What is it that prompts White males to spray bullets (and to be able to do so with near impunity)?
it’s not hard to see these elements in virtually every episode of mass murder we’ve witnessed with increasing frequency in the past thirty years.
When men like Billy Bush say that “For a man, [losing your job is] the ultimate degradation” well, I can’t help but feel that men may be overstating the importance of maintaining a job. Certainly, I can think of more degrading things. Having to grovel for my life before an incompetent former co-worker who felt he was owed a job or he’d kill everyone, is one of them.
Even the most innocent seeming victims, who could not possibly have “wronged” these men in any way don’t seem immune from their rage.
A great many mass murderers have a history of domestic violence. They range from Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub shooting, whose ex-wife claimed he took her paychecks, forbade her from leaving the house and beat her if she did not live up to what he perceived as being her duties; to Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic and had been accused of domestic violence by two of his three ex-wives…
Elliot Rodger, who killed six people near the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara, before fatally shooting himself, stands out as a man who very clearly explained his motive for shooting. In his final video titled “Retribution,” Elliot claimed, “You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime because I don't know what you don't see in me, I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman. I will punish all of you for it.”
I can assure you that not wanting to sleep with a man is not a crime. Killing six people and injuring 14, as Rodger did, is…
The terrifying thing is that, within circles of toxic men that comprise those like the alt-right—a movement that decries feminism and celebrates white nationalism—the men who commit these crimes do receive affirmation that they perhaps felt denied in life. The Southern Poverty Law Center explains that:
“The 'supreme gentleman,' a title Rodger gave himself… has since become a meme on the alt-right.”
Fan pages for Elliot Rodger, with titles like “Elliot Rodger is an American Hero,” sprang up on Facebook.
The fact that these actions are in any way celebrated or joked about can only serve as an incentive for other men who feel they are owed more than the world is offering them to behave violently. A movement telling them their sense of entitlement is rational, and that women are bitches and, as Dylan Roof believed, black people are “taking over our country”—well, it probably doesn’t do much to stop men from acting on their most violent fantasies.
There have, thus far, been 13 alt-right related incidents.
When we have enough data points, we can no longer claim we lack the evidence to say definitively what is happening: White males with fragile egos are slaughtering hundreds of people each year in sexualized dominance displays, precisely because of their feelings of inferiority, of displacement from their ‘rightful’ position atop the sociopolitical hierarchy...