Precious!:
Why some white men go ‘bang’ - The Boston Globe
Here’s news to no one: We are in a crisis of male insecurity in this country, specifically white male insecurity. The insecurity is prompted by, among other things, the demands of women and minorities for an equal share of the pie, the megaphone of the Internet that has allowed those groups a louder voice, and their increasing success at the local and national ballot box. Or, rather, the insecurity is prompted by fear of these developments — the belief that if other kinds of people achieve a measure of political power, there’ll be less for the men who always had it.
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The issue is certainly not video games, for pity’s sakes. Republican politicians and the bloviators on Fox News will tell you that “Call of Duty” and “Fortnite” are behind the carnage in El Paso and Dayton, the Gilroy Garlic Festival and the Poway synagogue in California. Do they understand how many millions of people play video games and don’t become mass murderers? That virtually everyone under 35 knows his or her way around a gaming console? A recent
Oxford study found no correlation whatsoever between violent video game use and aggressive behavior in adolescents. One of the Sandy Hook killer’s favorite games was “Dance Dance Revolution.” Maybe we should ban that.
Want to blame mental illness? Every human society on earth has its share. No other country has even close to the number of mass shootings as the United States. Nor are social media or violence in movies and on TV the convenient villains some might hope for. The former empowers and educates as much as it divides and foments; the latter is more a symptom of the male need for
bang bang than a cause.
Honestly, it’s not even the guns. OK, it’s mostly the guns. But when you burrow down to the diseased heart of it all, what is shared by the worst mass killings in America — the ones with the highest body counts, the biggest amount of ordnance, and the most random victims — is that they are carried out by aggrieved white men who feel the country and the world slipping from their control. Which it is, very slowly but very surely, and probably about time, too.
These men want their bang bang back — the feeling of indominability they feel they were promised and believed their kind once had. They see their power waning, their privilege finally in question, and it terrifies them. So they lash out, often at co-workers or spouses and girlfriends. And sometimes they pick up the biggest stick they can find and go after the boogeyman of
them. Which, when all the shooting’s over and the bullets have been spent, always turns out to be men, women, children; fathers, mothers, grandparents. Republicans and Democrats. New Americans and old, Not
them, in other words. Just
us.
Ty Burr can be reached at
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