America LOVES Mass Shootings
I’m so sick of the cliched rhetoric that always follows the mass shootings that are now a regular and routine part of American life. They are endemic to our culture now, as are the broken-record responses of grief and outrage and calls for change that will not happen…will not happen until something much more fundamental than gun laws changes about America.
America is not a nation and it is not a community. It is a fragmented rabble of warring factions where people regard one another with fear and suspicion at best, outright hate and animosity at worst. There is a lot of talk about the right-left divide, the Black-White divide and the rich-poor divide in America, but even within our in-groups, we don’t really trust or nurture one another. The “woke left” acts superior on this point, but it is easy to tell that much of their rhetoric is phony, a lot more talk than action.
America is a thoroughly disconnected society with no authentic social bonds. We are rugged individualism taken to its furthest and ugliest extreme. Because we are so disconnected, these tragedies are not REAL to most of us. We watch stories of these shootings on the news, and it is no different than when we watch a sad movie. We cry, we experience emotion, but then we go on with our lives knowing it is not real. We enjoy our grief the same way we enjoy a sad movie. American society has become a real-life tear-jerker—a sad, violent reality show.
But these mass shootings are real. The Alex Jones crowd and others who suggest these events are false flags or “psy-ops” highlight something fundamental about us. It is easy for some people to believe these events are not real because we treat these events like they are not real. Surely, if they were real, we’d do something, right?!?
You would think that at least the communities where these events happen would be fundamentally changed because they know the victims, but they do not change. Why? Because even in our our communities, we don’t really KNOW each other anymore. So the families of the victims grieve forever, but after a brief time, the communities move on, the news moves on, and the Facebook and Instagram posts go back to political debates and Kim Kardashian booty shots…until it happens again.
America has had a unique problem with violence since its inception. I believe there are many complex factors that explain why this is true. But at the most fundamental level, I believe it all comes back to the fact that America has always been a fractured and divided society—Europeans vs. Native Americans, White versus Black. early immigrants versus later immigrants, North versus South, rural versus urban, liberal versus conservative, Catholic versus Protestant, east coast versus west coast, owner class versus working class. Hell, Chevy versus Ford! We turn everything in into a conflict where we are all expected to take sides. At its root, the word violence means “to tear apart”. Hence, we have a divided nation torn apart by violence.
It isn’t hard to see the real truth behind the shooter problem if you leave your political silo and look. These shooters are almost exclusively male, usually young, socially isolated, angry and vulnerable. The mass shooter is, in almost EVERY instance, a boy or man who FEELS UNLOVED.
Canada has more guns per capita than America and Switzerland has a gun in nearly every home, but neither of these nations has a gun violence problem. This is conclusive evidence that this problem cannot be fixed by changes to gun laws. It cannot be fixed by treating this particular form of emotional isolation as a mental illness. No matter how much we may blame and demonize these shooters, it isn’t about what’s wrong with them. It is about what’s wrong with US!
Our society is so cold and cruel to some people that it breaks them, and some lash out in violent, suicidal anger as their final response. This is the mass shooter. Until we stop letting young men be marginalized, isolated, bullied, unloved and unsupported to these extremes, these mass shootings will only increase in frequency, and eventually we’ll have hundreds of years of tragic mass shooting news just like we have hundreds of years of tragedy from the theatrical stage, both equally unreal to the audience.
We will simply come to accept mass shootings as a part of life. We already have. The repetitive sameness of the outpourings of “thoughts and prayers” and the outcry for political change has become sickening to me. How many times can you say “never again” about a DAILY EVENT before it becomes a joke?
And that is the point that often gets lost: mass shootings are now an almost DAILY event in America. The national news only covers the largest and deadliest of them. But if you scan local news from around the nation, you can find at least one story of multiple people being shot virtually every day. This is who we are.
This is NOT a political problem and it cannot be solved by politicians (what can?). This is a SOCIAL problem that goes to the heart of the way we treat one another. We are a cold, cruel and abusive society, and mass shootings are only one of the myriad ways this manifests itself. Our high rates of suicide, poverty, mental illness, drug abuse, and crime compared to other wealthy nations are other embodiments of the same problem. The word “love” is everywhere these days, but there is no love in our hearts, and even less in our actions. Deep down, Americans think love is a weakness. We worship cruelty as strength.
Gun violence is primarily a male problem, and it transcends all ethnic and cultural boundaries. While shooters tend to be lower class, some have been more affluent. Gun violence is rarely perpetrated by men who have a stable network of nurturing relationships in their lives. Shooters are almost always men who feel SOCIALLY ISOLATED. Some will say, “Lots of people feel socially isolated but they don’t do mass shootings.”. This lame argument always comes up when anyone tries to hold society accountable for the mistreatment of certain individuals. Just because there are some individuals strong enough to carry an unfair burden without braking, that doesn’t make the unfair burden okay!
Shooters are also notably almost always straight or closeted, and with that I’m going to go one step further into an arena that the news doesn’t discuss, that the public discourse doesn’t discuss, but it may actually be the key issue at play….
America has an odd relationship with sex. On the one hand, we have society filled with sexually-charged imagery. But yet, we are deeply repressed and aren’t really comfortable talking about sex. We compartmentalize it. In many arenas of society, sex is a topic that is totally off limits, and this often makes us unable to see clearly because, in reality, for most of us, our sexuality touches every area of our lives.
I believe there is a definitive link between the mass shooter problem and the growing group of single men who are experiencing extreme sexual frustration and emotional isolation because of the combination of social and economic pressures that they are facing, and the fact that men and women are drifting further and further apart as our society’s gender war grows worse and worse. This would explain the relative paucity of out gay male mass shooters, as an out gay man usually doesn’t have too much of a problem getting laid at least, even if he has the same or more difficulty as a straight person in finding love.
If we closely scrutinize the lives of these mass shooters, I think we will find most share the condition of being sexually frustrated and unfulfilled. It is impossible for me to imagine a man who has a good sex life perpetrating a mass shooting, and I would bet that if we investigate that, we would find that few or NONE of them did.
And I think that is a good place for me to leave it, for you to chew on that. More to come….
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