Mass Shooters Have A Gender and a Race

Recent studies reveal that most school shooters are White males, with 97 percent being male and 79 percent White. Over the last three decades, 90 percent of high school or elementary school shootings were the result of White, often upper-middle class, perpetrators. These shootings are a direct reflection of White male privilege and the consequences that occur when groups like the NRA control influential conservative leaders.

Before his May 23rd premeditated killing spree, Elliot Rodger2 posted a YouTube video saying his intention was to “slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut I see” inside a sorority house, because they “all would have rejected [him] and looked down upon [him] as an inferior man if [he] ever made a sexual advance towards them.” These chilling comments cannot be simply regarded as nonsense from a “madman,” because they actually represent the deeply entrenched manifestation of our misogynistic society. Furthermore, the case of Elliot Rodger exposes the prevailing intersection between gender and race of gun violence.

There is a pattern in these school shootings that has been coined as “suicide-by-mass-murder,” and seems to be an almost-exclusively young-White-male phenomenon. Michael Kimmel, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University and founder of the academic journal Men and Masculinity, has been conducting research on the intersection between race and gender of American school shooters, and observed that “victims of [young men of color] are usually those whom the shooter believes have wronged him. And it rarely ends with his suicide. .. White men, on the other hand, have a somewhat more grandiose purpose…’If I’m going to die, then so is everybody else,’ they seem to say. Yes, of course, this is mental illness speaking: but it is mental illness speaking with a voice that has a race and a gender.”

This “suicide-by-mass-murder” is a reflection of a combination of both White and male privilege—the ideology that White males have social, economic, and political advantages granted to them solely on the basis of their sex and race. In Elliot’s case, he believed he, as a White heterosexual male, was entitled to women and sex, and that their disinterest was “an injustice, a crime.” Misogyny is still alive and well in American society, provoking many men to still believe that women owe them obedience and adoration. Manhood and masculinity are defined and shaped from the early years of when a father or sports coach tells a boy to stop crying and “Man up, you sissy!” Boys become ‘men’ and gain respect from their peers when they lose their virginity or win their first fist-fight. Pop culture and movies drive home these not-so-subtle themes to young male audiences, teaching them that masculinity revolves around having a nice car, violently punching the bad guy, and saving the girl who would be nothing without their hero.

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/06/19/mass-shooters-have-a-gender-and-a-race/#sthash.qmFfodt4.dpbs

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I wonder what Fox would say about that!