Real reason for shootings.

[kengr]

An item on the local news the other night caught my attention. Seems we had 145 shootings in Portland this year.

And most weren't gang related or while committing a crime (other than the shooting itself being a crime). And almost all were by young men in their teens and twenties.

What was the reason? According to the expert they interviewed it's because these young men have no skills in conflict resolution. They get upset with someone, and if they have a weapon, that's their idea of a solution.

This fits *so* well with a lot of stuff. Because if you think about it, guys that don't have guns will resort to some other weapon. To their fists if that's all they have.

If you are angry, you attack. No other possibility even *occurs* to them. And if you've lived thru that age range as a male, looking back you'll probably recognize that for a good chunk of it you were suffering from *major* anger issues. It's your body trying to adjust to all that testosterone.

The "macho culture" is another factor. It says that non-violent solutions mean you're a wimp, a weakling.

The macho culture is also responsible for the *real* motivation of mass shooters. They feel *entitled* (because they are white and male) to things like jobs, *unearned* respect, and girlfriends.

Add in the lack of skills in how to "resolve" issues other than violently, and guess what?

No, the problem is rarely mental illness. It's *culture*. The unrealistic expectation it instills in young men, and the way it discourages (practically forbids) males from even considering non-violent means of resolving problems.

We really *need* to break this cycle. We gotta get rid of this *stupid* "macho" BS.

Of course, just as with rape culture, we'll be fought tooth and nail by folks who've internalized it as normal.

BTW, I bet that a lot of bullying is related to this. As is the insane "sports team must win at all costs" attitudes in a lot of high school and some colleges. The stuff that lets jocks get away with (literally in some cases) with rape and murder.

Comments

'Entitlement' and 'Macho' related, but non-identical

[polydad.livejournal.com]

Cultures are tricky. It is now a very uncommon thing for a given person to be only of one culture.

I'm not sure 'Macho' is an entire culture, or merely a cultural *element* that's used in many different cultures.

Note that I'm not disagreeing with your underlying point, but I think coming to a successful resolution of this particular set of issues is highly reliant on getting the structure of the problem precisely right.

In general usage, I'm accustomed to hearing both 'macho' and 'entitled' as terms of pure opprobrium. They're blanket condemnations, equivalent to 'evil'. And I think that's a problem, because there exist contexts in which either or both of them are both correct and appropriate.

So I think a good solution to '*stupid* "macho" BS' may be to replace it with a smarter form of 'macho', that can be generally trained (in both senses of the word at once) to a BS detector. Is this being English yet?

best,

Joel

[kengr]

Well, I did put "macho" in quotes because it's not entirely correct, it just makes a handy shorthand.

Entitlement isn't evil. There *are* things we should be entitled to. But getting mad at the world because you aren't getting things that you *aren't* actually entitled to, that's a problem.

Alas, too many of the school shooters seem to have the "I deserve a girlfriend" idea stuck in their heads.

That's as much rape culture as entitlement with a big dash of "male privilege" thrown in. Yet another reason we need to stomp on those sets of memes. And it's why mass shooters are so overwhelmingly male.

Other parts of their sense of entitlement is due to "white privilege" being so ingrained that most don't admit it exists. With these guys, they are angry because they aren't getting the "privileges" they expect.

And that's why mass shooters are overwhelmingly white (and middle class). :-(

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the problem is largely cultural. Bizarrely, successful training in conflict resolution is sometimes sabotaged by fathers who tell educators "You aren't teaching my kid that sissy stuff!"

Note, though, that these sorts of impulsive, violent crimes are actually on the decline in the US. They have been since we started getting rid of tetraethyl lead in gasoline in 1975 (with a roughly fifteen year lag). There's still a lot of cultural influence to deal with.

[kengr]

But the shootings are going *up* here. That's the individual ones. Though mass shootings seem to be increasing as well.

I suspect both rises are because "social stress" is climbing as real income drops and jobs get harder to find. At least non-minimum wage jobs.

That's something that doesn't get mentioned enough. Yes, unemployment is down. But the type of jobs is shifting to lower income and less "secure" jobs.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by "here"? (Not a snarky question; what part of the world are you referencing?) Violent crime in the US as a whole has been trending down since the early Seventies. Much of that, of course, was due to the high level of violence from protests against the Vietnam War and for civil rights fading, but even once we were out of that period a slower decline in violence has continued. Naturally, there are hot spots which are worse than average and occasional periods which run opposite to the trend. (I used to work with trendline analysis for a living.) Interestingly, short-term increases often follow incidents which are highly publicized.

I recently saw a graph which showed a sharp uptick in violent crime after the end of every war the US has been involved in. That contributed to the early Seventies maximum and some more recent upward blips. As you touched on, there's also a strong positive correlation between an increase in average income and a decrease in violent crime. The better the economy does the lower the crime rate and vice versa. This applies both overall and to specific regions.

From what I have read, the recently touted increase in police officer deaths was actually a return to what has been typical in recent years, because 2014 was a record low. We should, of course, strive to return to and exceed that record low, but this information puts the increase in proper perspective.

When quoting the number of murders you have to be careful about what source you use. Gun control advocates quote 32,000 "gun murders" in the US every year. That's actually the total number of shooting homicides (willful taking of life). According to the US Department of Justice roughly half of all fatal shootings in the US are ruled legally justified. (Naturally, I can't find my bookmark for the DOJ page and Google is being uncooperative so I can't give a firm percentage or a reference.)

We definitely need to work on the violent tendencies of so many in the US, but the situation isn't as bad as some people portray it.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I apologize if the above reads as preachy. I was short on sleep yesterday and tend to get gabby when sleepy.