discuss a gang wiping another, an armored car robbery, a home owner killing a group of teenagers burglarizing his house, someone killing four campers for their quads, etc… All these things happened in my part of SoCal in the last two years, and I do not call them mass murder. You do. I do not think they are relevant to this discussion. Do you?

  21. 21
    Charles S says:

    MJ and the criminologist you cited both gave stats for a recognizable category. That you want to pretend that that category isn’t a meaningful one because it isn’t an FBI defined category is pathetic and ridiculous.

    Speaking as a mod, if you aren’t interested in participating in the discussion in a non-derailing manner, please stop participating in it.

  22. I’ve been following the comments here on and off, but this is the first moment I’m at a computer where I can respond, and I just want to observe that this discussion has veered into a very comfortable, and in so many ways stereotypically male, discussion of statistics rather than the question of the shooter’s gender. I don’t really have very much else to say about this right now except to observe it.

  23. 23
    Eva says:

    Thank you for your observation Richard. Is anyone interested in getting back on topic, sans statistics?

  24. Here’s a brief, relevant bibliography compiled by someone from a list I’m on:

    Buchanan, C., V. Farr, M. Flood, and J. Galeria. (2005). Women, Men, and Gun Violence: Options for action. In Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. (eds.) Missing Pieces: Directions for reducing gun violence through the UN process on small arms control. Geneva: Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (pp. 68-78).

    Kellner, Douglas. (2008). Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre. Paradigm.

    Kimmel, Michael S. (2008). Profiling School Shooters and Shooters’ Schools: The Cultural Contexts of Aggrieved Entitlement and Restorative Masculinity. Pp X-X in There’s a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech, edited by Ben Agger and Timothy Luke. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

    Klein, Jessie, and Lynn S. Chancer. (2000). Masculinity Matters: The Omission of Gender from High-Profile School Violence Cases. Pp. 129-162 in Smoke and Mirrors: The Hidden Context of Violence in Schools and Society, edited by Stephanie Urso Spina. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield.

    Lizotte, Alan and David Sheppard. (2001). Gun Use by Male Juveniles: Research and Prevention. Juvenile Justice Bulletin. Washington, DC: US Department of Justice, Office of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

    Myrttinen, H. (2003). Disarming Masculinities. Disarmament Forum, 4: 37-46.
    Tonso, K. L. (2009). Violent Masculinities as Tropes for School Shooters: The Montreal Massacre, the Columbine Attack, and Rethinking Schools. American Behavioral Scientist, 52(9): 1266-1285.

    Widmer, M. (with G. Barker. and C. Buchanan). (2006). Hitting the Target: Men and Guns. Revcon Policy Brief, June.

  25. 25
    Emily says:

    I don’t know a whole lot about guns, but I understand why people who don’t know much about guns would be referring to guns that shoot 5 bullets per second as “automatic.” I can’t imagine why anyone would need to shoot 5 bullets/second for sport and I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly pull a trigger 5 times in a second. I don’t know the difference between “automatic” and “semiautomatic” but if semiautomatic means 5 bullets/second, no one outside the military should need those either.

  26. 26
    RonF says:

    Well, then, perhaps people who don’t know much about guns shouldn’t talk much about what kind of gun is what until they learn something about guns. “Automatic” and “semi-automatic” are specific terms that refer to how the mechanism of how the gun works and are used in legislation that makes the possession of some guns legal and of others illegal. They aren’t terms to be thrown around in ignorance and whose definitions are subject to opinion just because the person speaking wants to make an emotional impact on the listener.

    And why do I make a point of this? Because it’s screwing up the dialog. People who want to put limitations on 2nd Amendment civil rights are trying to convince people who are in favor of removing such limitations that what they are doing is a fair balancing of civil rights vs. public safety. But when people who are trying to create such limitations exhibit ignorance about guns it makes them sound as if they are deliberately spreading lies in order to override facts with emotion – that they are more interested in eliminating guns than in having an honest debate. It damages the credibility of both your statements and your motives. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect people to know what they’re talking about when they talk (see, for example, how many times I and others have been told to “read up on Feminism 101” when we’ve been in a discussion).

  27. 27
    RonF says:

    There’s a lot of people out there who have an “I don’t like guns, period, I don’t need to know anything about them” attitude. It doesn’t help.

    So – why are guys predominantly represented in the “mass killer” group? Because guys are encouraged to be violent in our culture and to solve their problems through violence a lot more than girls are.

    Funny thing – again, that “View” show. They were talking about how one change in our culture from the past (when guns were also available and when people were also mentally ill) is that images of extreme violence are far more widespread in our culture through movies, video games, etc. Oh, dear me, what can be done?

    A) if you can restrict civil rights by taking away guns, you can restrict civil rights by limiting the prevalence of violence in the media. After all, “Corporations aren’t people” was a mantra of the left in the recent election, right? So put limits on the media. Rate movies and video games for violence just like they’re rated now for sex. Run underage kids into movie theaters just like the cops run them into tobacco and liquor stores and shut down the theater if they let underage kids in. They’ll figure it out.
    B) How about not buying your kids video games and not letting them go to violent movies? Understand that this kind of discussion comes up every year in the Troop. When I tell parents that they look at me like I’m from Mars and say “But if I try that he whines and gets angry and pouts and tells me he hates me.” Well, fucking grow up and be the kid’s parent, not his buddy. I never bought my kids video game systems and I didn’t let them go to violent movies. Did my kids do all that stuff? Hell yeah. Tough shit.

  28. 28
    closetpuritan says:

    RonF,

    Not sure how I feel about attributing this to violence in the media in general. I suspect that the round-the-clock coverage of these types of shooting incidents specifically has more to do with it. (Report that it happened and have an analysis after the facts are known, sure. But do we have to endlessly dissect it and play footage, with a new round of analysis any time an unconfirmed detail emerges?) Maybe by giving them recognition as scary and dangerous it helps to give them a sort of status, which may be especially important to males who feel they’re losing/have lost status.

    But when you say “not buying your kids video games” you mean violent video games, right? Which video games count as “violent” is another discussion. You could make a case that since the Mario games involve killing evil mushrooms, turtles, etc. that they’re violent, although I don’t think of them that way and I don’t think most people do, either. Same goes for most fantasy RPGs, e.g. Final Fantasy. But there are also video games that just can’t be reasonably construed as violent, like many or most sports games and puzzle games.

    I agree with you on this: if you believe that you have good reason not to allow your kids to have something, “whine and gets angry and pout and tell me [they] hate me” doesn’t trump it.

  29. 29
    Ruchama says:

    Rate movies and video games for violence just like they’re rated now for sex.

    Movies and video games already are rated based on violence. The ratings take violence, sex, language, and probably a few other things into account. Same thing with TV shows.

  30. RonF:

    [W]hy are guys predominantly represented in the “mass killer” group? Because guys are encouraged to be violent in our culture and to solve their problems through violence a lot more than girls are.

    It sounds so simple when you say it like that, no? And I mean that without snark. The problem is when you start trying to talk about how to change that, because I don’t see how you start talking about how to change that without talking about manhood and masculinity, which are in so many ways built around violence, which require violence in order to be proved, in order to be earned, which men and women both measure men by, and which men, when we don’t measure up, will often crazy, stupid and, yes, violent things in order meet the standard. If the problem is that guys are encouraged to be violent, and you really want to solve the problem, then you need to be willing to dismantle the entire structure of that violence, and that is what people have such a hard time talking about.

  31. 31
    KellyK says:

    RonF, since video games are already rated based on violence, your comments to Emily can apply just as well to you as to her, and just as well to first-amendment issues as second-amendment ones.

  32. 32
    Eva says:

    If the problem is that guys are encouraged to be violent, and you really want to solve the problem, then you need to be willing to dismantle the entire structure of that violence, and that is what people have such a hard time talking about.

    That’s it right there. That’s what I’ve been afraid of talking about with my friends.

    On one end of the spectrum I’ve got a friend who grew up with guns. Went to competitions, target shooting, when he was a teenager, and regularly posts about his latest acquisition. Loves guns. Very upset with the shooter for killing all those children and making it that much harder to be a proud gun owner.

    On the other end of the spectrum I’ve got a friend whose got a seven year old girl and is very upset with society and how much it’s failing everyone – his daughter, him, and all the people who have died as a result of these guys who need to kill people and create a lot of misery just before they kill themselves, because there aren’t enough regulations controlling access to guns, and our society refuses to do anything about it.

    I’ve been nervous thinking about the conversations I want to have with both of these friends. Mostly because I don’t know how to talk about the culture of violence with either of them without worrying I am going to alienate them before the conversation starts. How do you talk about it without the risk of everyone shutting down? And if they do shut down? How to re-start the conversation?

  33. 33
    KellyK says:

    Also, I do think a culture of violence plays a role, but I don’t think simplistic solutions like “ban violent video games” are the answer. The shooter (whose name I will not mention because he doesn’t deserve fame) was an adult legally allowed to watch all the horror movies he wanted and play Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto to his heart’s content. And ratings are great at identifying how gory the imagery is, but not so great at subtle distinctions about the message. You can glorify violence without showing it in gory detail, and you can depict violence in a way that doesn’t necessarily glorify it. (As a gamer who’s a fan of RPGs both paper & pencil and computer, I feel like this is an important distinction. You can teach a wanton disregard for human life in a D&D module that doesn’t visually depict a single death, or complex moral reasoning in a bloody video game–it all depends on context and story and things that are a little harder to rate.)

  34. 34
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Well, men are socially very different. But of course they’re also biologically different (on average) from women.

    It’s almost a certainty that social issues have a huge effect here. They’re worth focusing on. But the differences between men and women (especially when it comes to differences on the far extremes of the scale, like this one) also probably have some roots in biology.

  35. 35
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    This is pretty abstract, but isn’t there a need for positive images of masculinity which are strongly engaging? Maybe not absolutely stronger than images of explosive violence, but at strong enough so that boys want to grow up to be like that.

    The other half is that most people apparently have a gut-level desire to not kill. I don’t know what the ratio is between empathy and the desire not to be punished– I assume both are in play a lot of the time. What would tend to build empathy?

  36. 36
    Jake Squid says:

    Well, men are socially very different.

    Socially very different or socialized very differently? In what ways are you saying they’re different? Is this an inherent biological difference?

    I have no idea of what you’re trying to say there.

  37. 37
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    I meant “socialized very differently.”

    Poorly phrased on my part, sorry. I don’t think there’s really any reasonable debate that men and women have vastly different experiences in society. Even folks who disagree about who “has it worse” seem to agree on that part.

  38. 38
    Ruchama says:

    I remember once seeing a “How to be a mensch” (or something like that) curriculum for Hebrew schools to use with teenage and preteen boys. It was a lot of stuff about how the culture at large says that to be a man means to be powerful and violent and stuff like that, and then looking into various Jewish sources that describe what a “good man” is, and what a mensch is, and creating a model of manhood based on those concepts. I think that something similar but non-religious could be done — have the kids actually look at what the common conception of manhood is, and where that conception comes from, and get them to actually think about it and consider it, rather than just absorbing the messages without really analyzing them. Show them scenes from movies or TV shows that end in violence, and get them to discuss ways that the situation could have ended peacefully. Our culture shows boys and men that violence is often the way to solve problems, and then we tell them in school, “No fighting,” but we don’t actually teach them any better ways to solve problems.

    Another idea I like, which is something that Sidwell Friends School in DC does, is that they have all the fourth graders (their lower school is K-4) take some classes in conflict resolution. After that, each day on the playground, a few fourth graders are the designated conflict resolution people. If any of the other kids get into an argument, they know that they’re supposed to look for the kid wearing the special badge that day, tell that kid what the argument is about, and that kid will help them solve it. (There is, of course, an adult keeping an eye on things, to make sure nothing goes too wrong.) Again, “What should I do when I’m scared?” and “What should I do when I’m angry?” are questions that we can teach kids how to answer, but we have to actually address those things.

  39. 39
    Jake Squid says:

    Thanks for clearing that up g&w. I had no idea whether I agreed or disagreed with you before that.

  40. 40
    closetpuritan says:

    Rate movies and video games for violence just like they’re rated now for sex.

    RonF hasn’t been back to address it, but I was wondering on second reading whether he meant, “take violence as seriously as sex/nudity is taken”. I mean, simply showing a clear view of someone’s butt or female breasts will get your movie an R rating, but (to use the last movie I’ve seen as an example) The Hobbit has violence including an arm being lopped off, humanoids (orcs) being killed by the dozens, and implied imminent torture with some torture implements being shown, and only gets a PG-13 rating.

  41. 41
    xiaozi_in_ca says:

    Generic misandry. Aggression is a virtue, it just needs to be controlled.

  42. 42
    tom says:

    re: nikki, et al

    I appreciate the point that if Lanza were Muslim the conversation certainly wouldn’t revolve around “mental illness”. But even when a killer’s motivations are ostensibly “religious” (e.g. the Boston bombers’), these can be seen as rationalizations of underlying “psychological” — really, psychosocial, psychopolitical — conditions. It’s never clear, in any case, what is meant by “religion” or, for that matter, “mental illness”. The latter relies on a dubious analogy with physical disease which is supposed to legitimize one’s suffering: if it’s not a “scientifically” acknowledged condition that can be treated medically, the client is assumed to be a “malingerer”. So “alcoholics” who have an inclination to change are encouraged, inevitably, for lack of alternatives in the way of “treatment”, to think of themselves as “sick”. On the other hand, is the rapid proliferation of ADHD diagnoses in the past decade the least bit surprising in light of the fact that ours (I’m 23) is a generation “raised by television” — whose disavowed aim is, according to Patrick Lelay, “to sell available brain time” (in the form of young, and increasingly younger, children) to corporations whose sole aim to turn a profit? I for one tend to support the argument for improving and making more accessible “mental health services” (although I wouldn’t use that language), but I’m not at all confident, from my brief experiences in college psychology and sociology classes and with a series of more less competent psychotherapists/counselors, in the capacity of these institutions to make the necessary changes — especially since they are largely determined by the financial interests of pharmaceutical companies, or are complicit in the late capitalist ideology of rendering the client more “productive” and “flexible”, or encourage a quasi-religious resignation in the face of life’s vicissitudes. One gets the sense that despite the efforts of so many seemingly well-intentioned individuals, the problem is systemic and won’t be resolved except through quite drastic structural reforms — not to mention the fact that the people who are supposed to initiate and carry out reforms are themselves products of the very disintegrating, corporate-dominated, infantilizing system they presume to change, and thus bear its mark. No one, not even the so-called “experts” are exempt. The emphasis on “entitlement” with regard to white males who commit mass murder seems not a little bit shallow, and strikes me as merely the flip-side of the inclination to blame parents (which is different, I should add, than holding them accountable).

  43. 43
    tom says:

    I just want to add that the notion of “aggrieved entitlement”, banal and reductive as it is, is nevertheless one that people in Lanza’s demographic encounter precisely during moments of crisis when, for example, they seek “treatment” for “mental ill-health”. The treatment itself might be based on this presumption — give him a prescription, or even let him talk about his pseduo-problems to a more or less “sympathetic” therapist if that’s what the spoiled brat thinks he needs, and get him back to work, let him become “a productive member of society” like the rest of us decent folk who’ve had to work hard for everything we’ve got and truly “earned” our self-respect. Even the fact that Lanza (or Lanza’s mother — but wouldn’t she resent him for it?) was probably in a position to afford a $100/hour treatment program makes little difference precisely because HE COULD AFFORD IT, was “entitled” to it, and so on. Hamby’s “analysis” only renders explicit the latent resentment toward people in Lanza’s demographic (and says nothing about Lanza himself, in his singularity — but that is the problem with the “social sciences” in general, not just Hamby’s version) who, incomprehensibly on this view, consider themselves to be in some way outsiders, unrecognized, or oppressed and are angry about it. It’s not essentially different than when Chris Matthews calls the Tsarnaev brothers LOSERS (“objectively” speaking, of course) as if that explains anything. Mass murderers seem to think in terms of a logic not unlike that expressed in Ted Kaczynski’s “Ship of Fools”, and whatever ideology, if any, they use to justify their actions is almost beside the point. They believe they’re in the right somehow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re reacting to an aggrieved entitlement or a narcissistic wound following upon an illusion-shattering confrontation with reality or whatever else Hamby and his ilk suggest.

  44. 44
    RonF says:

    “when Chris Matthews calls the Tsarnaev brothers LOSERS”

    That is the precise term that their uncle used to describe them in an interview he gave when they were first captured. It was widely publicized. Chris Matthews may well have been quoting the man. And, of course, the uncle belonged to the same ethnic and religious background as the brothers.