SALON

Monday, Dec 17, 2012 5:00 PM UTC

Why is the shooter always male?

Stats don't lie. Instead of asking why America is so violent, perhaps we need to focus on one particular sex

By

Topics: Race, male violence, mass killing, serial muders, Sex, Editor's Picks, ,

Why is the shooter always male? (Credit: Jorge Salcedo via Shutterstock)

A common demand made of socially marginalized groups is that they take responsibility for the bad acts of their members.  These demands come both from socially privileged people who marginalize social outsiders and from the socially marginalized themselves.

For instance, I just Googled “black on black crime,” and the very first link that came up  was to a blog post by an African-American writer, discussing the relative lack of attention the writer claimed the African-American community pays to crimes committed by black people against other black people.

This is an example of how, in America, a white person who commits a crime is merely a criminal, while a black person who commits a crime is a black criminal.  In other words, being black in America tends to make one a member of what sociologists call a “marked category.”

The easiest way to explain what that means is to contrast it with its opposite: If I ask you to picture a police officer, what does this person look like?  I’m pretty confident that, whatever other characteristics the person may have, he is a man – just as if I ask you to picture a kindergarten teacher, you almost certainly will conjure up an image of a woman. We don’t usually notice the gender of male police officers because we expect police officers to be men: In this context, maleness is an unmarked category.

One effect of unmarked categories is that we don’t notice things that would seem both overwhelmingly obvious and socially significant if the category in question were marked. Suppose, for example, that African-Americans committed 100 percent of the mass murders and spree killings that happen in our unusually violent country.  We can be sure this fact would be considered the single most notable and important thing about such killings, and that an almost infinite number of words would be devoted to discussing the problem of “black mass murder.”

Now almost literally 100 percent of the mass murders and spree killings in America and around the world are committed by members of a very well-defined and particular social group: men.  Indeed it’s nearly impossible to find an example of a female mass murderer.  This illustrates how the likelihood that the gender of the perpetrator of an act can be predicted correlates almost precisely with how violent the act happens to be.  Men commit the large majority of violent crimes, the overwhelming majority of murders, and practically all of the most violent murders (98.2 percent of current death row inmates are men).

Yet until very recently the fact that mass murder is an essentially all-male phenomenon got almost no attention.  Ironically, we are so accustomed to the idea that violence is gendered male that we don’t even notice that it is — unless we force ourselves to focus on something that seems so natural that it’s normally invisible to us.

As feminists have pointed out, if we define “human nature” as “what men do” we will treat male violence as merely violence, as opposed to a very gender-specific behavior.  If, when considering violence in our society, we were to turn being a man into a marked category, we would not ask questions like “why is America so violent?” but rather questions like “why are men so violent?”

Some researchers do ask that question, and they come up with a number of answers, usually featuring a mixture of biological and social explanations:  testosterone makes men more aggressive, while boys are brought up to believe that a willingness to engage in physical combat is essential to being a man, and so forth.

To the extent the latter sorts of explanations are valid, they suggest that levels of violence in general, and mass murder in particular, are culturally determined, and are related to the messages societies convey about gender identity.  Yet because men belong to a – or rather the – socially dominant group, they find it relatively easy to ignore demands (from people they dismiss as “shrill feminists”) that they take responsibility for male violence.

But all this is too academic and abstract. In the wake of yet another unspeakable crime, I suggest that we men self-consciously mark the category to which we belong, and engage in some critical self-reflection about why committing such horrors should be such quintessentially male behavior.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More Paul Campos.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • A missing poster hangs on a tree outside the Cleveland home of Amanda Berry Wednesday. Berry and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, made a daring escape this week after being held captive for more than a decade.
    Credit: AP/Tony Dejak

  • Elvis Rafael Rodriguez and Emir Yasser Yeje offer their best impression of  Eric B. & Rakim. On Thursday, New York prosecutors identified the pair as members of an international gang that robbed $45 million in a matter of hours by hacking into a database of prepaid debit cards and draining ATM machines around the world.
    Credit: AP

  • New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie walks to a podium during the groundbreaking ceremony for the Technology Enhanced Accelerated Learning Center at Essex County Newark Tech in Newark, N.J., Tuesday. Christie made less flattering headlines this week after undergoing a secret stomach surgery to curb his weight.
    Credit: AP/Julio Cortez

  • Workers stand outside the Tung Hai Sweater Ltd. factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Thursday after a fire broke out in its 11-story building. Eight people were killed in the blaze.
    Credit: AP/Ismail Ferdous

  • Workers rescue a woman trapped for 17 days in the rubble of a garment factory building in Saver, Bangladesh, Friday. The building's collapse was the worst industrial disaster in the country's history, killing more than 1,000 people.
    Credit: AP

  • Former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford gives his victory speech Tuesday in Mt. Pleasant, S.C., after winning back his old congressional seat in the state's first district.
    Credit: AP/Rainier Ehrhardt

  • Jodi Arias reacts in Maricopa Country Superior Court Wednesday after being found guilty of first-degree murder in the gruesome killing of her one-time boyfriend, Travis Alexander. Arias has subsequently said she wants the death penalty, claiming she'd "prefer to die sooner than later."
    Credit: AP/The Arizona Republic/Rob Schumacher

  • Ariel Castro stands for his mug shot Thursday at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center, where he is being held on $8 million bail. The former bus driver is accused of imprisoning three young women and beating them repeatedly over a period of 10 years.
    Credit: AP/Cuyahoga County

  • Charles Ramsey addresses the media Monday after helping rescue three women held captive in Cleveland for more than a decade. Ramsey's hero portraiture has been complicated by revelations of his own domestic violence record.
    Credit: AP/The Plain Dealer/Scott Shaw

  • Michael B. Donley, Secretary of the Air Force, testifies during a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday. The military branch was rocked this week after its chief sexual assault prevention officer was charged with sexual battery.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 134 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations