Saturday, March 30, 2013

WHITE MALE MASS SHOOTERS: THE OMEGAS AMONG THE ALPHAS?

Charlotte and Harriet Childress have published an op-ed in The Washington Post titled "White Men Have Much to Discuss About Mass Shootings." Obviously they're right when they say that mass shooters are nearly always white males. And they're right about the fact that if both mass shooters and the defenders of gun rights were overwhelmingly of the same non-white race, the rest of the culture would accord gun-rights defenders far less respect.

But mass shooters, for the most part, aren't the alpha males within their own culture, even though most come from America's alpha race.

And maybe that's the problem. If you're white and male (and middle- or upper-middle-class), the culture tells you that you can have it all. If you're white, male, and developing paranoid schizophrenia, or having profound difficulties with socialization, you're falling short of very, very high expectations. Why aren't you thriving? You're a person who's supposed to be thriving! Everyone in your demographic category can thrive!

Young American males of other ethnicities are conditioned to expect disappointment in life. White suburban males are led to believe that the world is their oyster. Maybe it's falling short of these high cultural expectations that attracts a certain percentage of socially struggling white males to fantasies of violent revenge. They want to kill because they're expected to dominate, and this is the only way they know how.