Why is the shooter always male?

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:00:00 +0000

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.

Salon.com > mass killing

Why is the shooter always male?