You know you're from New Mexico if ...you fact check the mass murder map. They missed at least two: Ricky Abeyta, walking distance from my grandparents' house, and Hollywood Video, where my buddies used to get their tapes. That said: Sounds legit. I created /r/aggrievedentitlement, by the way. because holy shit what a lovely phrase to describe Red Pillers.Michael Kimmel suggests that these changes have produced a uniquely American gendered sentiment that he calls “aggrieved entitlement.” Of course, being pissed off about an inability to cash in on privileges previous generations of men received without question doesn’t always lead to mass shootings. But, from this cultural perspective, mass shootings can be understood as an extremely violent example of a more general issue regarding changes in relations between men and women and historical transformations in gender, race, and class inequality.
I've been calling them douche bags, but that is more of a catch-all. I had an unreasonably heated argument with a Facebook employee about gun control shortly after their IPO, so I think we should keep in mind that gun fetishism isn't limited to our society's cast-asides. Gun fetishism is an outright cultural identity in the United States and it isn't just Deliverance-style hicks that have bought into it.
Ex-boyfriend of one of my closest friends got dumped after 3 years - let's just say for legitimately valid reasons. Like holy fuck why are you still putting up with this valid reasons. We were talking about him today and I navigated over to his Facebook because of something she mentioned he'd posted a while back that had caused some mutual friends to be like "Uh...J is clearly feelnig sore about being dumped." What I was struck most by as I scrolled through his feed, however, was all his posts of guns and about guns and gun control. I was just really surprised because I hadn't known him to be that into firearms before. At first this started off as just a funny comment about how there are all sorts of levels of "cast-asides" and sometimes maybe a man who's just been dumped or going through a little rough patch might still on a minor level fetishize guns (through facebook posts) as a way to reassert his masculinity. You know, all creatures, great and small. I now find myself consciously reassuring myself that you know, that's all this is. But reading this article and about how clearly gendered some of these crimes are, that provides a context which makes my friend''s loser ex-boyfriend who lives with his parents in his 30s seem potentially more worrisome, I have to be honest.
There's a Louis CK bit about how men are the most dangerous threat to women and I believe that this is factually corroborated. Extended bit here Further, I think if you look at it in terms of social inheritance it makes a lot of sense that a boyfriend/husband is the most likely person to kill a woman. If the historical record says, in no uncertain terms, that a wife is a husband's property, then any attempt on her part to liberate herself would be "just cause" for her husband to take extreme actions. I don't think shaking off thousands of years of precedent is easy, and that entitlement is having a little renaissance in the US presently. The other side of the coin is that a lot fewer people are murdered in general, so the threat is maybe a little overblown, but the people that pose a threat are the same characters that they've always been.
The argument put forth in the research, however, is that those whose statuses are unchallenged are unlikely to react through violence. In this case, the rich, secure gun nut isn't a threat. It's the unemployed gun nut that can't get a date you need to worry about because culturally, he's the "breadwinner" who defends his family through violence.
I think the cultural enablers are part of the macro problem, but I agree, that friend with the Facebook options isn't going to hurt anyone; he'll watch as other people get hurt and say, "eh, I like having a gun and it's only black people that get murdered." -- Getting meaningful legislation requires a culture war with these types more than the cast-asides, but certainly, the cast-asides are the ones that pose a tangible individual threat. It makes intuitive sense that the less you have to lose, the more likely you are to "risk it all." Great post, btw. I hadn't seen it before. :)