As I anticipated, the majority of the victims were female. There’s also his mother, and still one other unidentified victim, from the sounds of it?

There is a clear root cause of all these male spree-killings. It isn’t mental illness nor gun violence (ultimately that’s a major problem which exacerbates an already bad situation, but it isn’t the reason). These men all display very similar characteristics of anxious masculinity and massive male entitlement; they just take it to the furthest end of the spectrum we see displayed by men throughout our society. We are raising these men; these men are part of our society. Whilst their acts are monstrous, they themselves are not monsters.

All the shooters in these spree-killings are male and almost all of them are white (in the US, anyway; it varies in other parts of the world dependent on ethnic makeup). They have similar personality types: men who have been taught since birth that they’re worth more than other people by virtue of gender, race, sexual orientation etc but have poor social skills. They don’t get the pussy they’re ‘owed’ the job they’re ‘owed’, the attention they’re ‘owed’. Sometimes, that intense sense of entitlement and anger are further displayed in their choice of victims. Some kill indiscriminately, but a lot specifically target women and girls. That’s not a coincidence. And yet the media either a) never notices or b) if they do notice, they don’t report on it. I watched several docos on the Amish school shooting and not a single one of them mentioned the very obvious fact that the shooter separated the boys and girls and then shot only the girls.

People fumble around asking “why? why?” and the answer is right in front of our faces and is thoroughly tied up in masculinity and the way we are raising our boys to see themselves as worth more than other people, and to deny the humanity of women and children in particular. This is a spectrum, and domestic abusers/killers are enacting the same exact thing, just in a different way. Family annihilators are a particularly obvious parallel; they take out their ex and kids in one fell swoop because he sees them as extensions of himself that he has a right to control and kill at will, rather than people in their own right. The whole thing is just disgusting, and I’m so tired of this happening repeatedly with a whole bunch of “Why?” questions raised, and then things like mental illness or video games get scapegoated. There are many pieces to the puzzle, of course. But the reason some men do this is not ‘because video games’, or ‘because mental illness’. It is ‘because toxic masculinity’ and ‘because male entitlement’.