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meccalecca
Voice of Reason
Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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- #1
- Posted: 10/09/2015 17:06
- Post subject: The Overwhelming Maleness of Gun Violence
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With each and every mass shooting perpetrated in America, there's been one thing that has stood out as a commonality: The shooter is virtually always a man. This has grown more and more interesting to me as the country continues to fail to address a reasonable solution to the problem.
Would you say gun violence is generally a male disease? And what would you say causes such an extreme disparity in murder rates between men and women perpetrators? _________________ http://jonnyleather.com
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RockyRaccoon
Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?
Gender: Male
Age: 33
Location: Maryland
Moderator
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- #2
- Posted: 10/09/2015 18:15
- Post subject:
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I'm without a specific source in saying this, but I believe that statistically, women tend to kill with less violent means (e.g. poison) whereas men tend to go more towards guns and things. _________________ 2023 Chart
Early Psychedelic Rock
Electronic Chart
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Precedent
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- #3
- Posted: 10/09/2015 18:27
- Post subject:
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RockyRaccoon wrote: | I'm without a specific source in saying this, but I believe that statistically, women tend to kill with less violent means (e.g. poison) whereas men tend to go more towards guns and things. |
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meccalecca
Voice of Reason
Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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- #4
- Posted: 10/09/2015 18:49
- Post subject:
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RockyRaccoon wrote: | I'm without a specific source in saying this, but I believe that statistically, women tend to kill with less violent means (e.g. poison) whereas men tend to go more towards guns and things. |
I've seen that as a republican talking point, but there's never been any evidence to back it up.
According to the Dept. of Justice, men committed 90% of all homicides between 1980 and 2008.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf _________________ http://jonnyleather.com
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RockyRaccoon
Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?
Gender: Male
Age: 33
Location: Maryland
Moderator
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- #5
- Posted: 10/09/2015 20:01
- Post subject:
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meccalecca wrote: | I've seen that as a republican talking point, but there's never been any evidence to back it up.
According to the Dept. of Justice, men committed 90% of all homicides between 1980 and 2008.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf |
Here's some stuff on it
Main points:
Men and women both use guns to kill people the majority of the time against other weapons (however the men's percentage is higher)
Women are seven times more likely to use poison than men
White people use poison more than any other race
White women are more likely to use poison than any other race/gender
Older people (30+) are more likely to use poison than younger people
Oldest (51+) and youngest (<12) victims are most likely to be poisoned _________________ 2023 Chart
Early Psychedelic Rock
Electronic Chart
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zdwyatt
Gender: Male
Age: 45
Location: Madison WI
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- #6
- Posted: 10/09/2015 20:59
- Post subject:
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There are many theories, but the anthropologist in me likes to keep it simple: testosterone's a hell of a drug. And I don't mean because testosterone makes us violent, because that link is actually not that strong. What I mean is that, down deep in the caveman part of our brain, testosterone drives some very basic man machinery: it makes us big, it makes us strong, and it makes us want to have lots of sex. There is an animalistic subtext to so much of what we do, but we largely sublimate basic biological desires (e.g. having all the sex all the time) for social/cultural reasons. To me, most violent crime is a pretty natural result of what our caveman brain wants winning out over what society says we can have.
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Satie
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- #7
- Posted: 10/09/2015 21:29
- Post subject:
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zdwyatt wrote: | the pseudo-scientific evolutionary psychologist in me likes to keep it simple |
FTFY
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Graeme2
Gender: Male
Location: The Upside Down
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- #8
- Posted: 10/11/2015 00:10
- Post subject:
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I don't know about if you are more inclined to commit a gun crime if you are male. But you know that bill hicks speech about what makes you think about sex ...errr having a dick? Well umm....
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Puncture Repair
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- #9
- Posted: 10/11/2015 10:36
- Post subject:
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Men (or maleness) are naturally competitive, and want to put themselves above their peers. Our system of society is broken when shootings occur, everyone ultimately 'loses' when they are killed - regardless of how rich or intelligent or established you are. For someone that has never been seen as a success within our system, who fails to associate with the system (which is built on some degree of empathy) might consider killing people as a final victory, by destroying that system that told them they hated. That, in their minds, puts them above everyone else, when they are the one's who made it happen.
Men are also much more likely to struggle with empathy. The same reason men tend to be mathematicians and scientists is because the mechanical side of the brain tends to work better for men than the social side. I think this ultimately relates to why most diagnosed psychopaths are men.
Mix this up with what zdwyatt said, and it's a recipe for a shooting. Men and women aren't wired the same. That said, I don't think this is a problem. A shooter is a shooter, man or woman, it simply shouldn't be so easy for them to obtain weapons, and there should be more opportunities and education to identify just who might commit a shooting.
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Satie
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- #10
- Posted: 10/11/2015 14:33
- Post subject:
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I don't think biology should be completely disregarded, but as an actual anthropologist, I find it very dangerous and also empirically, demonstrably false to fall into the trap of biological determinism and essentialism. The notion that men or women are predisposed to certain social behaviors or are even objectively accepted categories among all societies is false, and we shouldn't understate the role of society in both establishing specific definitions of what is and isn't maleness and then enforcing that norm. If it appears men are "naturally" going to be competitive, violent, etc. it is probably more heuristically useful to look into why masculinity and competition are intertwined in our own society instead of pretending there's some big biological boogeyman that we as "civilized moderns" need to circumscribe and contain with societal force. I have a big paper that I'm working on at the moment, so I can't flesh this out just at the moment, but if people are interested in citations that flesh out my perspective on this and its harms, I'm taking a week vacation here shortly where I'll have lots of downtime during the day to provide academic papers on the topic.
In short, though, I think the reason we see a huge connection between maleness and mass murder in our own society is that we have, as Puncture Repair brings up, equated maleness and competition (violent competition specifically). The discourse is very fragmented, and men in difficult positions in life have a hard time understanding why they are not as entitled to sex as "alpha males." They're told by evolutionary psychologist chucklefucks that they aren't competing well enough for the survival of the species, and the culture at large in the west reinforces a link between sexuality and fulfillment on similar biological bases at the rational level. In other words, we are somehow incomplete as men if we are not successful in sexual pursuits, and because we tend to not value women very much and women are increasingly vocal about this, it becomes very easy to piece these two narratives together into one where women are canvases across which men paint their assertions to dominance and success, and when they fail to allow men to do such, they become victimized. We see this trend from the prevalence of cat-calling to rape to mass murders such as this. What's baffling is that these shooters like Charles Mercer and Elliott Rodger provide these explanations to us, the latter at great length, and we decide that it's mental illness or something. Hating women isn't mental illness - that is, it isn't some aberration of the mind that makes you unable to not be violent and require hospitalization. It requires societal reinforcement that your right to fuck someone doesn't supersede their right to live and that your desire to fuck someone shouldn't be your driving urge. But it's much easier to just throw the mentally ill under the bus than it is to confront what we tell young boys, because of course it's impossible that a media culture that equates loss of virginity with being the final rite into male adulthood could have anything to do with an actually serious problem. That said, gun access is also all too high and should probably be restricted in some fashion in order to have an immediate material impact on the number of lives lost to this heinous perspective.
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