Opinions re Mass Shootings, based on Tulsa shooting, 2022-06-2

In My Humble Opinion
22

Without looking it up, my considered guess would be that you could look at the state of pretty much any country with high rates of unemployment among the similar demographic, and – mostly without the firearm component – you’ll find trouble.

I spent a few months in Central America in the middle of the last decade. My sense was that it was the time of The Rise of Women.

Which is/was phenomenal, but – to my earlier point – it triggered a zero sum game mentality in so many of the men who felt denuded of their existentially important manhood.

Homelessness, (often due to) severe alcoholism and substance abuse, and abandonment of wives and families abounded. Numbers were increasing precipitously.

So … while I doubt I’d like Ms. Stuckey, I’d also concede that somewhere in her retrograde shtick may be a kernel of truth.

23

I know there are a lot of factors here, but I think this may be a factor unrelated to most of the other mass shootings.
I noticed that the shooter had recently had back surgery that resulted in pain that wasn’t being addressed effectively. It’s very common for black people to have their pain dismissed and getting accused of drug seeking. I don’t know if that was happening, but the odds are pretty good

24

I thought about that.

And – while this simple fact alone doesn’t preclude that having happened – this is the surgeon who operated on the murderer, and was then murdered by the patient who complained of ongoing post-operative pain:

ETA: It’s important to note that he sounds like a remarkable man:

25

Excellent cite, thank you.

That is certainly one issue.

There is that, but there is also Mitch McConnell’s desire to not let Biden have any victories. Without him, we might be able to pass some mild laws.

We need to get out the vote this upcoming General election.

26

I’m sorry to criticize a post by you, @ThelmaLou , I otherwise always admire your work here, but this sounds terrible to me. Here is some selective quoting:

How about promoting responsible attitudes towards sex and women?

I don’t see demonizing of masculine strength. I do see a lot of name-calling and fear whenever a man isn’t properly “manly.”

Are they now. Most people are morally deficit. A very revealing accusation.

What is the supposed connection between being fatherless and purposeless? Why is she demonizing single mothers?

About as good as thoughts and prayers, in my humble opinion.

27

As stated in the long Atlantic piece I quoted above, it is young men who need (among other things) leadership, guidance, structure, safety, support, and non-destructive ways to channel their energy. God knows, young women need these things, too, and have their own battles to fight, but it’s boys-- loners, outsiders, misfits-- who are committing mass murders, not girls.

When Vanderbilt University psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl learned that the perpetrator of the Uvalde, Tex., school massacre was a young man barely out of adolescence, it was hard not to think about the peculiarities of the maturing male brain.

Salvador Rolando Ramos had just turned 18, eerily close in age to Nikolas Cruz, who had been 19 when he shot up a school in Parkland, Fla. And to Adam Lanza, 20, when he did the same in Newtown, Conn. To Seung-Hui Cho, 23, at Virginia Tech. And to Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, in Columbine, Colo.

Teen and young adult males have long stood out from other subgroups for their impulsive behavior. They are far more reckless and prone to violence than their counterparts in other age groups, and their leading causes of death includes fights, accidents, driving too fast, or, as Metzl put it, “other impulsive kinds of acts.”
…

28

But again, a lot of the same same things are happening in Canada. Divorce, decline of churches, decline of community organizations, increasing isolation, “demonization” of traditional masculinity, it’s all happening here. Perhaps not quite to the extent as in the US, but not fundamentally different, either. And remember, Canada consumes a whole lot of US cultural output. Probably 90% of our TV comes from the US, and so we see the same things as US citizens.

But Canada still doesn’t come anywhere close to the number of gun deaths/mass shootings per capita as the US.

29

I think they’re onto something here, actually, re: promoting opportunities for wayward young men to be doing something productive that can channel their frustration with all the shit that accompanies being a young man, and no, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to lean into the “be a real man” angle if the message is “a real man doesn’t need to use violence.” You don’t even need to bring up the buzzword of “toxic masculinity” at all, if you just lead with the examples of the non-toxic kind.

Pissed off and angry about your life? Get a guitar. Learn to write songs. Make friends with some other guys who have some things in common with you; start a band. The girls won’t give you the time of day? Fuck, why do you think guys start bands? Play loud, scream your emotions out, the girls will dig it, and nobody needs to get killed. The bonds you’ll form with people you play in bands with are like no other feeling on earth; even if there’s drama and struggle (it’s inevitable), you’ll learn (hopefully) some important lessons about life.

OK, not everyone wants to get into playing music. Fair enough. There’s other things to do. Someone in one of these other recent threads about the shootings, I can’t remember who, brought up the example of welding as something you can do to have a sense of power and accomplishment. In this case it was specifically noted as an alternative to the feeling of power that comes from firing a gun. That post (and I wish I could remember who made it) was legit true. I’ve been shooting guns my whole adult life; I do own guns (which are stored in a safe) - last year I learned to weld at a construction job I was working over the summer, and ever since then, I’d rather be welding than shooting any day. It’s a badass thing to do. You’re shaping and forming and joining solid steel…once you get decent at it, you feel like God! (I mean, you should check your ego at the door to an extent, because there is a learning curve and there’s always someone who can do it better than you) but still, you know what I mean.

Learn to build shit. Learn to conquer the environment. (Well, without harming it, but again you know what I mean, lol…)

There’s a really popular Youtuber named Andrew Camarata. Look him up, he’s got millions of devoted subscribers. He lives in a remote property in upstate New York and he’s just a young guy who restores heavy equipment like excavators and other earthmovers and records himself doing shitloads of landscaping projects and tinkering with machines. He’s got a fanatical following, he’s become a major influencer. Tons of people who watch his videos are inspired to work on DIY projects of their own. For the price of the rifle the asshole in Texas killed all those kids with, you can buy a mig welder, a 3-ton jack, and at least a handful of decent power tools - probably more than a handful if you poke around on Marketplace and get secondhand gear.

In any event, it’s easy to throw out these suggestions, it’s harder to figure out an effective way to PROMOTE them to the guys who need to hear it. Mentorship programs? Local callouts and meetups? Nationwide PSAs, social media campaigns…while I don’t know exactly how to do it, I’m sure it could be done, and for a lot less money than some of the other things our government regularly shells out tax dollars for.

30

I have often suspected that narcissistic tendencies go along with mass shooters. This is something that can be picked out in a very young child but has to be dealt with at a very young age. Lack of accountability is a major cause here.

31

Unfortunately, those are exactly the sort of social programs that the right doesn’t want to pay for. I mean, there’s a lot of social programs the right doesn’t want to pay for, but when they derisively talk about “midnight basketball” that covers the entire genre of self improvement programs that are intended to give kids and young adults something constructive to do with their time.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, I just don’t know how it gets sold.

32

That may be the case, but not all narcissists become mass shooters. We could deal with a bit less narcissism in our world, but treating anyone who thinks too highly of themselves as a potential mass murderer may do more harm than good.

I remember after Columbine, when it was bandied about that the shooters were loners and anti-social, rather than find ways of reaching out to those people and finding a way to make them feel included, they were even more shunned and vilified.

33

NPD goes far beyond just having an exaggerated opinion of themselves. These are very sick people and they can be dangerous. As competition grows for recognition in our society the narcs are finding themselves more and more isolated and angry. Attention is what they crave and some of them will go to any length to get it.

34

I just wanted to bump this excellent response.

It’s easy to point to Canada or Switzerland and conclude that, since they have lots of guns and relatively few homicides or mass shootings, the guns aren’t the problem.
But when we go beyond the simple picture of number of guns, and look at the differences: who can obtain a gun, what kind of gun they can own, other requirements, such as training, gun safes, no open carry etc, it becomes pretty obvious what kind of things america should be doing.

35

I don’t disagree, I’m just saying that if it becomes “common wisdom” that narcissists are potential mass murderers, then anyone who thinks highly of themselves will be treated as one by peers and authorities.

Mass murderers are rare, and confirmation bias is common.

36

Yes I do agree with you there, statistically they are very rare. It would be nice if we could find ways to pick these potential mass murderers out at a younger age and intervene somehow. May not be possible.

37

And people are assholes. Our workplace made everyone watch one of those run/hide/fight videos (valiantly protecting…. Corporate from future lawsuits), and the only real result was the further ostracism of a coworker with OCD who’d go out of his way to avoid stepping over cracks in the floor. Not just the line workers: college degree managers saw him as a threat. (When in fact his OCD made him one of the best heavy equipment operators in the place)

38

The majority of gun deaths in this country are suicides, and those deaths are hugely skewed male. There was another recent article possibly in the Atlantic, which proposed that the majority of mass murders are also suicides; it is common that the shooter kills himself after his carnage, and that was his plan all along.

Here’s my suggestion: compulsory community service for all young men between the ages of 16 and 24. This would be all kinds of community service, from ESL tutoring to building paths and bridges in parks. You get paid, you get medical and mental health services, and you must put in at least two years. You can be tagged to start your service at 16 if you are ‘red-flagged’ or you just want to get it over with and go to college, and you can stay in until you’re 24 if you want to. Learning a skilled trade is an option.

Young men only, this is not co-ed. There could be a similar organization for young women but separate. The point is that young men need a rite of passage into respected manhood that is arduous, even dangerous, and they need sane adult male guidance to do it.

Generally, our society has devolved into meaninglessness and despair, with less and less connection to the things which keep people whole – useful work, family ties, a community of friends, living in the natural world. And it appears to me that men in general are a lot less resilient than women. They are taught to bottle their feelings until they explode, violence is glorified everywhere, and in capitalism everyone is disposable. Yes, we have a bizarre and utterly abhorrent culture of violent death which we call gun culture, but that is a result, not a cause.

39

This suggestion would never survive the lawsuits on gender discrimination.

40

Sounds like a good program to have as an option.

Not sure I’m sold on the compulsory part.

I think that there are some communities that this could be true in. I wouldn’t go so far as to “generalize” that to society as a whole.

I’d say that men are expected to be more resilient than women, and often don’t live up to that.

I don’t know that I would agree either that we have a culture of violent death, not that that is what is known as gun culture.

There are certainly problems in our society, and you’ve hit on some of them. But your conclusions and your solutions are simplistic and misguided.

41

Just a couple of thoughts on the Canadian context. I suspect that a major difference between us and the US is that we (Canucks) are almost indifferent to guns for the most part. We certainly don’t have this weird fetish or worship associated with them.

In all honesty, regarding Americans and guns, most of us just don’t understand it or get it.