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.