It’s a predictable national tradition: after each mass shooting, liberals call for gun control and conservatives demand better mental health care. Liberals agree that we need better mental health care, the two sides fight a bit about gun control, and nothing happens.
Study after study has disproven the role of various Republican scapegoats for mass shootings. Video games don’t cause violence, and neither does mental illness. In fact, the most significant predictor of mass shootings is misogyny. Men who engage in domestic violence and who endorse far-right sexist ideologies are much more likely to go on shooting sprees.
Misogyny and Domestic Violence as Mass Shooting Predictors
Mass shootings often begin with domestic violence. In at least 54% of mass shootings, the shooter also killed a family member or domestic partner. A large number of mass shooters have a prior history of domestic violence, and many have even been convicted of various forms of partner abuse.
Many mass shooters are explicit about their views. The Dayton, Ohio, shooter allegedly maintained a rape list. Elliot Rodger, who killed six people, explicitly stated that he was angry with women and wanted them to suffer. Women and children are disproportionately victimized in mass shootings. Twenty-five percent of mass shooting victims are children, and several mass shooters have specifically targeted women.
The incel movement—which unites men who are sexually frustrated and angry with women—has been linked to numerous mass shootings. The FBI has called them a growing threat. Violent men have long attacked women’s right to control their bodies. Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Olympics, also bombed a Georgia abortion clinic.
Despite this evidence, and despite some mass shooters being explicit about their motives, we continue to pretend as if these shootings are a mystery. They aren’t. They are the inevitable result of a country that worships guns, denigrates women, and encourages boys to show strength through violence.
A 2017 study found a clear link between toxic masculinity and school shootings. Specifically, boys who felt they could not live up to a stereotypical masculine ideal were more likely to commit shootings. All of the shooters in the study had been subjected to emasculating bullying. This suggests that misogyny extends far beyond the minds of shooters. It’s a society-wide infection that can turn vulnerable men violent.
Why Mental Illness Doesn’t Cause Mass Shootings
Mental illness is the great scapegoat for people across the political continuum, allowing them to foist responsibility for violence on a mysterious other, all while ignoring a more obvious and fundamental fact: 97% of mass shooters are male, and the overwhelming majority are white.
Mental illness is an easy scapegoat because we all want to believe that a person must necessarily be “crazy” to do something terrible. Mass shooters know exactly what they are doing, and often spend months planning their attacks. Most mass shooters have not had a mental illness. Moreover, the United States has much higher gun violence rates than the rest of the world, but does not have higher rates of mental illness.
Virtually every public health organization has called on politicians to stop blaming mass shootings on mental illness. “We know that a history of violence is the single best predictor of who will commit future violence,” APA CEO Arthur Evans, Jr., said in a recent statement condemning attempts to tie mental illness to mass shootings.
Stigmatizing people with mental illness by blaming them for mass shootings may actually help drive more violence. Research consistently finds that people with mental illness are more vulnerable to various types of abuse. They’re more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.
When we blame the “mentally ill” for mass violence, we ignore a crucial fact: people with illness are not a mysterious other. They are us. A 2017 study even found that lasting mental health is unusual. According to that study, 82% of people experience a mental health diagnosis such as depression or anxiety before the age of 38. If we’re going to block access to guns for the mentally ill or put the mentally ill on some sort of monitoring list, then we are going to have to put the majority of the country—including much of Congress—on that list.
Why White Men Get a Free Pass
When people of color do anything problematic at disproportionate rates, white analysts and “scientists” rush to tell us that this proves these groups are innately and immutably inferior. Where are the scholars rushing to tell us that white men are inherently inferior? Where is the rush to limit their rights? The Republicans who so eagerly called for a Muslim ban are silent on the issue of white men and mass violence.
This isn’t an accident. In a white supremacist patriarchy, white men continue to see what non-white men do as deviant, and what white men do as somehow justified or understandable. Perhaps that’s why police are able to arrest white mass shooters without killing them, or why Republican lawmakers are so eager to blame others—video game manufacturers, for example—for the violence of white men.
Mass shooters often cite a loss of power. Incels insist that women are oppressing them by refusing to sleep with them. This, too, is not an accident. When a group is accustomed to having unearned advantages, the steady loss of some of those advantages and the steady improvement in the lives of minority groups can feel like oppression.
For the entire history of our nation, white men have had the right to control, rape, and even kill women and people of color—through slavery, coverture, ducking, Jim Crow, extrajudicial lynchings, and more. It should come as no surprise that the men who are most committed to racist and sexist ideas would attempt to reclaim their right to control and kill others. Mass shootings are a natural extension of far-right ideology. To call them anything else is to ignore the clear pattern.