A Culture Permeated by MALE Violence, War, and Guns
I’m taking a break from my personal life to look at problems associated with the latest mass murder of students by a single maverick male.
Last fall those innocent Amish children were murdered in their school by a berserker, and now, the horror at Virginia Tech. “Columbine” is an infamous name that needs no clarification. Today our public schools are on constant lock-down with metal detectors at the doors, and resident police. There have been over 500 incidents of school shooting recorded, all of which occurred during the past 40 years with 2 exceptions. It is time for our society to attempt to make some fundamental changes in the broad cultural conditions that encourage boys and men to kill in mass.
Yes, boys and men. There are no recorded incidents in which a woman or girl has picked up a gun or guns and mass murdered students. I believe this phenomenon is a freakish perversion of the hunter instinct, the prehistoric program to provide food for the family/tribe. Unfortunately studies dwell on other aspects of school violence. A Secret Service Study states that profiling a “type” of school shooter is dangerous because they do not fit our preconceptions. They do not typically come from broken homes. Many were “joiners” with good friends. Of course, it is possibly to early to compare the MALE responsible for this most recent event at Virginia Tech with the perpetrators of past events, though he seems to have been more of an introverted loner than many of the past perpetrators. As far as I know, there are no studies that specifically identify this as a MALE problem.
Not one of us can deny that these are violent times in which we live. Incidents of genocide abound. Global terrorism is a fact. We are fighting a war that our MALE president initiated against what he mistakenly described as a MALE dictator with WMD and connections to the MALE gang of international terrorists, Al Qaeda. MALE dominated gangs and gang warfare dominate City streets, and increasingly suburban streets. Cultural imagery is dominated by violence as well. The Hans Solo doll of Star Wars fame was, when first released a normal, well muscled MALE. Today, he is a hyper steroidal grotesque with arms bigger than a normal man’s legs. We are all familiar with this litany of violence that includes television and motion picture crashing vehicles, guns, blood and guts splashing and spilling across both big and little screen.
In a society in which criminal and terrorist alike are armed with better weapons than are our police we as a people must begin to take responsibility for this MALE dominated violence. We must begin to make fundamental changes in the way our culture thinks about and processes violent and peaceful events alike. We must target men as perpetrators of this perverted hunting instinct and attempt to understand how individuals who lead seemingly normal lives become murdering maniacs. We must do the work necessary in human psychology to understand and help MALES to know and understand the violent perversion of the hunter instinct that moves malevolently to damage us in this first decade of the Twenty-first Century. If we do not do these things mass murders of students by MALES will continue to take place on a regular basis.
You can send E-mail comments to
Last fall those innocent Amish children were murdered in their school by a berserker, and now, the horror at Virginia Tech. “Columbine” is an infamous name that needs no clarification. Today our public schools are on constant lock-down with metal detectors at the doors, and resident police. There have been over 500 incidents of school shooting recorded, all of which occurred during the past 40 years with 2 exceptions. It is time for our society to attempt to make some fundamental changes in the broad cultural conditions that encourage boys and men to kill in mass.
Yes, boys and men. There are no recorded incidents in which a woman or girl has picked up a gun or guns and mass murdered students. I believe this phenomenon is a freakish perversion of the hunter instinct, the prehistoric program to provide food for the family/tribe. Unfortunately studies dwell on other aspects of school violence. A Secret Service Study states that profiling a “type” of school shooter is dangerous because they do not fit our preconceptions. They do not typically come from broken homes. Many were “joiners” with good friends. Of course, it is possibly to early to compare the MALE responsible for this most recent event at Virginia Tech with the perpetrators of past events, though he seems to have been more of an introverted loner than many of the past perpetrators. As far as I know, there are no studies that specifically identify this as a MALE problem.
Not one of us can deny that these are violent times in which we live. Incidents of genocide abound. Global terrorism is a fact. We are fighting a war that our MALE president initiated against what he mistakenly described as a MALE dictator with WMD and connections to the MALE gang of international terrorists, Al Qaeda. MALE dominated gangs and gang warfare dominate City streets, and increasingly suburban streets. Cultural imagery is dominated by violence as well. The Hans Solo doll of Star Wars fame was, when first released a normal, well muscled MALE. Today, he is a hyper steroidal grotesque with arms bigger than a normal man’s legs. We are all familiar with this litany of violence that includes television and motion picture crashing vehicles, guns, blood and guts splashing and spilling across both big and little screen.
In a society in which criminal and terrorist alike are armed with better weapons than are our police we as a people must begin to take responsibility for this MALE dominated violence. We must begin to make fundamental changes in the way our culture thinks about and processes violent and peaceful events alike. We must target men as perpetrators of this perverted hunting instinct and attempt to understand how individuals who lead seemingly normal lives become murdering maniacs. We must do the work necessary in human psychology to understand and help MALES to know and understand the violent perversion of the hunter instinct that moves malevolently to damage us in this first decade of the Twenty-first Century. If we do not do these things mass murders of students by MALES will continue to take place on a regular basis.
You can send E-mail comments to
ZacSfuts@Comcast.net
, or post them below.
posted by Isaac at 4/18/2007 11:23:00 AM
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