With the beginning of 2013, many people make New Year’s resolutions to improve their health, happiness, or wealth. We make these commitments and hope for a better future. As an activist, I have a long list of resolutions and goals for the upcoming year, but, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, I hope others will participate in a necessary conscious raising effort involving the dangerous link between masculinity and guns.

On December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man killed his mother and then entered into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and murdered twenty children and six adults. This incident is one of the largest mass shootings in the United States to date. People’s responses ranged from anger to sorrow to disbelief to a frenzied fear. Immediately, blame was allocated, and solutions were proposed. Some of the saner ideas thrown about included gun control, better mental healthcare, suicide prevention, and increased security on school campuses, but absent from much of the public outcry has been a discussion on the tie between masculinity and guns.

Statistically, the United States outranks the wealthiest nations worldwide in gun-related deaths. America also outranks every other country in gun ownership per capita with approximately 88 guns per 100 people. In mass shootings specifically, the overwhelming majority of perpetrators are men. In the past thirty years, only one of the 62 massacres involved a woman as the shooter. (Here are two sites discussing the history of mass shootings in the U.S.: The Telegraph and CNN.) This isn’t to say only men commit violence, and this isn’t to demonize men at all. Rather, the extraordinarily disproportionate ratio between male and female aggressors in gun violence speaks to an important issue, an issue that if addressed can help lessen the deaths and ease gendered anxieties. Clearly, the connection between gun violence and masculinity is real and needs to be addressed.

Manhood and womanhood are continually defined and redefined by society often with competing images of the ideal in play. As historian Gail Bederman asserts, “Gender is a historical, ideological process.”[1] In moments of massive change, gender crises emerge and reconstruction of masculinity and femininity occurs. Historically, periods of anxiety over masculinity have often led to resurgence of a more aggressive definition of manhood.

Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 deftly analyzes the changing concept of what it meant to be a man at the turn of the twentieth century. She argues modernity led to this shift. For most of the nineteenth century, society idealized a refined, educated, thin, self-restrained, moral, spiritual, and emotional man. “Civilized” men did not retaliate for supposed wrongs since that meant the man lacked the critical characteristic of self-restraint. Class and race obviously played into the perfect standard too. Still, Victorians placed value in feelings, etiquette, and intelligence. Think of the romanticization of tuberculosis during the period. Often men suffering from the disease were described as thin with flushed cheeks and maniac periods of intellectual productivity. Many considered their suffering ennobling. But by the late 1800s, urbanization, industrialization, the abolition of slavery, and women’s claim to the “public sphere” with “mixed sex fun” and the women’s suffrage movement altered the understanding of manhood.[2] In the wake of such change, a more physical male ideal took root. The “cult of the strenuous life” emerged in which athleticism, all male clubs, Boy Scouts, boxing, and college sports dominated. These activities reinforced the new masculinity and set new expectations. For example, the body of the archetypal man changed as well with the incredibly muscular Eugene Sandow earning the title “The Perfect Man.”[3]

In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs published what would be loved by the public, the story of Tarzan of the Apes. At one point in the story, Tarzan yells, “I am Tarzan…I am a great killer.” He successfully reaffirms the new masculinity and ties it with violence and aggression. Overwhelmingly, people praised the new Tarzan and his primitive but aggressive physical prowess. Doctors also helped shape the emerging new view of masculinity. They started urging men to combat the disease of modernity (a disease called neurasthenia) with physical activity. These doctors argued men’s minds were overworked and only through bodily activity could the mind rest. Some in the medical community, like Dr. Stanley G. Hall, advocated the recapitulation theory and thought parents needed to teach their male children to act like savages in order to raise “real” men. A few even suggested boxing classes for babies. In all of this, Theodore Roosevelt publicly performed the role of the new masculinity with his interests in hunting and his pride in military exploits. His hunting expeditions in Africa and the United States gathered national attention as did his participation with the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. Overall, the ideal man at the turn of the twentieth century became more aggressive and physical, and some, like Teddy Roosevelt, experienced “real” masculinity with gun ownership. After World War II, the Cold War created anxieties over family and masculinity. Time magazine wrote a story in 1959 that expressed this concern over defining masculinity. The article discussed the overabundance of westerns that filled the media. It argued westerns created a form of escapism. “A man’s fate depends on his own choices and capacities, not on the vast impersonal forces of society or science….Moreover a man cannot be hagridden; if he wants to get away from women, there is all outdoors to hide in. And he is not talk-ridden, for silence is strength.” The article goes on to quote a sociologist who asked “‘How long since you used your fists? How long since you called the boss an s.o.b.? The western men do, and they are happy men.'”[4] Westerns provided an outlet for the male imagination. These cowboys communed with nature, fought, were physically fit, and used guns. While most men couldn’t copy every action of a cowboy, they could at least acquire a gun to assuage anxiety over their masculinity. Gun companies tapped into this anxiety and saturated their advertisements with discussion of masculinity.