I don’t want to overemphasize this too much since we seem susceptible to tangents right now, but think about how we fight ISIS recruitment. We don’t fret about AK-47s because we know they’ll still get them from Russia, China, Iran, etc. It’s sadly inevitable at this point, just like pump shotguns in America.
Instead we talk giving these young men viable alternatives in life. Jobs, support structures, religion that emphasizes peace, etc.
Again I don’t want to kick off a 100 post tangent but it’s another way to start thinking about root problems.
Thanks for the clarification! Like I said I wasn’t trying to nitpit or insinuate anything in my question, I was just unable to draw a line between feminism and school shootings. I understand what you were saying now.
At some level I think the reason why there are more school shootings now than there were before is because nobody had thought about it before. Same reason that there weren’t more planes flying into big skyscrapers before 9/11 or vans ramming people on sidewalks before a couple years ago.
Yes, combined with an entertainment and media culture where anyone can become famous overnight through talent, hard work, or just shooting up their high school classmates.
That’s a reasonable question, and I’m sure there’s no single answer or we’d have stumbled across it by now. Certainly we have plenty of examples to study. My guess at some of them, based on the discussion here and other thoughts I’ve had:
I think the largest factor is a feeling of hopelessness. If you feel like you’re going somewhere in life, you don’t risk that by shooting up schools or running down pedestrians. But if you think there’s no hope of anything better, it becomes easy to give up your future for some kind of statement. It’s easy to look at the strides being made for insert person not like me (women, people of color, LGTBQ, etc) and see it as an attack on your own prospects, especially if you were in a privileged group before. It’s going to particularly affect you if you’re not good at sports, smart in school, popular with the girls, etc. And if you’re swimming in teen hormones, so much the worse. Put all those factors together and it makes a lot of sense that young white straight male is over-represented in the ranks of these perpetrators.
Someone else must be at fault, in the mind of the perpetrator, and they must be reachable. When you’re a high school kid or recently graduated, pretty much your whole world has been that school so it’s easy to assign blame to people there and go after them. You might also blame celebrities, politicians, foreign countries, etc but they’re not reachable in the same way as the school down the street.
There’s something of a snowball effect, I think. I look at Columbine as the start of the modern era of school shootings. Like @Menzo said, once someone got the idea out there and it became widely known, more people picked it up. The sleepiest corner of America today has exponentially more exposure to the goings-on in the rest of the country and the world than all but the most metropolitan areas had 50 years ago. When there’s that much information, the extremes float to the top. Either extremely good stories, which most people have no hope of replicating; or extremely bad, like wars and terror attacks. If you’re mentally damaged enough to feel like your only option is to make a loud statement, the obvious choice is something like a school shooting.
Having said all that, there’s still going to be only a small percentage of people who actually carry out attacks. I bet there’s thousands who have some level of each of the above factors, but they don’t all start shooting up schools. The less mentally ill folks do dumb things against their own interest, like vote for anyone who promises to roll back the clock, no matter how impossible that is. Those with more damage look to strike out at those that they see as the cause, so you get racial graffiti, crosses burned in yards, gays kids beat up in alley, etc. And the small percentage with just the wrong kind of mental damage take that to the extreme and start shooting.
I just want to say that tapping back into my long-lost memories of being a teenager the one thing that kind of “hurt” so to speak was that i distinctly remember feeling like i didn’t have any identity to complain about. Even though it would have made school that much harder in some ways it would have been “nice” to have some identity like LGBTQ to latch onto and make into a “cause”, and i remember meeting lots of people in college for whom those identities gave them a sense of purpose and cause which i never had. Instead i was left, for better or worse, to ruminate on my failings without anything but my own limitations to blame.
At least from my own experience, it wasn’t that i felt put upon by others, but that others had ready-made identities they could fall back on that i could not.
A lot of what 4chan, alt-right ect seems to be doing is hammering out of the morass some kind of collective grievance these young men can latch on to. Unfortunately the point of this is not to give them a sense of belonging but further exacerbate their sense of isolation which they can now blame on others.
Change make into a “cause” to something like like make you a target, and you’re closer to the reality of what it’s like for a lot of people growing up. It only a cause for those who don’t experience it; I suspect most of us would just call it… life.
So does this mean it’s okay to talk about white men again or are we only allowed to talk about that group through the context of others groups that are not them?
When you’re getting punched in the face every day and then laughed at because you sit alone (because you get punched in the face) it’s a bit hard at 14 years old to see your privilege.
My point wasn’t to woe is me but to point out that i understood / understand to some extent why these kids shoot up schools - why specifically it is white kids that are shooting up schools; there was probably a point when i was say 14 or 15 when i could really understand it. That blinding, angry urge to get back at them; the people that made your life hell.
What i meant by “cause” was that you have a way of understanding why bad things are happening to you. You’re (not you personally) a minority, you’re a woman, you’re someone of a nonstandard gender or sexuality. This doesn’t make it easier or less real, but it makes it understandable. You’re being treated like shit because of X. And when you get older, if you feel lost or uncertain of what to make of your life, you can go back to X and say this is what i’m going to be about.
What’s my excuse? Just a white schmuck nerd who sucks.
Is this a reason all these “beta” males are turning to the internet and trying find some kind of identity, find some kind of cause, find some kind of place to be a victim? I can understand it at that age.
Part of the problem is that class has completely collapsed as a motivating force. In the 90s i remember kids still toting about the Little Red Book and Abbie Hoffmann, warn out echoes of an older, different time. But i couldn’t buy into it; it seemed artificial and trite and ill fitting for the time. And i liked baths and air conditioning. I remember envying peers and professors who had causes to fight just by who they were; it gave their life structure and meaning.
Frankly it’s probably not a coincidence that in America it’s white males - the only ones whose identity is more or less the oppressors - who are both scramble around the internet looking for an identity to claim and are the ones shooting up schools. With the utter collapse of class as a dividing force, white males don’t have an identity of their own. Which is fine if you’re the captain of the football team, but probably sucks pretty hard if you’re a nerd getting punched in the face.
I think I understand what you’re trying say, but let me share something with you. This is not how it works. When you’re being called a nigger, being told to go back to Africa, being made fun of because your hair is not white hair… you’re a kid. You’re not reviewing history and saying hey, well because of slavery this makes sense. Oh people are saying you aren’t equal because of what happened in the 60s. You’re five years old, then you’re seven, then ten…
You never fully understand,I mean really, why things are the way they are, even if you have some kind of recognized label.
If this is what these kids think, that somehow if they were women, if they were a minority, if they had an less than accepted status around their sexual orientation things would be easier… they’re being fed a bunch of lies. In addition, all these groups also have nerds, large people, less than ideally attractive people, dumb people… I mean there are outcasts in all groups.
It’s a valid point that people will fawn over one white guy (e.g. football captain) and denigrate another, when the same mechanisms are responsible for the experiences of both. (Insert other race/ethnic group for analogous phenomena.)
There are shootings inside and outside of schools among many demographics, and the motivation to intimidate a community and hold it hostage is largely the same.
I’m not going through your if you can’t change the world right now don’t you dare try to address a piece of this again Yak. Go sell that line to someone else.
If these white boys think their lives would be easier as some other minority group, they’re deluding themselves and anyone else listening, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have it hard in other ways. None of that excuses mass murder.
This is the point. Only a sick and evil society can countenance mass murder. And the solutions suggested by NRA-supporting pols are worse than merely countenancing murder, they’re outright laughing at it. Rocks and baseball bats. Teachers with guns. Closing off fire exits. These are snide, malicious jokes made by people who think murder is fine so long as they’re not the ones being murdered.
There is nothing wrong with telling these murderers that no matter how hard you think your life is, you don’t have a right to murder your peers and remove your obstacles with blood…And if you do something like that, you’re goddamn coward and absolutely less, including those who have endure far more than peer rejection.
There is someone right now enduring in insurmountable pain, a deep rooted agony that will scar them for life, and they’re not going to school tomorrow to kill someone.
