Today, one year ago, a young man set off a bomb in the middle of a city, then drove to a near-by island, calmly crossed the water, and started shooting dozens of teenagers.

Today, a couple of days ago, a young man went to a movie premiere, equipped with ammunition he had acquired for months, and started shooting dozens of viewers of all ages.

Today, almost a year and a half ago, a young man went to a local constituents meeting and started shooting the Representative as well as dozens of bystanders.

This list could go on for pages. The Washington Post has a timeline with some of the deadliest mass shootings around the world. What they all have in common is the mostly public setting, the victims who were often unrelated and didn’t even know the perpetrators, and of course the perpetrators themselves who are almost always young-ish males.

What does that tell us? At first glance, not much. Other than the fact that they were males, the killers don’t seem to have much in common. They come from different social and ethnic backgrounds and have different political and religious convictions. All of this matters and may have influenced their motivations to a larger or lesser extent.

But there are also women who are fundamentalist religious zealots or political radicals with a disdain for fellow human life, who have a mental illness that isn’t treated properly or who live in impoverished conditions. These women may become violent and are certainly capable of destructive behaviour, but they rarely go on killing sprees. It takes a special kind of hatred of society and the people belonging to it, to come up with such a devious plan and to execute it.

When violence erupts at such a scale, motivations always come into focus. Why would anyone do this? I am certainly not someone to start blaming specific violent movies or computers games, which sounds like a simple answer to a complex problem. But cultural representations are, of course, by-products of wider social phenomena (I wouldn’t be a cultural studies major if I thought otherwise), and I am not telling any secrets when I claim that men are traditionally much more socialized (also, but not exclusively, through media and culture) to be aggressive and to react violently to situations that impact them negatively. That is still true today, perhaps a little less so, but I am not too hopeful that there will be a drastic change in this behaviour in the near future.

The violence, however, only explains the way in which action is taken, not the motivation. And I think simply arguing that men are more violent and if something triggers their “darker side” that violence is released, is not very helpful.

I would like to argue that one of the main reasons that influence this level of cruelty, pointlessness and contempt for human life is the experience of the loss of privilege and the resentment that goes with it.

First of all, it takes a very strong belief system regarding the world and how it should be. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. I think many people have very strong convictions that influence their lifestyle and behaviour; it would be terrible if it was otherwise. And it is also quite natural to feel anger upon the realisation that one’s particular world view (be it a political or religious one, for example a patriarchal or anti-liberal one) is not supported by a large fraction of society. I myself experience this anger daily in response to sexist and racist political decisions, news articles or comments.

However, there is an enormous difference between where my anger stems from and the case I am making here, and this may have a direct effect on the response. I think that the negative emotions involved grow much stronger much faster, if this opposing fraction of society threatens one’s priviliged position within these belief-structures – i.e. the position of a man dominating over women, the entitlement to certain advantages or a certain lifestyle – and when this entitlement is disappointed, resentment and anger ensues and the will to retaliate, to “take back” the entitlement with any means possible, leads to the only conclusion: the use of force. You can see this sort of rhethoric used on particular websites of the men’s rights movement and right-wing blogs.

Now I don’t mean to say that anyone who feels this particular kind of anger is a mass murderer or terrorist in the making, but the tendency towards violence is unmistakable. Sometimes this anger is directed at particular people (for example the wife) or groups in the form of hate crimes, but in the most extreme cases the rage can be developed against a diffuse enemy that cannot clearly be defined (because that enemy doesn’t exist), so the violence is directed at a general mass, an anonymous crowd as a stand-in for society in general, and that is when the number of deaths only matters insofar that the more die the stronger the message: I hate you. All of you.

I believe that the above mentioned killers’ sense of purpose and the sensationalism of their crimes attest to that as well, as a means of forcing the attention they feel entitled to.

I am not pretending that any of these thoughts are based on empirical evidence, simply qualitative sociological observations that can be easily contested. But whenever I read about these disgusting incidents (and I’ve had to read about a lot in my short life) I cannot help but feel confirmed in my observations. Anders Behring Breivik was just a textbook example, as he made it easy for everyone to reconstruct his convictions and motivations. Most killers remain silent (or are silenced), leaving room for interpretations such as my own. If they were to talk, would I want to know what they thought? Would I want to know that essentially they support some of the same beliefs that I am confronted with day after day in newspaper comments, on the street, even in my personal environment?

UPDATE: Turns out Hugo Schwyzer had pretty much the same idea as me.