This past week, a deranged shooter in Santa Barbara, California took the lives of 9 people before he ended his own life. What he did was monstrous; he, himself, had become a monster. Apparently, he blamed his assault and terrorist actions on girls rebuking his “advances” or invitations for intimacy.

For a man who allegedly had first gone to therapy starting at age 8, it unfortunately is not shocking that someone with mental scars so deep might eventually do something like that. I say that because, at 22, his relatives said that he had refused treatment and medication since he became an adult. He might have been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome as a child, a condition in which patients are normally not aggressive whatsoever, but the gap after turning 18 allows for 4 years of mental issues to arise.

At the same time, in the aftermath of his horrific actions, I’ve noticed that it sparked a sexism discussion on social media. Most of the things I’ve read were emotive, knee-jerk responses to an emotional event. Some of the more egregious comments I saw were, “yet another example of how men are misogynists” or “man kills women because they rejected him proves sexism is alive and well in the US.”

Considering the events and circumstances surrounding the comments, it seems necessary to unpack everything which seems to have gotten mixed together which resulted in those angry comments.

First, the shooter was literally crazy.

Crazy people do crazy things for crazy reasons. In this case, the man decided to go on a killing spree because he felt that women didn’t want to go out with them and he wanted to punish woman-kind for his isolation. But, considering that crazy is as crazy does, instead of killing those people because of some sense of sexism, circumstances could’ve been different and he couldn’t gone on his killing spree because the cafeteria didn’t have orange jello for lunch. It hardly seems like a justified reason for feminists to start screaming that a sexualised male society caused this travesty.

Second, this event does provide women with an opportunity to voice the violence they’ve experienced in their lives.

It provides an opportunity both for healing when people can talk about past injustices and at the same time a re-evaluation of where we stand and what can be done in the future. The problem is, like the feminist organisations and women’s studies programs at universities, the loudest and most influential voices in the discussion are women who show the same sexist attitudes towards men that they apparently are arguing against when men do it to women.

There’s something wrong when women can make the claim “all men are misogynists” or “men are pigs” and expect the men to whom they’re speaking to simply nod their heads in agreement and tell them that they’re right. If one were to replace the word “men” with a racial minority, then the statement would be considered hate speech. “Jews are thieves” or “black people are dangerous” are inflammatory, hateful, and downright incorrect statements that would never be accepted in polite conversation.

I, for one, am tired of being grouped in with creeps like this shooter or wife-beaters or the like simply because I am a man. Some have walked back from the initial inflammatory language and rightly stated that it’s only some men who do this but that it causes women to fear all men. It causes them to fear walking home alone at night or rejecting someone’s advances.

They are absolutely right that it causes a great deal of fear that they might be raped or worse if they walk home alone at night. It is sad that I belong to the group that is most likely to perpetuate violence against women. At the same time, however, are we also saying that a Jewish person ought to be sad for being Jewish or that a black person ought to be ashamed for being black even if each group is the disproportionate cause of some sort of societal problem?

Perhaps the women that wrote those things were simply trying to vent some pent up anger or frustration at society that hasn’t been resolved. But, considering that the feminist groups mentioned above often use the same rhetoric and the same tactics to shame people into acquiescing to their leftist policies, I can’t say that I will be bullied into submission.

I consider myself to be an equity feminist. All people of both sexes and all religions, races, etc ought to be treated equally before the law; that is why justice ought to be blind. But when the modern feminist movement, originating out of Marxist philosophy, simply changes the wording from Marx’s class warfare argument from “class” to “gender”, I don’t have much sympathy for them. Instead of the working class fighting the capital owning class, feminists reframed it to women are fighting men for power. Equality is not a zero sum power struggle between people where one always wins and one always loses. Men and women ought to work together instead of against each other in order to overcome inequality.

Nowadays, feminist groups only support the Democratic party and leftist policies. One needs only mention the names of Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, or Christine O’Donnell in front of a self-proclaimed feminist and watch as her eyes roll. Perhaps I missed something, but I was under the impression that feminism sought to promote women making a contribution to American society. Apparently I missed the part where they actually only want to promote women who make a contribution by supporting abortion and increasing government control on society. Considering their Marxist origins, however, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

If anything, what this tragedy shows us is that there is so much healing that needs to be done. Healing for the victims and their families; the men and women who died at the hands of that lunatic. At the same time, healing for any woman who has been the victim of attacks, unwanted attention, or aggression by their male counterparts. Hopefully, we can prevents tragedies like this from becoming travesties as we do when we allow sexism to be perpetuated, but in a different form.