One Undeniable Factor In Gun Violence: Men

by Jill Filipovic,

Another mass shooting in America, another round of questions. Was the shooter a terrorist or a lone wolf (read: “Is he Muslim or not?”). Did he have a political agenda? Was he mentally ill? Why would someone do this?

A question we never ask: Was the shooter a man?

The answer is always the same.

Of 134 mass shooters who’ve preyed on Americans since 1966, just three have been women, making mass shooting a 98% male enterprise. More broadly, 90% of murderers are men — firearms are used in close to 70 percent of homicides.

Much has been written about the relationship between masculinity and guns: how gun companies target advertising campaigns to men seeking macho status, how a startlingly high proportion of mass shooters have a history of abusing women, how more than half of mass shootings involve a man killing (or trying to kill) an intimate and taking others out along with her. Indeed, stories are surfacing about the Las Vegas shooter publicly berating his girlfriend. But the reality of American men and guns is as much about a hyper-masculine fetishization of murder-toys as it is about tribal identity, a deepening identification of self and clan that radicalizes marginal views and magnifies personal entitlement and social distrust. This is a communal masculine ideology, not an individual one. There is no lone wolf. There is a rabid wolf pack.

Male gun owners are more likely to bind their recreational lives and identities to their guns and “gun culture”: they hunt, go shooting, watch gun-related shows in TV, and seek out more gun-related recreation and information. This intersects with other aspects of identity: Ninety-one percent of Republican gun owners agree that “the right to own guns is essential to their own sense of freedom.” White men are much more likely to own guns than non-whites, and the “super-owners” amassing arsenals of weapons are particularly likely to be white, male and conservative.

In other words, there is less a broad American fixation with guns than there is a subculture of mostly white, mostly male, mostly conservative gun obsessives.

These are the same men we have been hearing a lot about since the election of Donald Trump. They are, we have heard, angry and displaced. A global economy that forces them to compete not just with other high-school-educated white men but with men and women around the world means their limited skill sets are not as valuable as they once were, and they are no longer able to work a blue-collar job and comfortably support a family — this is apparently vastly unfair (the low wages certainly are, but it’s telling the sense of injustice seems to be predicated on an assumption that white male American workers have an inherent claim to well-paying work, while others are “taking” jobs that were someone else’s birthright).

It is undeniable that more guns mean more gun deaths. But we choose to let this ecosystem thrive, even as we bleed out inside it. We comfort ourselves with vapidities about “lone wolves,” these unpredictable animals whose behavior cannot be restrained or tamed. How many of them have to strike before we realize there’s a whole pack out there, some of them preying but all of them eating their fill, while the rest of us cower?

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