Why are all of the mass shooters men?

[Calculating]

Killing certainly isn't exclusive to men as there have been plenty of female murderers out there, but as far as I know every single mass shooting event has involved a male shooter. I really start to wonder why that is. Is it all just lonely men who cannot find a girlfriend and take it out on society(Elliot Rodger being a prime example)? Or is there something specific to the male psychological state which causes men to take this course of action?

[Sneederbunk]

1. Don't know many women into assault rifles

[applegrove]

2. Don't you think they have personality disorders? They are not regular men.

And the California mass shooting, San Bernadino, back when Trump was running was a couple.

[MrScorpio]

3. Men are the most privileged class in this society.

Last edited Mon Nov 20, 2017, 05:13 AM - Edit history (1)

Men have been conditioned to believe that they're entitled to inflict their own pain onto everyone around them... That their own pain is so much greater than the pain that they'd inflict on others. Mass shootings are also a sign of toxic masculinity. Consider how also that plays with gun culture.

White men are the most privileged of the privileged, so it's not an accident that they're the ones who commit the most mass shootings.

[Skittles]

9. BINGO

[raccoon]

21. Da winner! Nt

[FarCenter]

4. Testosterone

[Calculating]

6. I do start to wonder if that's a big piece of the puzzle

I can understand that there are cultural aspects of this problem related to how men are brought up and taught in society, but it's still hard to grasp how ALL of these shootings are done by men. Perhaps T drives aggression/the will to fight and that is what makes the thought of some 'grand revenge massacre' so appealing to troubled men. A mass shooting fills the need to 'go down fighting and hold the world accountable for perceived wrongs in a blaze of glory'. Females tend to be more low-key with their murders and usually have some particular goal in mind other than random carnage.

[FarCenter]

31. Males of most mammalian species are larger, more aggressive than females

Generally, the males are the ones who fight for territory, food, and access to females. So they have bigger bodies, stronger muscles, longer claws, etc. They are also more dangerous. Cows are docile, while bulls are not. Boars are more dangerous than sows.

This is an evolutionally conserved differentiation due to differences in gene expression and hormone balance from conception onwards.

[VOX]

7. Worlds most dangerous substance.

Most fights, violence, feuds, and wars are fueled by it.

[Matthew28]

5. Men are taught

that being tough and violent are part of being a man. We as a people need to teach our sons that such is bad and counter productive.

[meadowlander]

8. I don't think it's any one thing,

but I'd add that men are more likely to develop schizophrenia and when they do it's at a younger age with a more sudden onset.

Male psychopaths outnumber female psychopaths by as much as 20:1 in some studies.

I'm not saying that all mentally ill people go on to become mass shooters, but that many mass shooters do have some form of mental illness and when they do, it is generally the kind of mental illness that is more prevalent in men.

My totally non-professional and anecdotal observation would be that women are generally culturally conditioned to internalise feelings of anger and impotence (leading to higher rates of depression, suicide and self-harm) and men are encouraged to "blow off steam" which, for some people, translates into lashing out violently.

[Hamlette]

10. Strangulation appears to be a common thread in mass shooters.

“Statistically, we know that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide,” Strack said. “They don’t go backwards.”


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/which-domestic-abusers-will-go-on-to-commit-murder-this-one-act-offers-a-clue/2017/11/16/80881ebc-c978-11e7-aa96-54417592cf72_story.html?utm_term=.e677eda37c6b

[ecstatic]

12. Interesting article. Thanks for sharing. Nt

[BigmanPigman]

11. You probably have read my 1000 posts asking the same question.

I read this article in my Time Mag after the Las Vegas shooting. Basically it is testosterone (therefore should all men be castrated at birth except for a select few who are prime examples of the male gender who would be allowed to give sperm samples for invitro?). I often have thought that would be a simple and tidy solution. However it is not due not to testosterone alone but also the uniquely American gun culture and the stereotypical BS that boys and girls are raised in in this country. There are men and guns in other countries/cultures but none have our number of gun related crimes and deaths. Men make up 98+% of the violence linked with guns. There are two solutions...
1. Get rid of the guns and you solve most of it.
2. Change how America sees guns a a macho man stereotype (like cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, etc.) Men are trained to feel that they aren't "a real man" unless they are the dominant gender and entitled to whatever suits them personally to prove it to themselves and their macho man peers.
http://time.com/4968842/one-undeniable-factor-in-gun-violence-men/

The 2nd amend is a BS lame excuse that the NRA has used to get richer and this is strictly America.
* Now everyone feel free to bash me...I have heard it all before.

[goldwax317]

13. For that matter, why are they all white?

Sometimes, it *is* about race.

[Alea]

15. 4 people shot is a mass shooting

So they're not all white and not all men.

[Marengo]

20. All? Were Rizwan Farook and Omar Mateen white?

[Lee-Lee]

22. All white isnt even close to true.

DC snipers
Pulse Night Club
San Bernardino
Baton Rouge police officer shootings
Dallas police officer shootings
Chattanooga Naval Reserve Center
Ft Hood
Virginia Tech
Oikos University
Washington Navy Yard


I could keep going on and on.

[ck4829]

23. Ft Hood - Which one?

The one perpetrated by a non-white man or the one perpetrated by a white man?

It's just so weird, when people say "Fort Hood" and "shooting", the one perpetrated by someone who looks just like your average congressman doesn't even register.

[Lee-Lee]

25. You know which one

Like any other disaster, when you speak of the name attached to a place like that you mean the worst, most notable one. Like the Chicago Fire or San Francisco Earthquake there were lots of other fires and earthquakes there before and after but the name gets attached to the worst one.

This is no different, despite your attempts to put some sort of racial or religious bias motivation to that name where there isn’t one.

[Make7]

14. Not all. There was the Goleta postal facility shootings in 2006.

Perhaps the exception that proves the rule? Still, it is inaccurate to say all mass shooters are men. Tashfeen Malik was one of the shooters at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino.

[doc03]

30. What ever happened to going postal? There for a while it was mailmen

going crazy and killing people.

[safeinOhio]

16. Sociology of American Shooters: Young, Angry, andViolen

https://sophieologie.me/2012/09/27/sociology-of-american-shooters-young-angry-and-violent/

Last line, "As we can see, about one-third of our shooters are under the age of 25 at the time of their gun rampage."

So in implementing vast reforms in public high schools to make them resemble almost prison-like conditions, and in treating students pretty darn similarly to prison inmates, is it any surprise that this generation has grown up to express increasingly violent tendencies? Is it really any surprise that we are now seeing school shootings with increased frequency by shooters of increasingly younger ages? No. Nobody should be surprised at all.

And when I say increasingly younger ages, I really do mean our mass murderers are really getting younger. A young and angry generation. First I present to you a general breakdown of the shooters in my sample, done in percentages, to the left.

As we can see, about one-third of our shooters are under the age of 25 at the time of their gun rampage.

[LeftInTX]

17. Amy Bishop was a professor who shot at a group of other professors

She killed three and injured three others

[Raine]

18. 16 yr old Brenda Spencer shot up

an elementary school killing 2 and injuring 9 because she hated Mondays

[Crabby Appleton]

19. Laurie Dann

more at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Dann

During the days before May 20, 1988, Laurie Dann prepared rice cereal snacks and juice boxes poisoned with the diluted arsenic she had stolen in Madison. She mailed them to a former female friend, ex-babysitting clients, her psychiatrist, Russell Dann, and others. In the early morning of May 20, she personally delivered snacks and juice "samples" to other friends, acquaintances, and families for whom she had babysat, some of whom had not seen her for years.[1][2] Other snacks were delivered to Alpha Tau Omega, Psi Upsilon, and Kappa Sigma fraternity houses and Leverone Hall at Northwestern University in Evanston.[1][2] Notes were attached to some of the deliveries.[6][7][8] The drinks were often leaking and the squares unpleasant tasting, so few were actually consumed. In addition, the arsenic was highly diluted so nobody became seriously ill.[1]

At about 9:00 a.m. on the 20th, Dann arrived at the home of the Rushe family, former babysitting clients in Winnetka, Illinois, to pick up their two youngest children. The family had just told Dann they were moving away.[2] Instead of taking the children on the promised outing, she took them to Ravinia Elementary School in Highland Park, Illinois, where she erroneously believed that both of her former sister-in-law's two sons were enrolled (in fact, one of Dann's intended targets was not even a student at the school). She left the two children in the car while she entered the school and tried to detonate a fire bomb in one of the school's hallways. After Dann's departure, the small fire she set was subsequently discovered by students, and quickly extinguished by a teacher. She drove to a local daycare attended by her ex-sister-in-law's daughter and tried to enter the building with a plastic can of gasoline, but was stopped by staff.

Next Dann drove the children back to their home and offered them some arsenic-poisoned milk, but the boys spat it out because it tasted strange to them. Once at their home, she lured them downstairs and used gasoline to set fire to the house, trapping their mother and the two children in the basement (they managed to escape).[1][2][9] She drove three and a half blocks to the Hubbard Woods Elementary School with three handguns in her possession. She wandered into a second grade classroom for a short while, then left. Finding a boy in the corridor, Dann pushed him into the boys' washroom and shot him with a .22 semi-automatic Beretta pistol. Her Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver jammed when she tried to fire it at two other boys, and she threw it into the trash along with the spare ammunition. The boys ran out of the washroom and raised the alarm.[1] Dann then re-entered the second grade classroom where students were working in groups on a bicycle safety test. She ordered all the children into the corner of the room. The teacher refused and attempted to disarm Dann, managing to unload the Beretta in the struggle. Dann drew a .32 Smith & Wesson from the waistband of her shorts and aimed it at several groups of the students. She shot five children, killing eight-year-old Nicholas Corwin and wounding two girls and two boys before fleeing in her car.[2]

[shanny]

24. A culture of toxic masculinity (ours).

Note the frequent precursor of domestic abuse.

[janterry]

26. I can't quite speak to mass shooters

But when women and men try to kill themselves (and mass shooters are also suicidal) - men select more lethal methods. They shoot themselves, while women often (not always!) select methods that might (and often do) get themselves help (they swallow pills, are found, and hospitalized).

[mythology]

27. I think a lot of it is how we are conditioned in our society

Men are conditioned to not let our feelings and emotions out, and that builds up inside of you. Couple that with a world that is changing so that white men aren't quite so advantaged, particularly in the sense that the traditional jobs that were available to white men that offered a ticket to the middle class and the whole family, decent vacation, societal respect etc are being lost to automation, and the wide spread availability of guns (and large clips). I'd even lump the fact that a major part of the Republican party "base" has been fed bullshit by people like Rush Limbaugh that they are being screwed by feminists and minorities in a sense helps push people over that edge. Not that Limbaugh is directly responsible, but the attitude of victimhood, that they are "owed" better will resonate the wrong way with a certain percentage of people who don't have, or aren't willing to avail themselves of, the outlets to relieve that tension in a safe fashion like therapy.

[HAB911]

28. Testosterone

[Loki Liesmith]

29. I dont like Mondays

It wasn’t always just men.

[rainy]

32. Dont forget that more boys are medicated

for ADHD ADD and other conditions to get them to sit in class without disruption. These drugs have serious side effects that cause mental problems, aggression and violence!

[former9thward]

33. A couple years ago we had the San Bernardino shootings.

Which was both male and female. There have been a few others.

On Feb. 20, 2014, Cherie Lash Rhoades, 44, former chairwoman of the Cedarville Rancheria tribe, opened fire at the Cedarville Rancheria Tribal Office and Community Center in Alturas, California. Among those killed were her brother, her niece, and her nephew. When she ran out of ammunition, she grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed another person. All told, she killed four people and wounded two. Authorities said the meeting at tribal headquarters was about evicting Rhoades and her son from tribal land.

On Jan. 30, 2006, former postal worker Jennifer San Marco, 44, fatally shot a former neighbor in Goleta, California, then drove to the mail processing plant where she used to work. She opened fire inside, killing six employees before killing herself. The U.S. Postal Service said that San Marco worked for the Postal Service for six years, but was given early retirement in June 2003 because of psychological problems.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino-shooting/wife-san-bernardino-shooting-joins-small-list-women-mass-killers-n473536