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Why Do White Males Commit Most Mass Public Shootings?
Hexmage-PA
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The narrative for the longest time in regards to school shooters was that they were bullied until they lashed out indiscriminately. Even now I see this sentiment echoed in the posts of (mostly female) acquaintances on Facebook.
This hypothesis has been so effective in garnering sympathy for the perpetrators that today there are even online fandoms for school shooters and other mass murderers, such as the Columbiners. Membership appears to be mostly female and focuses on identifying with the alleged feelings of depression and social isolation that supposedly drive (mostly white male) students to murder.
Inside the Online Subculture of Columbiners
Lately this hypothesis has been called into question, most recently and memorably as part of a spoken word poem performed during March for Our Lives:
Dame Magazine yesterday released an article with a fairly comprehensive look at why the bullying narrative is insufficient (chiefly, that white males are least likely to be bullied yet are the ones committing mass murder):
Who's to Blame for a Generation of Angry White Men?
TL;DR, the primary argument is that whites are often raised from childhood in a coercive parenting style (characterized by hostility; such a parent derides, demeans, or diminishes children and teens by continually putting them in their place, putting them down, mocking them, or holding power over them via punitive or psychologically controlling means) that leaves them vulnerable to bigoted ideologies that "explain" who is supposedly to blame for the lack of control they believe they are supposed to have over their lives.
Does this new explanation hold up?
This hypothesis has been so effective in garnering sympathy for the perpetrators that today there are even online fandoms for school shooters and other mass murderers, such as the Columbiners. Membership appears to be mostly female and focuses on identifying with the alleged feelings of depression and social isolation that supposedly drive (mostly white male) students to murder.
To be a Columbiner is basically just having a huge interest in the Columbine shootings and being interested in the shooters, Eric and Dylan, themselves. They [the media] portays us as people who condone these things, and honestly I can say now we really don't in any way, shape or form. It's just quite an interesting case, so we like to read up about it. We try and get to know the shooters minds. A lot of people identify with the feelings of the shooters. So we kind of take comfort in it in a way, since a lot of us feel depressed an anxious, and they did too. So it's kind of nice since a lot of people don't necessarily have someone there who understands them and feels the same way as them. I mean, I think it's just mostly to do with the fact that they were bullied. And bullying still goes on in schools everywhere pretty much in this day and age.
Inside the Online Subculture of Columbiners
Lately this hypothesis has been called into question, most recently and memorably as part of a spoken word poem performed during March for Our Lives:
"Was he isolated? Did he have any friends? Did he have a troubled family? Who the hell cares? The solution to gun violence isn't to keep the white male company."
Dame Magazine yesterday released an article with a fairly comprehensive look at why the bullying narrative is insufficient (chiefly, that white males are least likely to be bullied yet are the ones committing mass murder):
“As a matter of public safety, we need to ask why so many mass shooters are white men and boys,” says Robin Bernstein who is a history professor at Harvard University and author of the book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. Bernstein says that we need to ask, “What is American culture teaching white boys, who become white men, about what they are entitled to and how they should express their anger?”
“What the media is overlooking is that white childhood has been conditioned by the narrative that white people are superior," says Tommy J. Curry, a professor of philosophy and Africana Studies at Texas A&M University , "and by effect will enjoy a superior economic and political position to Black and Brown groups in America. For poorer white Americans, their inability to access this racial legacy due to their economic declination and their fear of being overrun by non-white populations makes violence appear to be their only resort."
Given the hard evidence of this national threat, it is past time to look at triggers in the socialization of white boys, including the most mediocre who are led to expect a dominant position in society and an automatic path to success, with no ability to accommodate or adapt when that dominant position is undermined. But our corporate media refuses to talk about the white family as the real root of the problem each time some white male who is mad at the world snaps. We saw this most recently with the coverage of a home-schooled Christian, unemployed college dropout serial-bomber who terrorized a whole city for weeks and left two people dead and four other victims wounded.
“Parenting is often designated as a private, personal realm. The distribution of that privacy, however, is affected by race and class,” says Bernstein. She also says that the parenting practices of Black adults are routinely publicly criticized. But the parenting practices of white, middle-class adults is often assumed to be a matter of choice for individual families. “The media have not criticized white parents as white parents in the way that the media have, for decades, criticized black parents as black parents.”
“The media focuses on the symptoms of violence and struggles over how to label it. Were these just troubled young men or outright terrorists? The public is never allowed to make the connection between racial violence and the white family, the context of coercive violence these young men were raised in,” says Toby Rollo, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia whose research focuses on the politics of childhood in western societies.
Rollo adds that the media tends to focus on the early adult years of these killers, skipping over their childhoods in what are almost always labeled “‘normal families.’ So, the media will observe that the perpetrator abused his girlfriend, or dabbled in white supremacy online, or abused drugs,” Rollo says. “But they never investigate the coercion and violence they internalized in the home. If we’re serious about understanding why young white men can become so violent, why wouldn’t we study how they are raised?”
So far the media strategy has been to ignore parenting and families to focus on more nefarious causes. The public doesn’t want to be told there is something wrong with the normal white family itself. This is why we have no real insight into the violence we see in the news. There are always articles on toxic masculinity or gun culture, which are treated like viruses communicated in schools and workplaces. Yet behind this stands the “normal” white family with all its unspoken violence.
The coercive parenting and socialization of white boys is central to understanding white supremacy and violence.
Rollo says that white boys don’t always grow up receiving overtly racist messages at home but are inevitably exposed to them later on. “Racism, fundamentalist religion, toxic masculinity, or white supremacy are often encountered by young men once they have left home. Highly accessible, these ideologies provide boys with a conduit through which to channel their frustration over a lack of mastery,” he says. “It provides meaning to experiences that seem otherwise meaningless. ‘Why am I so angry, full of resentment and unhappy all the time? Why am I abusive to the people I love, and mad at strangers? Why am I not in control of my life?”
Along comes radical religion, or radical patriotism, or white supremacy, or men’s rights advocates, or whatever with a ready-made map that can be used to navigate toward mastery: “Your feelings of weakness are because of women, or because of immigrants, or because of Black people, and so on. Often it’s whatever website they come across first that determines the particular brand of violent criminal they become.”
Who's to Blame for a Generation of Angry White Men?
TL;DR, the primary argument is that whites are often raised from childhood in a coercive parenting style (characterized by hostility; such a parent derides, demeans, or diminishes children and teens by continually putting them in their place, putting them down, mocking them, or holding power over them via punitive or psychologically controlling means) that leaves them vulnerable to bigoted ideologies that "explain" who is supposedly to blame for the lack of control they believe they are supposed to have over their lives.
Does this new explanation hold up?
Hexmage-PA on
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1) what counts as a "mass shooting"?
2) does the disparity still exist per capita according to the definition in 1 above?
3) is there anything to demonstrate that the flagrantly racist comments in the bolded quotes are actually a motivating factor in mass shootings, and if so, how many?
My first impression of the article linked is that it's intending to be a condescending polemic.
"There is nothing more dangerous in the United States than a white male who has expected to succeed and finds himself falling behind."
This is not what I would consider a "fairly comprehensive" article.
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Bullying and violence, however, is a bit more complex than I think either those pushing the bullying narrative and those pushing against it put forward. I experienced bullying heavily as a child but it didn't mean I didn't have any friends. From the outsider perspective it may have even looked like I was a bully, something I experienced first hand when an administrator called me a bully after a fight started when a group of students physically assaulted me, because I began to push back. And after so long of dealing with it until I got into sports in high school and began to "fit in", I started "escalating to deescalate" as the Russians would say. And I could tell pretty quickly when bullying was about to start so I escalated pretty quickly. Which led to a lot of fighting.
Which is why I don't really care for the framing of it as "well how about they don't shoot at us instead of us having to be their friend" because that is, if we assume for the sake of argument that bullying is a catalyst, not "not bullying". Not bullying doesn't require you to be someone's friend, not bullying is not spraying the impoverished kid with body spray in class because his parents can't afford the water bill for everyone to shower more than once a week and you think he smells (something I personally witnessed) or physically assaulting another student because the administration is stretched thin and teachers somehow occupy a space where defending yourself is bad but so is an authority figure stepping in.
And I don't think the sentiment put forward would be so quickly agreed to if we applied it to other violence by those who feel marginalized.
Yeah, a lot of these shooters are not what you would call "weird kids", but it became an easy narrative to latch onto. See also: the use of mental illness as a go-to for these events.
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
I'll contribute my analysis when I get home from work.
That may well just be a labeling problem. We've certainly heard of "gang violence" in that context but not in the suburban white male demographic.
Isn't gang violence usually outside schools, and targeted toward gang activities, though? In contrast to white male students who choose to go to war with the student body and staff inside the schools themselves.
I'm curious, do shooters like the abortion doctor killers fall into this thread's umbrella?
lol.
amen to that.
This article refutes the OP pretty thoroughly. The question can't be answered because the assumption that we need one is based on false data.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
Then don't post in it. Purposefully dragging it down with useless comments like this is a shit move.
Hmm, interesting if true.
It's not true though. It's backfilling a false idea with speculation. I'm certainly the first person to say that gun control is racist, but again, there doesn't seem to be any actual evidence that white men commit mass shootings out of proportion with their demographics. The Slate article that Pyphor linked says that they might commit nearly 20% fewer than you'd expect!
Treating all shootings with three or more victims as equivalent is not a useful statistic. School shootings and gun terrorism like Las Vegas are unique pathologies.
Yes, inner-city shootouts often leave unintended victims. Bystanders aren't the target, but generally it's not a big deal if they get hit.
With the other mass shooters, there's usually a reason and there are no bystanders. Someones trying to put a bullet through a culture or ideology, whether real or imagined.
Edit: yeah, this is the right thread
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The types of groups a particular person might fall into are segregated mostly by cultural and economic backgrounds.
It also fits a narrative that black folk are not as important. You don't see many national news stories, or ones that basically hijack the news for several days, about 3+ black people dead in a shooting. I would imagine it happens on the same frequency as a white person shooting up a school or movie theater. They're just shootings that happen in public places, sometimes targets are chosen at random, sometimes they are not. Just like a shooting on a street block can have fully intended targets, and more random wounded bystanders than actual targets too.
Society has been conditioned to ignore that stuff though. The previously mentioned statistics seem to say nothing is extraordinary about any particular race.
What is really interesting is that men in general are shooting people in a much higher frequency. Why is that? Machismo and toxic masculinity? Societal problems? Mental health issues? Handwaving away shooters as being bullies instead of the ones being bullied doesn't necessarily mean that mental health issues go away, either. Most bullies suffer from a lot of problems in their personal lives and bullying is sometimes a way in which they lash out.
We pretend that whites are some homogeneous group when they are not. They tend to be highly individualistic, and our current economy forces everyone to move for work and spend most of their time at work, there really isn't any time to have a community for working people. Young white poor males experience an isolation like no one else in our society. No one will accept that you are disadvantaged in any meaningful way, you will get blamed for things that have nothing to do with you or your life choices, and you will be looked down on. You will experience this without the benefit of a community that advocates for your interests or tries to put things into a context that you can accept, because "white people are already doing so well," a statement that is often made and completely discounts the fact that there are still lots of poor white people out there growing up in horrible environments. No one will accept that you have any meaningful problems. If anyone from any other group has a problem we are willing to listen to it, but if it's a poor white boy everyone wants him to shut up. The way I view it we are emotionally abusing these kids, don't be surprised if some of them end up having problems.
I'm sorry, but "young white males experience isolation like no one else in our society" is probably the most laughable goddamned thing I've ever heard.
Let's back up for a second, just a second here.
There's a long, thick, corroded thread of toxic masculinity running roughshod through the country. That goes beyond race, completely. It isn't just "white males" being told they're potential rapists, it's people coming to the realization that the old way of getting girls drunk until they can't say no is a shitty fucking thing to do and should be something we shame others for.
Nobody is telling white people to shut up about their issues, we're telling them to shut up about issues they have with other people being treated on the same level as they are. That's the fundamental disconnect. Having someone be your equal in terms of societal treatment is not, not, not discriminating against you.
And, just for your own consideration, I am a cisgendered, white, lower middle class male.
Not really sure that I agree. There are numerous religious/community organizations that are widely open for white men. Your entire post sounds like it's written from the perspective of someone entrenched rather deeply in an ideological bubble, and suffering from more individualized isolation issues. Nobody is telling a person they can't join a bowling league because they are white, or whatever.
Isolation issues like the ones you are describing exist broadly across demographics. It's true that there are cultural forces that judge white men harshly, but there are cultural forces that judge EVERY demographic harshly, for tons of reasons.
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This is some philosophical trap card shit. The way you've set up this (false) situation, presenting facts about how other groups legitimately have a harder time is aggression. But sorry, being told, correctly, that the white man does not have a uniquely bad place in the world isn't an attack. It's reality.
The rich and poor both kill themselves. Sometimes the issues that plague us as humans have shit to do with our relative standing in society.
Once we get to the point where white males bathroom habits are national news stories and points of discussion, then we can start looking at their potential isolation and difficulty with society.
Im not saying other groups dont have a hard time. Im saying its problematic that a young poor white boy can complain about problems only to be laughed at cause of his status as a white male oppressor, and be told that if hes having a problem its his personal problem, and he should feel bad that hes so stupid he cant even succeed at life on easy mode.
At least no one that's reasonable
3 weeks ago: https://www.google.ca/amp/s/articles.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2018/03/huffman_high_school_junior_cha.amp
If you want school mass shooting
http://ktla.com/2015/10/01/umpqua-community-college-shooter-targeted-christians-father-of-oregon-shooting-victim-says/
2015, but I only had to go back about 20 entries on here:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/
It's possible the increased average victim count for whites is due to factors tbloxham has said, the ability to get access to expensive rifles and enough time and money to train with using them
If you carve out all the data you don't want to look at, it looks the way you want it to!
The thrust of the OP is that a) there are a lot of mass shootings and b) white men are mostly to blame for them, because c) reasons.
If you disprove b, and the response is to reduce the sample until b is true, you've disproven a.
Either way, you cannot conclude c because the premeses are false.
And blacks get told to shelve their problems because "racism ended a long time ago" and that protesting silently is "treason."
And women, because they got the right to vote.
Immigrants, everyone. Gay people got marriage so now what the fuck are they complaining for?
The fact that white people think that society telling them to suck it up is uniquely a White Male Phenomenon when everyone else gets catered to just reeks of a people experiencing social oblivion as opposed to social isolation. It's like complaining about the person with the handicap tag on their car not having a wheelchair when their issue is congestive heart failure.
5 injured/dead?
Or are we talking just about school shootings and the title needs amending?
Nobody has mentioned yet that after the gang violence moral panics of the 90s, US schools started to tighten their security measures - adding metal detectors, backpack searches, on-campus police officers - but to quote a 2016 study on public school security,
As Huffpo reported, the number of public schools with police officers increased from 10% to 31% from 1997 to 2001 (partly in response to perceived gang violence, partly in response to Columbine).
HuffPo was one of the many sources that's also observed that more school police officers correlates strongly with more arrests, usually for property violations like theft and vandalism, but these arrests are disproportionately concentrated on black students.
So, first off, I'm skeptical of the claim in the OP that white students commit more shootings per capita than nonwhite students.
Second, if there's a disparity in shootings between white students and black students, I don't think it's prima facie obvious that this reflects any higher propensity towards violence among whites more than it reflects higher surveillance and more stringent policing among blacks.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
I appreciate the double-down here but your claim is false.