General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat scares me is that there are thousands of young men just like Devin Kelley.
They're everywhere. They're young white men who are angry with life. They never had a good home life. They're young but they feel like life has already failed for them. They didn't do well in school, career, or relationships. They're not smart, but they're not stupid. They blame everyone but themselves. They hit their partners and children. They get stopped by police. They lose one job after another. They don't know what to do with all this anger, they just know that life isn't fair. They don't really care if they live or die.
Are they mentally ill? No, they're just run of the mill. They're so common that they are everywhere. Each one of us could find 100 of them in a week if we started asking around.
There is nothing to stop them from getting a gun, or getting 100 guns. There's always a way to get a gun. And maybe someday they will cross the line and shoot somebody, and go down in a hail of gunfire. Name goes up in headlines and is known forever.
They're everywhere.
guillaumeb
(42,641 posts)rather than the easy availability of weapons that enables these massacres.
bagelsforbreakfast
(1,427 posts)their killing spree.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)are lots of haters out there and most are armed up.
BannonsLiver
(16,387 posts)A bloated self importance, delusions of grandeur in many of these shooters, though not all of them are young.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)silver platter. They don't understand that to have a decent job, you have to work for it and be a good employee. To have good relationships, you have to be a good friend/boyfriend and treat other people well, to get the respect of your community, you have to be a decent, respectable person who makes a contribution. They are lazy and filled with self-pity and they alone are they main cause of their own problems.
There are millions of people out there, a lot of them women, minorities and gay people that have had horrible upbringings and instead of feeling sorry for themselves they work hard on themselves and make something of their lives. They don't expect everything to be handed to them, so they aren't filled with resentment at their lot in life.
The hallmark of men like this is that "They blame everyone but themselves". And they will make others pay for their humiliation.
llmart
(15,540 posts)but I would add that there are just as many angry, white, OLD men. I've seen plenty of them and was married to one. He got angrier and angrier the older he got because he thought the world owed him something because he was white and male. He grew up in an era where they were told they were special just because they were male.
MaryMagdaline
(6,855 posts)Looking at young men and saying to myself, "does that one want me dead?"
handmade34
(22,756 posts)Want to reduce horrible gun crimes? Reduce inequality.
Elizabeth Stoker
But there is an intersection of men and violent crime that is open to immediate political intervention. In their 2009 book The Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett point out what other commentators have re-established in the wake of the Isla Vista murders: violent crime is overwhelmingly committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 29. And, calling upon the expertise of Harvard Medical Schol's James Gilligan, the author of Violence and Preventing Violence, the authors posit that "acts of violence are 'attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation a feeling that is painful, and can even be intolerable and overwhelming and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride.'"
...since much of the violent crime we see among young men appears to be the result of the hopelessness and frustration brought on by the lack of status available to men at the bottom, strides can be made toward reducing the impetus for those crimes simply by raising the bottom up and reducing the gap between the worst and best off. A policy as simple as a universal basic income could accomplish that neatly.
...angry young men can be deterred from violence by reducing inequality. Doing so would not only provide men at the lowermost rungs of the socioeconomic ladder with a lowered sense of pressure given the reduced extremity of the financial poles, but would also by that same mechanism reduce adversarial social focus on financial status. This accounts for the slew of benefits Wilkinson and Pickett associate with more equal societies, including lower rates of mental health problems and higher indicators of child welfare. In that way, an overall social reduction in economic inequality could have salutary benefits for those at the top as well as those at the bottom...
https://thinkprogress.org/study-income-inequality-is-tied-to-increase-in-homicides-84076065498a/
https://www.salon.com/2016/10/26/more-than-just-the-guns-poverty-and-inequality-should-be-blamed-for-americas-gun-violence_partner/
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2095881
see Durkheim
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/pal/sth/2003/00000001/00000001/art00002
doc03
(35,339 posts)but you never know. I know one that was never in the military but claims to be an x Navy Seal. He can
tell you all about any military weapon. He is 50 years old and lives in his mom and dads basement.
Paladin
(28,262 posts)WhiskeyGrinder
(22,350 posts)hack89
(39,171 posts)There is no shortage of violent young men regardless of race.
cwydro
(51,308 posts)Thats just not as popular here.
kcr
(15,317 posts)I would never hang out anywhere where I thought everyone was bigoted.
milestogo
(16,829 posts)but the difference is - they are angry ABOUT something. There is perceived injustice which is rooted in real, visible, tangible injustice. It may be directed in a variety of ways, but I can't think of any mass shootings that involve young, black men.
flamingdem
(39,313 posts)Someone got mad at someone on the other bus and they shot up the other bus killing a woman.
Different but yet the same in the end. Not related to much more than male anger and easy to get guns.
Response to milestogo (Original post)
WinkyDink This message was self-deleted by its author.
kimbutgar
(21,153 posts)Raine
(30,540 posts)races, religions, sex etc some have a good reason and some don't. They're all dangerous, don't discount one group over another.