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dbcooper41 wrote:nick phelps' performance as a worried dad seemed a bit melodramatic to me.
Manhood Crisis At The Heart of The Newtown Tragedy: Part I
As Mizzou always says, “Change the Narrative.” The Starting Five takes a critical look at the Newtown, Conn. shootings and how gender affects complex social problems. – CA
Newtown Bee/ZUMA Press
The tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut shocked America to its core. On Friday Dec. 14, Adam Lanza, 20, of Newtown killed his mother, Nancy Lanza, 52, before carrying out a horrific shooting rampage at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. He forced his way into the school wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying three semi-automatic weapons. Lanza walked into a classroom, killing 20 children and six teachers and administrators, and turned the gun on himself.
The question on everyone’s minds is why did Lanza do this? People want to see action to prevent mass shootings. The common suggestions are: stricter gun control, greater mental health evaluation and treatment, enhanced school security, or even arming school administrators.
But an overlooked aspect in the discussion is gender. When one looks at past mass shootings, the majority, if not all of them, are committed by men. So why is gender, more specifically men’s actions, not being examined? Jackson Katz, a leading anti-sexist activist and scholar of violence, has been asking this question for years.
Katz is involved in gender violence prevention and has worked extensively with men and boys in sports culture, the military, and in schools. He has pioneered work in critical media literacy and is the creator and co-founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), the first program in the sexual and domestic violence prevention field to advocate a ‘bystander approach’ to prevention.
He is the creator and co-creator of three documentary videos. They are Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the Crisis in Masculinity, Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying & Battering with Sut Jhally, and Spin the Bottle: Sex, Lies, and Alcohol, with Jean Kilbourne. These films are widely used as educational tools in the U.S. and around the world. He is also the author of two books, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Leading Men: Presidential Campaigns and the Politics of Manhood.
I caught up with Katz and we discussed how gender, manhood and masculinity shaped the tragic events in Newtown, Connecticut.
You’ve been saying for years that mass shootings have a lot to do with masculinity. Why is this a problem and why does it persist?
There’s long been a reluctance — in the mainstream media and even in the progressive media and blogosphere – to critically examine power. Whether it’s whiteness, masculinity or heteronormativity, it’s much easier to talk about the victims of violence than it is to examine illegitimate exercises of power by the dominant group.
When gender is talked about, it’s almost always talked about as a women’s issue or concern, as opposed to its being about the dominant gender, men. This invisibility of the dominant group is one of the ways that dominance functions.
Getting people in mainstream media to talk about white masculinity — which is the central factor in this as in so many other rampage killings — is difficult because so many people are uncomfortable talking about this. In some cases they don’t even have the language to talk about it. That’s not unexpected; it’s how power works. We often lack the very language to uncover the mechanisms by which dominance functions.
Based on what you’ve seen and what you’ve read so far, how is masculinity playing out in regards to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings?
First, I would say it’s the most important factor in virtually all rampage killings. I’m not saying other factors aren’t important (such as mental illness, access to guns, drug and alcohol abuse, etc.) but they are secondary. The first line of inquiry needs to be about gender – specifically (white) masculinity.
But most people don’t think about masculinity when they hear the word gender. Since they think “gender” equals “women,” many people assume that when you’re talking about Newtown and gender, you must mean it has to do with the fact that he killed his mother, or because many of the victims were girls and the psychologist and principal were women.
They don’t get that what you mean is that the young man who committed the shooting is a gendered being, and that his gender is arguably the single most important factor in his perpetration.
Right, mass shootings in Paducah, Kentucky; Bart Township, Pennsylvania; Springfield, Oregon; Columbine High School; Virginia Tech; Sikh Temple of Wisconsin; Aurora, Colo. and Newtown, Conn. were all committed by men.
For decades, the experts who get called on to explain these mass killings say the same things over and over again. They de-gender the conversation and miss the main point.
I just listened to Dave Cullen, author of Columbine on Rachel Maddow a couple of nights ago. I did not hear him say one thing about gender. He ran through a set of psychological profiles for school shooters without mentioning that they’re virtually all boys and men, most of them white.
A widely circulated Mother Jones piece documented 62 mass killings over the past thirty years. All but one were done by a man, but there was no discussion of gender in the piece. I’ve been saying this for a long time, but you would think that someone would look into this as a meaningful statistic, not just some ancillary point. Imagine if 61 out of 62 mass killings were done by women. Would people just dismiss that and say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and move on? No, it would be the first thing people were talking about. Everyone would say “Why are women doing this? What’s going on for women? What is it about women’s life experiences that would lead them to do something like this?”
But when 61 out of 62 incidents are perpetrated by men, it’s all about mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse problems, brain injuries, etc. Gender is barely on the radar screen.
How does masculinity drive men to do these kinds of acts? Especially toward children?
I’m sad to say this … but I think those children were props in Adam Lanza’s performance of his aggrieved manhood in some sort of revenge fantasy he plotted and enacted. I’m only speculating, of course, because we don’t yet know enough about his psyche. But I think the children were used more as props than as targets.
It’s similar with the shooting at the Sikh temple outside of Milwaukee. So much of the media conversation was about racism, ethnocentrism, resentment toward foreigners. My thought from the beginning was that it wasn’t fundamentally about those people. It was about the white male shooter – his anxieties, fears, perhaps self-hatred. Once again, the victims were props in his performance of his angry white manhood. I think when the facts come out we’ll see this is true of Adam Lanza.
Killing innocent, defenseless children was his way of making an even stronger statement. He may have thought (and I’m speculating):
“I’m going to kill children so the world can see how much pain I’m experiencing” or “I’m so angry that I’m going to break this taboo and actually kill children so you can see how angry I am. And you’re going to suffer like I have.”
That’s one of the gendered aspects of these types of killings: men’s externalization of their internal pain. They’re making a statement. Instead of turning the gun on themselves and internalizing their pain, they turn it outward. That’s the gender piece. Plenty of girls and women feel despondent, frustrated, said, helpless or emotionally in turmoil. But very few externalize the way men do. It’s like:
“I’m feeling badly about myself … I’m feeling helpless or hopeless and I’m going to take it out on somebody else. It’s somebody else’s fault … it’s the world’s fault … my mother’s fault … and I’m going to externalize my feelings of inadequacy and shame by taking it out on someone else.”
And then they kill themselves, or arrange it so the police shoot them.
What is the allure of guns to men and how is it connected with masculinity? Why is this a concern we should be aware about?
Guns are an instrument of violence that can be used against another person or against oneself. They certainly make the externalization of violence much easier. They are easily available and their power is seductive because it is so tangible and immediate.
The whole gun debate needs to be infused with a discussion about manhood. It’s frustrating to hear debates about gun rights vs. gun control, and yet very few people say what’s hidden in plain sight: it’s really a contest of meanings about manhood. I talk about this in my new book Leading Men. The NRA and the right-wing understand this. Of course there are women who own and love guns; Adam Lanza’s mother was one of them. But the right is skilled at framing the gun as a symbol of men’s potency and freedom: the freedom to defend themselves and protect their families.
One of the things I noticed about Adam Lanza was how he was armed. He wore a bullet proof vest and carried three semi-automatic weapons: a Glock 9-mm handgun, Sig Sauer 9-mm handgun and Bushmaster rifle. What would drive a man to go to that extreme? How does masculinity explain his whole appearance when he committed the killings?
I think that’s part of what’s going on here. Doug Kellner, a colleague of mine who’s at UCLA, writes a lot about these types of events in terms of media spectacle. Adam Lanza in a sense created a movie in which he had the starring role. Whether it’s a flak jacket or guns blazing, Lanza was engaged in a performance of his manhood. That’s what it appears he was going for. His transgression of the taboo of killing children – in a public space sure to be heavily covered by media — was how he was going to reclaim his manhood.
James Gilligan wrote a couple of very important books called Violence and Preventing Violence. One of the many great insights he shares is that a huge percentage of what is called “senseless violence” is not senseless at all if you’re the shooter. There is an internal logic to their actions that makes sense. In a huge percentage of cases where men commit heinous acts of violence you see they’ve experienced shame in a profound way. The way the culture helps to shape their response to these feelings of shame is to create and even glamorize narratives for how they can externalize their pain and reclaim their manhood.
The story in many of these men’s heads goes something like this: someone has taken something from me, so I’m going to take it back. The victims of that “taking back” aren’t necessarily the original perpetrators or bullies of these guys. As I’ve said they’re merely props in a gendered enactment of revenge. But people don’t want to face this uncomfortable fact. Better to put it in a category of “mental illness” and not delve too much further into it. He just snapped, and so on.
But James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who worked with really violent men for many years, says it’s not true. It’s not how it works. These guys aren’t detached from reality and unaware of what’s going on around them. They’re intentional with what they’re doing and why.
This makes people very uneasy. They’re more comfortable with the idea that he’s a sociopath, or he just went off.
Bushmaster's Shockingly Awful "Man Card" Campaign
The company that produces the semiautomatic rifle used in the Newtown, CT, shootings is currently running an online campaign based around virtual cards that “prove” the bearer's manliness. One specifically talks about how unmanly it is to be afraid of elementary-school kids.
Friends say that Nancy Lanza, a former financial trader, had not been working in recent years. The terms of the settlement could explain why: She received $289,800 in alimony in 2012,which was to increase each year to reach $298,000 in 2015.
Peter Lanza, a vice president for taxes at GE Energy and Financial Services. . . . (GE is a minority owner in NBCUniversal.)
For what it's worth, the Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America, and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men. The tragic monster that Mr. Lanza grew up into lived with Mom and ended up parking four bullets in her brain. Imagine the tensions in that monster. It's not an accident that the commercial fantasies represented in movies and television aimed at boys are populated by legions of super-heroes. This sort of grandiosity -- the wish to project supernatural powers -- is exactly what you get in boys who have not developed competence in any reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor -- and I wouldn't necessarily include school, such as it is in our time, as a reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor, since it is mostly a brutally boring accreditation process. Notice, Mr. Lanza's chief instrument of death was the "Bushmaster." His weapon made him a "master" of something, at least, even if it was just the systematic slaughter of six-year-old kids and the women in charge of them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... ed-states/
Twelve facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States
By Ezra Klein , Updated: December 14, 2012
When we first collected much of this data, it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid “politicizing” the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for “don’t talk about reforming our gun control laws.”
Let’s be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It’s just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws.
Since then, there have been more horrible, high-profile shootings. Jovan Belcher, a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, took his girlfriend’s life and then his own. In Oregon, Jacob Tyler Roberts entered a mall holding a semi-automatic rifle and yelling “I am the shooter.” And, in Connecticut, at least 27 are dead — including 18 children — after a man opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.
Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. “Too soon,” howl supporters of loose gun laws. But as others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late.
What follows here isn’t a policy agenda. It’s simply a set of facts — many of which complicate a search for easy answers — that should inform the discussion that we desperately need to have.
1. Shooting sprees are not rare in the United States.
Mother Jones has tracked and mapped every shooting spree in the last three decades. “Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:
2. 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States.
Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
3. Lots of guns don’t necessarily mean lots of shootings, as you can see in Israel and Switzerland.*
As David Lamp writes at Cato, “In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel ‘have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States.’”
*Correction: The info is out-of-date, if not completely wrong. Israel and Switzerland have tightened their gun laws substantially, and now pursue an entirely different approach than the United States. More details here. I apologize for the error.
4. Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened from 2007 onward.
That doesn’t include Friday’s shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The AP put the early reported death toll at 27, which would make it the second-deadliest mass shooting in US history.
5. America is an unusually violent country. But we’re not as violent as we used to be.
Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier.
As Healy writes, “The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.”
6. The South is the most violent region in the United States.
In a subsequent post, Healy drilled further into the numbers and looked at deaths due to assault in different regions of the country. Just as the United States is a clear outlier in the international context, the South is a clear outlier in the national context:
7. Gun ownership in the United States is declining overall.
“For all the attention given to America’s culture of guns, ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows,” writes political scientist Patrick Egan. The decline is most evident on the General Social Survey, though it also shows up on polling from Gallup, as you can see on this graph:
The bottom line, Egan writes, is that “long-term trends suggest that we are in fact currently experiencing a waning culture of guns and violence in the United States. “
8. More guns tend to mean more homicide.
The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there’s substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders. This holds true whether you’re looking at different countries or different states. Citations here.
9. States with stricter gun control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence.
Last year, economist Richard Florida dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation. But correlations can be suggestive:
“The map overlays the map of firearm deaths above with gun control restrictions by state,” explains Florida. “It highlights states which have one of three gun control restrictions in place – assault weapons’ bans, trigger locks, or safe storage requirements. Firearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation. Though the sample sizes are small, we find substantial negative correlations between firearm deaths and states that ban assault weapons (-.45), require trigger locks (-.42), and mandate safe storage requirements for guns (-.48).”
10. Gun control, in general, has not been politically popular.
Since 1990, Gallup has been asking Americans whether they think gun control laws should be stricter. The answer, increasingly, is that they don’t. “The percentage in favor of making the laws governing the sale of firearms ‘more strict’ fell from 78% in 1990 to 62% in 1995, and 51% in 2007,” reports Gallup. “In the most recent reading, Gallup in 2010 found 44% in favor of stricter laws. In fact, in 2009 and again last year, the slight majority said gun laws should either remain the same or be made less strict.”
11. But particular policies to control guns often are.
An August CNN/ORC poll asked respondents whether they favor or oppose a number of specific policies to restrict gun ownership. And when you drill down to that level, many policies, including banning the manufacture and possession of semi-automatic rifles, are popular.
12. Shootings don’t tend to substantially affect views on gun control.
That, at least, is what the Pew Research Center found:
Note: This post has been updated and expanded since first being published.
© The Washington Post Company
http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archive ... t-country/
[worth a second look - for some reason img won't display, so follow link.]
http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/a ... ts-all.png
[graphs for each country shown separately]
http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/a ... -facet.png
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/won ... s/?print=1
Mythbusting: Israel and Switzerland are not gun-toting utopias
By Ezra Klein , Updated: December 14, 2012
My post “12 facts about guns and mass shootings” included a mention of Israel and Switzerland, societies where guns are reputed to be widely available, but where gun violence is rare. Janet Rosenbaum, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center School, has actually researched this question, and she wrote to tell me I had it wrong. We spoke shortly thereafter on the phone. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Ricky Carioti — The Washington Post
Ezra Klein: Israel and Switzerland are often mentioned as countries that prove that high rates of gun ownership don’t necessarily lead to high rates of gun crime. In fact, I wrote that on Friday. But you say your research shows that’s not true.
Janet Rosenbaum: First of all, because they don’t have high levels of gun ownership. The gun ownership in Israel and Switzerland has decreased.
For instance, in Israel, they’re very limited in who is able to own a gun. There are only a few tens of thousands of legal guns in Israel, and the only people allowed to own them legally live in the settlements, do business in the settlements, or are in professions at risk of violence.
Both countries require you to have a reason to have a gun. There isn’t this idea that you have a right to a gun. You need a reason. And then you need to go back to the permitting authority every six months or so to assure them the reason is still valid.
The second thing is that there’s this widespread misunderstanding that Israel and Switzerland promote gun ownership. They don’t. Ten years ago, when Israel had the outbreak of violence, there was an expansion of gun ownership, but only to people above a certain rank in the military. There was no sense that having ordinary citizens [carry guns] would make anything safer.
Switzerland has also been moving away from having widespread guns. The laws are done canton by canton, which is like a province. Everyone in Switzerland serves in the army, and the cantons used to let you have the guns at home. They’ve been moving to keeping the guns in depots. That means they’re not in the household, which makes sense because the literature shows us that if the gun is in the household, the risk goes up for everyone in the household.
EK: As I understand it, there’s a stronger link between guns and suicide than between guns and homicide. And one of the really interesting parts of your paper is your recounting of the Israeli military’s effort to cut suicides among soldiers by restricting access to guns.
JR: Yes, it’s very striking. In Israel, it used to be that all soldiers would take the guns home with them. Now they have to leave them on base. Over the years they’ve done this — it began, I think, in 2006 — there’s been a 60 percent decrease in suicide on weekends among IDS soldiers. And it did not correspond to an increase in weekday suicide. People think suicide is an impulse that exists and builds. This shows that doesn’t happen. The impulse to suicide is transitory. Someone with access to a gun at that moment may commit suicide, but if not, they may not.
EK: I was surprised by one statistic in your article: You said that Israel rejects 40 percent of its applications for a gun, the highest rate of rejection of any country in the world. And even when you get approved, you say that “all guns must have an Interior Ministry permit and identifying mark for tracing.” That seems like it might make people think twice before they shoot from a gun they know the government can track.
JR: That’s a requirement. I don’t know a great deal about the ballistics issue there. But that is in the regulations.
EK: Israel and Switzerland are both small, highly cohesive countries. So some say that the difference in gun crime shows that there’s something about American culture that’s leading to these atrocities. Do you buy that?
JR: Israel is not a peaceful society. If there were a lot of guns, it may be even more violent. Israeli schools are well known for having a lot of the kicking and punching type of violence. I don’t know that Switzerland has that reputation. But Israel does, and it seems that the lack of guns promotes the lack of firearm violence rather than there being some nascent tendency toward peacefulness and cohesion. That cohesion may or may not exist, but not having guns prevents guns from being used in violence. People do still commit homicide and suicide but they do it with less lethal means. The most common form of suicide in Israel is strangulation, which is striking, because it’s not that common elsewhere.
EK: Not to derail the conversation, but given that most industrialized countries have quite strict gun laws, if they don’t use strangulation, what do they use?
JR: I don’t know what other countries have, but I’ve read about suicide in Israel, and it’s striking there, because there’s an age discrepancy. Between ages 18 and 21, when people are in the army and have access to guns, firearm suicide is very common. At other ages, strangulation is very common. So it does seem to suggest that people commit suicide with what they have access to even in the same society.
© The Washington Post Company
Fresno_Layshaft wrote:Regarding gender roles, James Kunstler touches on that in his latest blog.
http://kunstler.com/blog/2012/12/america-the-horror-show.htmlFor what it's worth, the Newtown Massacre to me is largely about the failure of men in America, and in particular the failure of men to raise up male children into men. The tragic monster that Mr. Lanza grew up into lived with Mom and ended up parking four bullets in her brain. Imagine the tensions in that monster. It's not an accident that the commercial fantasies represented in movies and television aimed at boys are populated by legions of super-heroes. This sort of grandiosity -- the wish to project supernatural powers -- is exactly what you get in boys who have not developed competence in any reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor -- and I wouldn't necessarily include school, such as it is in our time, as a reality-based, meaningful realm of endeavor, since it is mostly a brutally boring accreditation process. Notice, Mr. Lanza's chief instrument of death was the "Bushmaster." His weapon made him a "master" of something, at least, even if it was just the systematic slaughter of six-year-old kids and the women in charge of them.
8bitagent wrote:First off, with the exception of Great Britain, virtually every war has been brought to us by males.
I believe the profound challenge for most men is to look deeply into their own shame, and that can be devastating once the challenge has been taken seriously, in my opinion.Project Willow wrote:This references one of my favorite authors on the topic of violence.Project Willow pasted, not wrote:James Gilligan wrote a couple of very important books called Violence and Preventing Violence. One of the many great insights he shares is that a huge percentage of what is called “senseless violence” is not senseless at all if you’re the shooter. There is an internal logic to their actions that makes sense. In a huge percentage of cases where men commit heinous acts of violence you see they’ve experienced shame in a profound way. The way the culture helps to shape their response to these feelings of shame is to create and even glamorize narratives for how they can externalize their pain and reclaim their manhood.
The story in many of these men’s heads goes something like this: someone has taken something from me, so I’m going to take it back. The victims of that “taking back” aren’t necessarily the original perpetrators or bullies of these guys. As I’ve said they’re merely props in a gendered enactment of revenge. But people don’t want to face this uncomfortable fact. Better to put it in a category of “mental illness” and not delve too much further into it. He just snapped, and so on.
But James Gilligan, a psychiatrist who worked with really violent men for many years, says it’s not true. It’s not how it works. These guys aren’t detached from reality and unaware of what’s going on around them. They’re intentional with what they’re doing and why.
This makes people very uneasy. They’re more comfortable with the idea that he’s a sociopath, or he just went off.
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