Something like 98 percent of mass shooters in the United States have been men. If I hear about a mass shooting I can be pretty confident in my assumption it was a “he” that did it.
I know testosterone makes men more aggressive on average than women but it’s pretty amazing that we’re talking like a 50:1 gender ratio with these kinds of crimes.
Your first step should be looking up the statistics on other sorts of crimes (heck, why not just go for activities in general) and then you can see if there is some sort of pattern.
Most serial killers are also male, and homicides in general are about 90 percent male.
As far as I am aware, no one has yet been able to come up with a good explanation as to why this is. Testosterone and male aggression has been tossed around as a contributing factor. Another theory is that back in the days of Og the Caveman, men tended to do the hunting and fighting while women raised children and tended crops and such. The more violent men were more likely to win in tribal wars, leading to a genetic predisposition to violence in men that is not present in women. Or so the theory goes, anyway. Not my field of expertise, but I believe that the theory is far from proven at this point. However, it has been noted that chimpanzees also engage in “tribal” warfare, and chimps who commit violent acts tend to be rewarded with greater status among that chimp’s “tribe”. Male chimps are also known to be more violent than female chimps.
There is also a difference not just in who kills, but how they kill. Men are significantly more likely to use firearms in both homicides and serial murders, where women rarely use firearms and tend to use methods like poisoning or arson instead.
Some of it is also cultural. Back in the days of Ward and June Cleaver, the woman was expected to be subservient to her man and spent her day taking care of the house and children. As culture has changed and women have taken on more roles that were traditionally male, violent crimes committed by women have also risen. Males still commit the largest percentage of violent crimes, but the percentages for women have risen significantly in the past 50 years or so.
Suicide also has a gender gap. Two gaps, actually.
Women are more likely to attempt suicide, but the attempts often fail.
Men are less likely to attempt suicide, but when they do, it’s more likely to be fatal.
Males appear to be more predisposed to violence. Primates in general are violent towards their own kind and certainly for the large apes the violence is mostly male-based. Not surprising that we follow that pattern too.
I’ve read stuff about how the violent aspect of testosterone is just incidental and what its really all about is dominance, or just plain winning or the appearance of winning. I watch my younger son and daughter interact all the time if they start hitting each other my son is more aggressive and HAS to get the last hit in, if they play a video game he has to win at all costs and will turn the game off sometimes if he doesn’t. If they play a game with toys he wants to make all the rules and be in charge, if they get into an argument he was to be the one that is correct.
How do you define male?
Are you implying that men and women are different?
Working with this, statistically, men are more likely to use guns in suicide, women more likely to use other methods: pills, cutting, drowning, for example, that are less likely to succeed, take longer, and are more painful. Why do women want that with their suicide? Culturally, women just don’t like guns.
Plenty of women use guns for hobby purposes, and hunt as a hobby. But just in numbers, its less than men. Look at the extra scorn heaped on those news stories highlighting women who are trophy hunters – culturally, we expect women to not want to use guns.
I never said women shouldn’t use guns, or physically aren’t as good with guns as men, or other sexist foo. But culturally, with all the options available to men and women for sports and hobbies, guns just end up statistically less popular for women than for men. And so gun crime is less for women. To me, it actually seems awful – if a crime or suicide is to be committed, it should be as easy as possible, why make it harder on yourself?
Anecdote time: I’ve fired a gun once my entire life. The recoil was, for my spare (read that scrawny) male frame so incredibly significant, that I didn’t want to do it more. With more upper body development, and more practice, I could bear it better but … its not a sport and hobby I want to pursue. And women, generally tend to be more spare in upper body strength. A woman doesn’t have to be built like Ronda Rousey to grab and throw me, but in general, if something is slight less likely to be easy to, it can end up significantly less likely when it requires additional planning, training and opportunity.
If something is present in basically every culture around the world from the beginning of history and it is also very much present in our closest animal relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) and is not cultural, it is human. Men are more violent than women and at the extreme of violence it is almost all men.
Is it genetic or culture?
Historically, men go to war. They are expected to kill the spiders. Is this predisposed or is it taught?
A theory is that men have to prove themselves of worthy of procreation, so men are more prone to dangerous and risk taking behaviors. Female sex cells are more valuable than male sex cells, so men are more prone to doing dangerous things to try to attract a mate. If 90% of the men die, society will go on. Those remaining 10% of men impregnate all the women and society picks up where it left off. If 90% of the women die, then the women can only have 1 kid a year each, and society will take a long time to recover. Plus the men will probably destroy each other trying to compete for those remaining women.
Its probably a major reason why the wage gap may never truly disappear. Even as women grow in education and work experience, men will always have a stronger willingness to work more dangerous jobs, work longer hours, etc. due to this unconscious desire to prove they are worth mating with.
Men are also on average better athletes (male world records tend to be better than female world records), while women are on average more pro-social.
This specific point, athletics, may incorporate some selection bias.
Women are actually superior to men in some kinds of long-term endurance, as well as generally having a lower center of mass (important in some things like judo), and there are probably other traits at which they exceed men. We just don’t have nearly as many recognized athletic pursuits that depend on the traits women are better at. Whether that’s because of the patriarchy making the rules, or simply that long-endurance, low-center-of-mass activities make poorer spectator sports, I don’t know.
I’m not sure that the gun ownership aspect is necessarily applicable. Although about twice as many men own guns as women, the ratio of male mass shooters to female is much more than double. If it was just based on gun ownership, I would expect the gender ratio of mass shooters to be proportional to gun ownership in some way.
Even without guns, there are plenty of ways to commit mass murder. If someone didn’t want to use a gun, they could use bombs, chemicals, fire, etc. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case even for men. Why does a mass murdering man use a gun instead of a pipe bomb, car bomb, or something like that?
Maybe the investigation should be in two parts. Why are most mass murderers male? Why do most mass murderers use guns?
Yes.
That is, men are more aggressive, so they are channeled into activities where aggression is more useful, and they are channeled into activities where aggression is rewarded, so they become more aggressive.
Part of it is also that the bell curve for men in things like aggression and emotional disturbance is different from that for women. The average man is 60% more likely to be aggressive than the average women, but of the most aggressive people, 90% of them are men. An emotionally disturbed man is more likely to be violent because men are more likely to be aggressive. And men and women respond differently to emotional disturbance - women internalize it and become depressed or anxious, men abuse drugs and alcohol or become anti-social. (Cite.) Men are more likely to have learning disabilities that lead to frustration and failures in school. Men are more likely to have ADHD. Schizophrenia tends to affect men and women differently -
Regards,
Shodan
“Women are actually superior to men in some kinds of long-term endurance…”
Men’s marathon record: 2:01; Women’s 2:14. Dozens of men, perhaps more, can run a sub 2:14 marathon.
Judo? Very few, if any, top ranked, well trained women would be able to compete with top ranked, well trained men in Judo. Superior upper body strength trumps a lower center of gravity every time.
[Moderating]
If this post has any purpose other than trolling, I’m unable to see what it would be. This is an official Warning.
I suspect many mass shooters have a gun fetish where they subconsciously equate the weapon as an extension of the male organ. Few women, even those prone to violence, are likely to relate to such a conflation.
You also have to factor in nationality and possibly race, as mass shootings are much less of a thing in the rest of the world than in the US (Wikipedia- not unknown but rare enough).
Other forms of violence - homicide, suicide - yes, and probably global, but the ‘why’ probably has to include [1] gender and [2] availability of guns and [3] something in American culture.
I suspect an important factor has been the paralysis of gun control in the US. Without trying to be political about this, when other countries had appalling mass shootings, the response has been things like tighter gun control, usually driven by national leadership. Perhaps the failure of national leadership to deal with gun ownership should be an addition point [4] on my list? Where I think this plays out for the OP’s question is that I think men and women broadly respond in different ways to leadership, and men are more likely to take advantage of an absence of strong direction to do things spontaneously with a bare minimum of forethought (no cite, but was in context of a presentation about role models / strong family for young people and why they ended up committing crimes).
From personal experience, the men don’t even have to be top ranked. I sparred several times with nationally ranked women, and I am not all that good, and it was not very close.
Sports in general are based on running, jumping, throwing, fighting, and swimming. Men in general are better at running, due to their greater average leg length and more efficient stride due to average differences in pelvic structure. They have more lean body mass and a higher center of gravity, so they are better at jumping. More upper body strength means they are better at throwing things, and their greater spatial skills mean they usually have better aim. Fighting they win at, for all the above reasons. Swimming in general, at distances up to 1500m, they tend to do better due to upper body strength and longer limbs.
The only sport where women are supposed to have an advantage is open water, very long distance swimming, where their greater buoyancy and insulation can offset their other disadvantages.
But again, men are more aggressive and thus more competitive, so they are more likely to compete in sports, and when frustrated, externalize that frustration into things like mass shootings.
Regards,
Shodan
In the instance of mass shootings, I would guess that it’s because most female grievances aren’t the kind that would be resolved by a mass shooting. They may have a specific bully who’s hurting them, or some particular reason for despair or rage, but it’s not the kind that would lead someone to shoot up victims at random.
Men have their grievances, but they are likelier to be the kind that leads to revenge against society as a whole - i.e., “*Society *has wronged me, so it must pay,” etc.