Every mass shooting by a man in this country is another tragedy foretold
By: Gary Barker, President & CEO, Promundo-US
CW: Contains descriptions of violence.
UPDATE: Learn more insights on accountability and reconciliation by watching the Skoll Virtual World Forum event, “Race, Masculinity, Politics & America’s Angry White Men.”
Jimmy Carter was President. Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels were TV shows. Telephones had long cords so we could talk behind bedroom doors until our ears were sore. And there was a shooting in my high school cafeteria in Houston, Texas. About 200 of us witnessed as one young man shot another six times, yelling that the victim “would pay for having stolen his girlfriend.” We cried out in fear, sadness, and shock while a classmate bled out before us.
As the shooting incidents in the United State have continued steadily in the decades since, I have relived the pain of that moment. And I have tired of talking about it without seeing meaningful action. I think of the families of the two boys in my high school, and all the other families ripped apart and lives taken over the years. It’s part of what drove me to spend my career working in violent settings, including former war zones, around the world to understand what drives men’s violence and how to prevent it.
The US has 15,000–20,000 gun-related homicides a year. While we don’t have higher crime rates than Europe or higher rates of violence in the home, our homicide rates are roughly five times higher than Europe and Canada. And we are the world epicenter of mass shootings: over the last three years, there has been a mass shooting roughly every two months in the US. We can no longer act surprised every time a mass shooting happens, and treat them as isolated incidents, by lone, troubled individuals — we must recognize the patterns, the systems and the culture that engender and permit this violence.
We can no longer ignore this fact: the shooters are always men, and mostly white men: Of 116 mass killings carried out since 1982, 113 were carried out by men. We must stop looking for simplistic answers and ask the right questions: why is the US so good at making mass shooters? And what does American manhood have to do with it?
The list is long. There is no single factor that leads a man to kill, and kill in public, in the US or anywhere. It is high schools ill-equipped to deal with the mental health needs that students bring from home. It is boys told not to seek help even when they need it. It is families with economic hardship, often compounded by family violence and substance use, in a country that has steadily retrenched its publicly provided social services. It is too many boys raised on a steady diet of violence, sexism, racism, and misogyny. As poet Ocean Vuong recently said: “What happens to our men and boys when they can only evaluate themselves through a lexicon of death and destruction?”
Too many white men and boys in the US are fed a discourse that they are victims of feminism gone too far, told that immigrants took their jobs and that people of color scam social services. These are boys who themselves were bullied and beaten by other men. They are told by other men that they amount to nothing in a country that sees only winners and losers. They are men with more access to guns than to steady, meaningful jobs and life causes. As white men, they are told they are entitled to jobs, and to women. And if they don’t achieve these things, they see themselves as failures, their honor impinged, their worth nil.
Meanwhile, we cut funds for public education, job readiness, and mental health. Sex education programs– that could be place for meaningful, critical discussions about gender equality, consent, and communication– are gutted or forced to teach abstinence and not to discuss sex or consent at all, let alone healthy masculinity. Overcrowded and under-resourced classrooms leave teachers with little time or energy to engage with students beyond the next assignment. Boys who need additional engagement are more likely to be sent detention than to the counseling services they desperately need.
Then there are the guns. While an undegrad, I wrote op-eds in my state university newspaper arguing for gun control. It was Texas and I received hate mail. My fellow student journalists and I laughed at the threats; we posted them on the wall as a badge of progressive honor. But I also thought this: in this country, men act on those threats. I looked over my shoulder every night as I walked out to my car after my shift at the newspaper. Today it is too many members of our state legislatures and the US Congress who look over their shoulders at guns rights advocates who determine the outcome of elections in many districts.
Since those events decades ago, the US has become even more efficient at making men who kill. Guns are more available and more lethal; what were once combat weapons are available to civilians. The internet has become the farmers’ market for trading in the language of angry manhood. Journalist Laura Bates in her book Men Who Hate Women describes the online incel space as “ ..vulnerable, unhappy men mingling closely with men determined to wreak as much destruction as possible.” The grudge-filled, anti-immigrant, white supremacist, hyper-masculine brand of Republicanism of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon was amateur compared to online incel groups, Trumpism and QAnon. On-line gaming, while a source of friendship and camaraderie for millions of boys and men, is too often simultaneously a stage for fantasizing male violence.
This is why we must be ashamed every time another mass killing happens. Because we know what causes it and we have yet to act on what we know about men’s killing. If we are raising too many of our sons in a gun-obsessed, misogynistic, victim-blaming, socially disconnected, and often racist version of manhood — then it’s time we worked on manhood. Never instead of gun control, of domestic violence prevention and services, or racial justice, or publicly funded mental health services, or more funding for our schools and training for our teachers.
In addition to all these things we must also build and promote a healthy, connected, caring, empathetic manhood. We must model care, and help-seeking for our sons. All of us other men, and women — those of us who know the boys who become killers– must stand up and help our brothers out of this cycle. We must speak out every time we hear the misogynist, racist, and victim-blaming language. We must reach out to our socially isolated friends, brothers and workmates.
It saddens me to affirm that we know the next mass shooting is coming. It will be a matter of days or weeks or months. Somewhere around us right now another man, probably a white man, cut off from those he loves, is buying a gun, nursing his sense of victimhood in an online chat room, reading the hate of the ‘manosphere’. Someone knows him — a workmate, maybe his fishing buddy, or the friend who went with him to a strip club last week. Someone right now is going to high school with him. Some teacher may try to reach him. Some coach or parent may make a plea for connection or turn away in exhaustion because they have no where to refer him for professional help. Some gun store owner will sell him a weapon, which a state legislature voted to make easy to do. The violent, destructive cycle of damaged manhood continues. Unless we muster the political will to see it for what it is and how it happens.
Shame on us for not finding a way to reach out, to engage him, to question the hate, to break this cycle, to invest in the services that can prevent it and to limit access to military-grade weapons. To acknowledge that every mass shooting, and every misogynist act by men in the US, is a tragedy foretold. Shame on us for not making a better lexicon of American manhood.
