JohnBeige
JohnBeige
Black Belt
Post rating:
+++++
Paper I wrote for a community college class a little while ago. Nothing shocking to posters but I promised to post it forever ago and eventually fought back my shame at its wording and am now making the post.
This will be a brief attempt to discuss mass shooters in the United States, causes for trends of mass shooters, and who mass shooters are. We hypothesize that a combination of patriarchy and white supremacy in America have created the conditions for the prevalence of mass shooters in the country. Before we go into the data, we will look at very brief definitions of patriarchy, white supremacy, and what a mass shooter technically is.
Patriarchy is a sociopolitical and cultural system that values masculinity over femininity. It is a system that not only devalues women and gender non-conforming/non-binary individuals, but cisgendered men as well. Patriarchy perpetuates oppressive gender roles, the gender binary, transphobia, rape culture, the political and economic subordination of women, and much more. Even those in power under patriarchy are harmed by a rigid set of rules and societal expectations. Men are expected to adhere to strict ideas of masculinity that limit how masculine identified people can act, can feel, and how they express those feelings.
A white supremacist is a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races. There are different forms of white supremacy and while white supremacist groups may disagree with one another on various political points, their overall ideology is the same. White supremacist ideology filters into everyday discourse due to the US being steeped in settler colonialism, displacement, and brutal economic systems like slavery and mass incarceration. Proving this is beyond the scope of this paper, but literature on the topic is plentiful.
Massshooting.org suggests a mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot in a shooting spree. Using that definition means that from January 1st, 2013 to November 12th, 2017 there have been 1,901 mass shootings in the United States. Of those, 307 happened just this year, 41 of which fit the FBI’s definition of a mass murder. While a mass shooting has no single definition (none even offered from governmental sources) the commonly accepted one is three or more people shot in a single incident. A mass murder is defined by the FBI as four or more persons killed during an event with no “cooling off” period between the killings. This definition does not specify weapons used and can include the death of the shooter, which along with the lack of government tracking of mass shooters makes it difficult to accurately define mass shooters and determine how many mass shooters there have been in the United States.
Mass shooters are most commonly white men, though an exact percentage is difficult to establish because of the flexibility of offered definitions. Mother Jones claims white men make up 54% of mass shooters in the United States. There are others, like Grant Duwe, who disagree with this number. Duwe is the author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History and according to his research white men actually make up 63% of mass shooters in the country. Since there is no government agency that tracks mass shootings there is no answer for what the exact percentage is of mass shooters who are white men, but the trend is very clear. With white men making up 31% of the US population but constituting a ‘conservative’ 54% of mass shooters, we can infer that there is something about this specific intersection of identity influencing people to lash out in this particular way.
Motives for crimes are always hard to determine, especially in instances of mass shootings where it is relatively common for the shooter to be one of the casualties. Without testimony of some kind, we are left with psychosocial explanations for their actions. We will go into some individual cases below in an attempt to tease out various reasons for their actions before looking at a larger datasets.
There is a long history in this country of blaming mass shootings on mental illness. It has long been the go-to scapegoat for nationwide media coverage after any mass shooting to speculate whether or not shooters are mentally ill; recently President Trump made a statement about a recent mass shooting in Texas pointing to mental health as the problem. "Mental health is your problem here. This was a very, based on preliminary reports, this was a very deranged individual, a lot of problems over a long period of time. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries," Experts in the field disagree, not to say that mentally ill people do not commit mass shootings but rather that people with mental illnesses are actually less likely to commit mass shootings than people without mental illnesses. Additionally, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services people with mental illness are ten times more likely to be victims of violent crime.
“Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum, less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.”
Then there are reasons for mass shootings commonly discussed, but always ignored. When media organizations show the shooters face, make them out to be an anti-hero, or give 24-hour coverage of the event, it dramatically increases the chance of copycat murders. “We find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past. On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13 days, and each incident incites at least 0.30 new incidents.” Though it wasn’t the first school shooting, the mass and intensive coverage of the Columbine shooting ‘popularized’ the case to a degree that nearly every picked-on youth in the United States heard what happened in grisley detail at some point, and the copycat echoes it cast caused the event to live on for new generations to look at as a possible solution to their problems.
The most common venue for a shooting is the workplace. These cases are often preceded by a disciplinary action or firing by an employer. The shooter often initially targets management in the workplace or those who they view as responsible for their problems in some way. Class anger is a feature not often analyzed in these cases, but in a period with low union penetration in private industry and existing unions largely unable or unwilling to alleviate workplace stressors, workers are lashing out in individual acts of terrorism. In later charts this will be referred to as proletarian terrorism.
San Francisco, CA, UPS Shooting
Jimmy Lam began shooting specific coworkers during a wednesday meeting. He shot most inside the building, but followed two outside. Over a dozen escaped by flagging down a passing bus. The Teamsters local representative claimed that prior to the shooting he had filed an overtime grievance, a common occurrence at UPS according to the local representative and many other UPS employees.
One strong relationship noticed in the Mother Jones dataset is how many of the shootings feature men lashing out after an argument with a woman, often in a residence or workplace. They often feature men yelling slurs at women they target, or target places women congregate for healthcare. Much as class terrorism is explored here, patriarchal terrorism will be as well.
Planned Parenthood, Colorado Springs, Colorado
On November 27, 2015, Robert Lewis Dear, Jr walked up to a Planned Parenthood and began shooting women seeking medical care. He claimed he was a ‘warrior for the babies’, referring to Planned Parenthood’s abortion services. This is not the sole attack on an abortion provider; there have been 11 successful and 26 attempted politically-motivated murders on doctors who provide abortion services, often committed by those espousing white nationalist or christian extremist (or both) politics. Both movements find purchase in the ‘Quiverfull’ movement, a christian nationalist position advocating women to give birth to many children to raise an army for god. This position, among others, was espoused by the ‘Army of God,’ a loose-knit christian terrorist organization responsible for several bombings and assassinations in the 1990s and 2000s.
While most mass shooters don’t explicitly tell us they had racial motivations for their attack, some do. The ambient culture being white supremacist, we should not be surprised to find this rule enforced by terrorism.
Sikh Temple, Oak Creek, Wisconsin
On August 5th, 2012 white supremacist Wade Michael Page went on a shooting spree inside a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Six people were fatally shot and four more were wounded before Page committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Oak Creek police did not speak on whether this was a hate crime, but it was treated as a domestic terror incident and promptly handed over to the FBI for investigation. While the police and FBI investigated possible ties to white supremacist groups and racial motivations, Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards declined to speculate on the motive behind the attack, saying "I don't know why, and I don't know that we'll ever know, because when he died, that died with him what his motive was or what he was thinking."
Despite the statement made by the Oak Creek police chief it is fair to assume that race played some part in Page’s actions. He was reportedly a member of the white supremacist group the Hammerskins (or Hammerskin Nation) with ties to other white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Page was a member of multiple white power bands and the founder of another. He had white power tattoos on his arms, further showing his ties to white supremacist groups. A former friend said that Page would often talk about an impending “racial holy war” though it isn’t clear exactly what that meant.
Mother Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, South Carolina
Around nine am on June seventeenth, 2015 Dylan Roof began shooting the congregation of the predominantly-black Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church he was visiting. Shortly before the shooting both the victims and the shooter were participating in a Bible study. When the members of the church were praying Roof began shooting and using racial epitaphs. He also spoke to the victims as he killed them. “‘I have to do it.’ He then shared his grievances: ‘You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.’ Then he let off a fusillade of bullets.” Nine people, including state senator Clementa C. Pickney, were killed and three others injured. Roof intended on committing suicide but when he ran out of ammunition he instead fled the scene and was arrested the next morning in Shelby, North Carolina.
Before the shooting occurred Roof had expressed to friends and family members the intent to kill people, specifically to attack the College of Charleston. His threats were not taken seriously, despite his open racism and connections to other white supremacists. Roof posted photos online of himself wearing emblems popular among white supremacists. On the website registered to Roof where he posted his blatantly racist manifesto there also exists a photo of him posing with a confederate flag and a handgun. When he was arrested Roof confessed to the shooting and that his intentions had been to start a race war.
His white supremacist manifesto stated: "I would like to make it crystal clear, I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed." Roof was tried by the federal government and by the state, he has been sentenced to death and life in prison without parole, respectively.
Discussed previously, several journalists publishing at Mother Jones have been tracking mass shootings with their own criteria. Influenced by the FBI’s definition of mass shooting, they restrict it further, specifying 3 or more fatalities. They also attempt to track the locations mass shootings take place. Examining the shooting venue for the category labeled ‘Other’ reveals many of these took place in the same types of spaces, so this category was further processed for this paper. The data that follows is based off this modified dataset.
Workplaces, retail spaces such as malls, and schools are the top locations chosen for mass shootings. These locations are often densely-packed, and with the recent exception of schools, have no established defense against this type of attack. This is not to imply this is the main reason mass shooters choose these locations. Workplace shootings, for example, often feature a disgruntled or former employee attempting to attack a boss or manager. These three locations are places people, including the shooter, commonly spend their time. Much as how most car accidents occur within 10 miles of the home because that’s most of where you spend your time driving, most mass shooters choose places near where they live, work, or go to school.
Mass murder has been a feature of American life since settlers visited the continent. Settler violence throughout history has been well documented in nearly every city and town in the country. Both the victims and perpetrators of these massacres look fairly similar to the ones we see today - white men attacking black and brown men and women. Domestically we rarely call this process act terrorism or warfare but it is possible that by shifting our understanding of this country to be one of constantly warring classes and nations, these ‘isolated, incomprehensible events’ make far more sense than we’re willing to speak to in popular discourse.
While looking at only mass shootings for an indicator of the level of political terrorism ongoing in a country will necessarily be a ‘low ball,’ due to many politically-motivated attacks being left out (Planned Parenthood bombings and 9/11 being possible examples), using this type of lens on the previously analyzed dataset may prove illuminating.
Some explanation is in order. White and Black terrorism are labeled such because they feature either white nationalists enacting their beliefs like Dylann Roof or black people claiming to fight white supremacy like Colin Ferguson. While the vast majority of mass shooters are white, relatively few claim to be more influenced by white supremacist ideology that exists in mainstream American discourse. This does not mean one cannot claim white supremacy and the historical legacy of settlerism has an impact on mass shootings, merely that shooters weren’t intentionally expressing white supremacist terrorism while engaged in their attack. Heterosexual terrorism is a category made up of cases where the shooter blamed or targeted LGBTQ populations. While this could also be considered patriarchal violence, it is kept separate because none of the shooters seemed to focus on women or feminized victims. Class categories are also included in this analysis because it sheds light on additional instances of people violently acting out class interests. For instance, lumpenproletariat terrorism is a category determined by the shooter focusing on police as an attempted victim, and petty bourgeois is a category made up of people who got cut out of deals or contracts they thought they or their business would get. Youth terrorism is much like proletarian terrorism, which we discussed before, but often has revenge as a motive. Violence is visited on schoolmates, teachers, and occasionally family members. Patriarchal terrorism cuts across many venues, but often features a shooter initially targeting a specific woman, sometimes due to rejection or the end of a relationship, or targeting a women's healthcare facility or a business frequented by women. Often shooters will say derogatory remarks about their victims mid-shooting or immediately afterward. Unknown is a rather large category, which obscures what we can say clearly. We will never know why most shooters claim to commit their crimes due to the relatively few who tell us. However, here we have attempted to shed light on possible reasons, using class based and feminist analyses that are often ignored by mainstream reporters and policymakers.
Citations
1) J Sakai. Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2014.
2) John E Douglas. Crime Classification Manual. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006: p. 13
3) Mark Follman. US Mass Shootings. San Francisco: Mother Jones, 2017.
4) Jonathan M Metzl, MD, PhD. Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms. New York: American Journal of Public Health, Vol 105, No 2, 2015.
5) Sherry Towers. Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings. San Francisco: Public Library of Science, 2015.
6) Joe Allen. Going Brown. New York: Jacobin, 2017.
7) Chauncey Devega. The Plague of Angry White Men. San Francisco: Salon, 2015.
This will be a brief attempt to discuss mass shooters in the United States, causes for trends of mass shooters, and who mass shooters are. We hypothesize that a combination of patriarchy and white supremacy in America have created the conditions for the prevalence of mass shooters in the country. Before we go into the data, we will look at very brief definitions of patriarchy, white supremacy, and what a mass shooter technically is.
Patriarchy is a sociopolitical and cultural system that values masculinity over femininity. It is a system that not only devalues women and gender non-conforming/non-binary individuals, but cisgendered men as well. Patriarchy perpetuates oppressive gender roles, the gender binary, transphobia, rape culture, the political and economic subordination of women, and much more. Even those in power under patriarchy are harmed by a rigid set of rules and societal expectations. Men are expected to adhere to strict ideas of masculinity that limit how masculine identified people can act, can feel, and how they express those feelings.
A white supremacist is a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races. There are different forms of white supremacy and while white supremacist groups may disagree with one another on various political points, their overall ideology is the same. White supremacist ideology filters into everyday discourse due to the US being steeped in settler colonialism, displacement, and brutal economic systems like slavery and mass incarceration. Proving this is beyond the scope of this paper, but literature on the topic is plentiful.
Massshooting.org suggests a mass shooting is defined as four or more people shot in a shooting spree. Using that definition means that from January 1st, 2013 to November 12th, 2017 there have been 1,901 mass shootings in the United States. Of those, 307 happened just this year, 41 of which fit the FBI’s definition of a mass murder. While a mass shooting has no single definition (none even offered from governmental sources) the commonly accepted one is three or more people shot in a single incident. A mass murder is defined by the FBI as four or more persons killed during an event with no “cooling off” period between the killings. This definition does not specify weapons used and can include the death of the shooter, which along with the lack of government tracking of mass shooters makes it difficult to accurately define mass shooters and determine how many mass shooters there have been in the United States.
Mass shooters are most commonly white men, though an exact percentage is difficult to establish because of the flexibility of offered definitions. Mother Jones claims white men make up 54% of mass shooters in the United States. There are others, like Grant Duwe, who disagree with this number. Duwe is the author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History and according to his research white men actually make up 63% of mass shooters in the country. Since there is no government agency that tracks mass shootings there is no answer for what the exact percentage is of mass shooters who are white men, but the trend is very clear. With white men making up 31% of the US population but constituting a ‘conservative’ 54% of mass shooters, we can infer that there is something about this specific intersection of identity influencing people to lash out in this particular way.
Motives for crimes are always hard to determine, especially in instances of mass shootings where it is relatively common for the shooter to be one of the casualties. Without testimony of some kind, we are left with psychosocial explanations for their actions. We will go into some individual cases below in an attempt to tease out various reasons for their actions before looking at a larger datasets.
There is a long history in this country of blaming mass shootings on mental illness. It has long been the go-to scapegoat for nationwide media coverage after any mass shooting to speculate whether or not shooters are mentally ill; recently President Trump made a statement about a recent mass shooting in Texas pointing to mental health as the problem. "Mental health is your problem here. This was a very, based on preliminary reports, this was a very deranged individual, a lot of problems over a long period of time. We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries," Experts in the field disagree, not to say that mentally ill people do not commit mass shootings but rather that people with mental illnesses are actually less likely to commit mass shootings than people without mental illnesses. Additionally, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services people with mental illness are ten times more likely to be victims of violent crime.
“Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum, less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120,000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.”
Then there are reasons for mass shootings commonly discussed, but always ignored. When media organizations show the shooters face, make them out to be an anti-hero, or give 24-hour coverage of the event, it dramatically increases the chance of copycat murders. “We find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past. On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13 days, and each incident incites at least 0.30 new incidents.” Though it wasn’t the first school shooting, the mass and intensive coverage of the Columbine shooting ‘popularized’ the case to a degree that nearly every picked-on youth in the United States heard what happened in grisley detail at some point, and the copycat echoes it cast caused the event to live on for new generations to look at as a possible solution to their problems.
The most common venue for a shooting is the workplace. These cases are often preceded by a disciplinary action or firing by an employer. The shooter often initially targets management in the workplace or those who they view as responsible for their problems in some way. Class anger is a feature not often analyzed in these cases, but in a period with low union penetration in private industry and existing unions largely unable or unwilling to alleviate workplace stressors, workers are lashing out in individual acts of terrorism. In later charts this will be referred to as proletarian terrorism.
San Francisco, CA, UPS Shooting
Jimmy Lam began shooting specific coworkers during a wednesday meeting. He shot most inside the building, but followed two outside. Over a dozen escaped by flagging down a passing bus. The Teamsters local representative claimed that prior to the shooting he had filed an overtime grievance, a common occurrence at UPS according to the local representative and many other UPS employees.
One strong relationship noticed in the Mother Jones dataset is how many of the shootings feature men lashing out after an argument with a woman, often in a residence or workplace. They often feature men yelling slurs at women they target, or target places women congregate for healthcare. Much as class terrorism is explored here, patriarchal terrorism will be as well.
Planned Parenthood, Colorado Springs, Colorado
On November 27, 2015, Robert Lewis Dear, Jr walked up to a Planned Parenthood and began shooting women seeking medical care. He claimed he was a ‘warrior for the babies’, referring to Planned Parenthood’s abortion services. This is not the sole attack on an abortion provider; there have been 11 successful and 26 attempted politically-motivated murders on doctors who provide abortion services, often committed by those espousing white nationalist or christian extremist (or both) politics. Both movements find purchase in the ‘Quiverfull’ movement, a christian nationalist position advocating women to give birth to many children to raise an army for god. This position, among others, was espoused by the ‘Army of God,’ a loose-knit christian terrorist organization responsible for several bombings and assassinations in the 1990s and 2000s.
While most mass shooters don’t explicitly tell us they had racial motivations for their attack, some do. The ambient culture being white supremacist, we should not be surprised to find this rule enforced by terrorism.
Sikh Temple, Oak Creek, Wisconsin
On August 5th, 2012 white supremacist Wade Michael Page went on a shooting spree inside a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Six people were fatally shot and four more were wounded before Page committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Oak Creek police did not speak on whether this was a hate crime, but it was treated as a domestic terror incident and promptly handed over to the FBI for investigation. While the police and FBI investigated possible ties to white supremacist groups and racial motivations, Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards declined to speculate on the motive behind the attack, saying "I don't know why, and I don't know that we'll ever know, because when he died, that died with him what his motive was or what he was thinking."
Despite the statement made by the Oak Creek police chief it is fair to assume that race played some part in Page’s actions. He was reportedly a member of the white supremacist group the Hammerskins (or Hammerskin Nation) with ties to other white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. Page was a member of multiple white power bands and the founder of another. He had white power tattoos on his arms, further showing his ties to white supremacist groups. A former friend said that Page would often talk about an impending “racial holy war” though it isn’t clear exactly what that meant.
Mother Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, South Carolina
Around nine am on June seventeenth, 2015 Dylan Roof began shooting the congregation of the predominantly-black Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church he was visiting. Shortly before the shooting both the victims and the shooter were participating in a Bible study. When the members of the church were praying Roof began shooting and using racial epitaphs. He also spoke to the victims as he killed them. “‘I have to do it.’ He then shared his grievances: ‘You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.’ Then he let off a fusillade of bullets.” Nine people, including state senator Clementa C. Pickney, were killed and three others injured. Roof intended on committing suicide but when he ran out of ammunition he instead fled the scene and was arrested the next morning in Shelby, North Carolina.
Before the shooting occurred Roof had expressed to friends and family members the intent to kill people, specifically to attack the College of Charleston. His threats were not taken seriously, despite his open racism and connections to other white supremacists. Roof posted photos online of himself wearing emblems popular among white supremacists. On the website registered to Roof where he posted his blatantly racist manifesto there also exists a photo of him posing with a confederate flag and a handgun. When he was arrested Roof confessed to the shooting and that his intentions had been to start a race war.
His white supremacist manifesto stated: "I would like to make it crystal clear, I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed." Roof was tried by the federal government and by the state, he has been sentenced to death and life in prison without parole, respectively.
Discussed previously, several journalists publishing at Mother Jones have been tracking mass shootings with their own criteria. Influenced by the FBI’s definition of mass shooting, they restrict it further, specifying 3 or more fatalities. They also attempt to track the locations mass shootings take place. Examining the shooting venue for the category labeled ‘Other’ reveals many of these took place in the same types of spaces, so this category was further processed for this paper. The data that follows is based off this modified dataset.
Workplaces, retail spaces such as malls, and schools are the top locations chosen for mass shootings. These locations are often densely-packed, and with the recent exception of schools, have no established defense against this type of attack. This is not to imply this is the main reason mass shooters choose these locations. Workplace shootings, for example, often feature a disgruntled or former employee attempting to attack a boss or manager. These three locations are places people, including the shooter, commonly spend their time. Much as how most car accidents occur within 10 miles of the home because that’s most of where you spend your time driving, most mass shooters choose places near where they live, work, or go to school.
Mass murder has been a feature of American life since settlers visited the continent. Settler violence throughout history has been well documented in nearly every city and town in the country. Both the victims and perpetrators of these massacres look fairly similar to the ones we see today - white men attacking black and brown men and women. Domestically we rarely call this process act terrorism or warfare but it is possible that by shifting our understanding of this country to be one of constantly warring classes and nations, these ‘isolated, incomprehensible events’ make far more sense than we’re willing to speak to in popular discourse.
While looking at only mass shootings for an indicator of the level of political terrorism ongoing in a country will necessarily be a ‘low ball,’ due to many politically-motivated attacks being left out (Planned Parenthood bombings and 9/11 being possible examples), using this type of lens on the previously analyzed dataset may prove illuminating.
Some explanation is in order. White and Black terrorism are labeled such because they feature either white nationalists enacting their beliefs like Dylann Roof or black people claiming to fight white supremacy like Colin Ferguson. While the vast majority of mass shooters are white, relatively few claim to be more influenced by white supremacist ideology that exists in mainstream American discourse. This does not mean one cannot claim white supremacy and the historical legacy of settlerism has an impact on mass shootings, merely that shooters weren’t intentionally expressing white supremacist terrorism while engaged in their attack. Heterosexual terrorism is a category made up of cases where the shooter blamed or targeted LGBTQ populations. While this could also be considered patriarchal violence, it is kept separate because none of the shooters seemed to focus on women or feminized victims. Class categories are also included in this analysis because it sheds light on additional instances of people violently acting out class interests. For instance, lumpenproletariat terrorism is a category determined by the shooter focusing on police as an attempted victim, and petty bourgeois is a category made up of people who got cut out of deals or contracts they thought they or their business would get. Youth terrorism is much like proletarian terrorism, which we discussed before, but often has revenge as a motive. Violence is visited on schoolmates, teachers, and occasionally family members. Patriarchal terrorism cuts across many venues, but often features a shooter initially targeting a specific woman, sometimes due to rejection or the end of a relationship, or targeting a women's healthcare facility or a business frequented by women. Often shooters will say derogatory remarks about their victims mid-shooting or immediately afterward. Unknown is a rather large category, which obscures what we can say clearly. We will never know why most shooters claim to commit their crimes due to the relatively few who tell us. However, here we have attempted to shed light on possible reasons, using class based and feminist analyses that are often ignored by mainstream reporters and policymakers.
Citations
1) J Sakai. Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat. Montreal: Kersplebedeb Publishing, 2014.
2) John E Douglas. Crime Classification Manual. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006: p. 13
3) Mark Follman. US Mass Shootings. San Francisco: Mother Jones, 2017.
4) Jonathan M Metzl, MD, PhD. Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms. New York: American Journal of Public Health, Vol 105, No 2, 2015.
5) Sherry Towers. Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings. San Francisco: Public Library of Science, 2015.
6) Joe Allen. Going Brown. New York: Jacobin, 2017.
7) Chauncey Devega. The Plague of Angry White Men. San Francisco: Salon, 2015.
Edited by JohnBeige ()
karphead
karphead
Post rating:
+
front this piece
kamelred
kamelred
Post rating:
+
im not sure that i disagree with the general thrust of your argument, but there's something pretty obscenely dishonest about the way you're cutting up the numbers here to make the case for disproportionality in the racial makeup of mass shootings. like you can't cite the rate of white males in the general population and then turn around and compare that to their rate of participation in a crime that women don't actually seem to commit very often (maybe 1-5%?).
im generally skeptical of the entire argument form that goes: "x is y percent of the general population, but a shocking z percent of the problem" but here you've got a particularly difficult case based on the numbers you've cited. like its clear that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of mass shootings, but its extremely unclear that this is true of whites vs. non-whites. in fact if you were to just consider race in isolation it would seem that white people are less likely to be mass shooters than their general share of the population, which obviously isn't the case you're making. its also not clearly articulated why the compound of the two is the main point of entry to an analysis, other than the fact that it was fashionable to say so in the blog circuit for a few months.
like there are obvious links between white supremacy and mass shootings, but this is a very perilous way to articulate them and im not sure any kind of demographic breakdown is going to win that case, even if you could generally expect to get away just discounting a full third of all mass shootings without comment (some of these were very high profile and are bound to come up). i realize that this isn't like a big thesis and there are a whole bunch of problems with the quality of data and especially the quality of definitions that need to be further sorted (are church, school, office, public, and home mass shootings really all the same kind of crime? does it make sense to study them as crimes in a narrow, cop-drama kind of way?) but just as a question of rhetorical clarity you should take a look at the paragraph where you deliver all the percentages because right now it reads like either a pretty serious oversight or a very bad faith presentation of facts.
im generally skeptical of the entire argument form that goes: "x is y percent of the general population, but a shocking z percent of the problem" but here you've got a particularly difficult case based on the numbers you've cited. like its clear that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of mass shootings, but its extremely unclear that this is true of whites vs. non-whites. in fact if you were to just consider race in isolation it would seem that white people are less likely to be mass shooters than their general share of the population, which obviously isn't the case you're making. its also not clearly articulated why the compound of the two is the main point of entry to an analysis, other than the fact that it was fashionable to say so in the blog circuit for a few months.
like there are obvious links between white supremacy and mass shootings, but this is a very perilous way to articulate them and im not sure any kind of demographic breakdown is going to win that case, even if you could generally expect to get away just discounting a full third of all mass shootings without comment (some of these were very high profile and are bound to come up). i realize that this isn't like a big thesis and there are a whole bunch of problems with the quality of data and especially the quality of definitions that need to be further sorted (are church, school, office, public, and home mass shootings really all the same kind of crime? does it make sense to study them as crimes in a narrow, cop-drama kind of way?) but just as a question of rhetorical clarity you should take a look at the paragraph where you deliver all the percentages because right now it reads like either a pretty serious oversight or a very bad faith presentation of facts.
Populares
Populares
Post rating:
+++++
You want to stop mass shootings? Get rid of the gamers simple as that.
[account deactivated]
trakfactri
trakfactri
Post rating:
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JohnBeige posted:Roof posted photos online of himself wearing emblems popular among white supremacists.
There's an obscure term in the academic studies for mass shooters that might have fallen out of fashion: "pseudocommando." One of the common elements with mass shooters is how the men pose with guns with dead stares at the camera. The photos are obscene and ridiculous, but for the men it's a way of constructing this alter-ego where they become -- in their own mind -- an apocalyptic warrior for a totalizing cause. They have to see themselves whether in a mirror or in a photograph.
This idea of being reborn as a warrior is also essential to fascism, and is frequently used in U.S. military propaganda to lure idealistic young men into the war machine. One of the outcomes of destroying one's self and turning into an automaton dedicated to destruction of other living things is that the subject can overcome their own alienation, at least for a moment, and they feel really good about themselves: they have a purpose for the first time in their lives, although this comes with appalling consequences for their victims. So in one sense I see mass shootings in America as an expression of the society's militarism turned inwards.