It’s a strange dynamic which the United States has in respect to guns and gun violence. We repeatedly see young white men – typically college educated – taking up weapons and unleashing a torrent of violence upon a community. The attacks are eerily similar in perpetrator demographics, style, and in their suddenness. The similarities are well reported on and well known, yet we as a society continually dismiss perpetrators as being psychologically ill or unspeakably depraved – the trouble here is that we categorize them as some heinous monster, something inhuman, from being stricken by some incurable and malignant psychological affliction. We don’t see them as people, and therefore we don’t see them as members of our society; the blame for these terrible ruptures of violence then falls upon some vague problem with the individual, something well outside the realm of society’s influence, well outside the confines of ourselves. Yet we see this view is composed of flaws – if these were truly isolated incidents, if the mass shootings were the byproduct of a single person’s flawed psychological makeup then one would assume them to be exceedingly rare (they aren’t) and committed by persons varying greatly in demographics such as age and education (also not the case). The fact that one can so easily draw parallels between the men committing these acts hints at something amiss at the societal level.
The most easily invoked social problem with respect to mass shootings is the laxness of gun control in the United States; this certainly plays a large role, but to think it begins and ends there misses much. The enactment of stricter gun regulations would very likely reduce the amount of these tragedies – the fact that I can at this very moment walk into a gun store and with little more than an ID and some money walk out with a handgun and ammunition should and does sound absurd. Yet I do not want to focus on the specifics of why gun control is needed; I feel that has been addressed adequately elsewhere. What has not been sufficiently addressed is why there are young, educated white men going on killing rampages.
Why is it that bright middle class men are engaging in these sudden bursts of violence? We’ve established already that it’s not merely an issue of the individual, for if it were there wouldn’t be so many similarities between the occurrences. A major clue can be unearthed by looking at the incidents themselves. In each case, the young man sets out with no specific target in mind; there seems to be no focus on one type of person over another, the victims are generally strangers, mixed in age, sex, etc. The shooting also occur in public, they’re in high profile places, places where it’s unlikely the shooter will know any victims and where the shooting will be maximally visible. It seems then, based on these qualities, that the shooter is not looking to unleash his frustration upon a particular group or person, but upon society itself. The question of course becomes what about society has driven these men to lash back so violently and so spectacularly?
Here we come to a junction that gender becomes a major player. We have never witnessed a woman commit these acts, nor do I suspect we ever will. The difference lies within power dynamics and typical representation of gender roles. Dominance and aggressiveness in men is cultivated and revered from a young age; a weak man refers to a man seen as indecisive, lacking influence, and who is physically and mentally incapable of both defending and imposing his beliefs in social spaces. This is key: a man’s sense that he has fulfilled social expectations must come from society and from his interactions. If in his interactions he finds himself largely ignored, he goes home at the end of the day frustrated and feeling weak. A lack of reinforcement in ability and power creates dissonance between a male and his concept of his gender’s ideal.
In cases where the shooter has left clues to his motivations, we are met with another parallel: a belief that the entire world is against them. It is not the world against these young men, but society’s inflexibility and lack of transparency in gender roles and idealizations – something that may as well be the world against them. How, then, can a man who sees himself as being a chronic failure – weak and emasculated – rectify his position? Particularly if he has no other concept of success with respect to gender, if he himself has never experienced a questioning of gender and expectation. If his only framework for gender based actualization is that of society’s majority view how could he not see himself as weak and as a failure? It is no coincidence that the shooters all take up guns, a symbol of masculinity and ultimate power (that over life and death); nor is it a coincidence that their violence isn’t directed against any specific person and they stage their displays of lethal power in public settings. Their sense of discontent stems from such a fundamental place that they themselves are likely only partially aware of what it is they’re frustrated with. They then engender these vague but torrential resentments in an atrocious and lethal display of power, punishing society for failing to furnish them with the deferment they were taught signified their success as men. We as a society need to redefine what it means to be a man; ideally we need to remove the entire construct of sex-gender traits and ideals, and at the very least need to permit for greater flexibility in defining what it means to be a successful woman or man.
These shooting are tragic, yet after we have experienced so many and as a society sit by helplessly throwing our hands into the air saying “how horrific, people can be so cruel” our cries are not lamentations of the guiltless. I hope that very soon we as a society feel threatened and exposed enough that we look internally for a solution to the repetitious displays of violence; I suspect that when we do the monster we see in the shooter will also be seen in ourselves.
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