I’m not sure what’s up with this Milo Yiannopoulos catfish, but he brings up a point that may be completely deranged in his presentation but that still deserves to be discussed.
I might be a raging homo, but I still innately understand the male need to conquer, crush and win. Men need to express that dark, powerful part of themselves, or it can abruptly overflow. If it is suppressed, derided and ridiculed, it can show up without warning and with horrible consequences.
That’s why I’m so distressed that heterosexual men are being told, constantly, by the media and even in schools, that what they are is bad. This, I submit, is at least in part what’s driving the recent spate of shootings.
I think one thing that’s important to keep in mind when we think about these mass killers is that we can come up with various explanations that might tie them together, but unless they’re as true about other advanced industrialized nations as they are about our own, I don’t think the explanations will be convincing. There is no doubt in my mind that it’s hard to be a boy in this country right now and that our schools are so intent on getting them to behave that they’ve diagnosed being a boy as a mental disorder that requires multiple prescriptions.
I also don’t doubt that sexual frustration can become a lethal motivating force for both young males in our country and in Muslim countries where they often become the best recruits for martyrdom operations.
I also see a possible connection between autism, or the autism spectrum of mental disorders, and several of our recent shootings.
We can find some common motivations and medical conditions, but we still need to understand why these things result in mass shootings here and not everywhere.
What distinguishes our country is the prevalence of guns. A gun is what makes it possible for someone to translate their anger or frustration or hopelessness or simple psychosis into a huge bodycount.
Now, it isn’t just the guns, because as difficult as it can be to get a gun in Europe, it’s not by any means impossible. I’d argue that it’s both the guns and the attitude we have towards guns. In Europe, going out and getting a gun is a bit of an exotic idea. Here, guns are lying around everywhere for two year olds to pick and kill their parents and siblings.
It’s the latter condition that is more problematic than the former, because you can’t legislate about attitudes. At best, you can try to do this slowly over time through public health announcements, in the same kind of way that the government tries to get us to eat healthier and quit smoking.
Congress won’t let the federal government even research ways to reduce gun violence, so we also have a huge political problem.
If we seriously want to reduce gun violence, whether of the routine variety or the mass killing variety, we need to do some research. I don’t have any easy answers, but I know that the simple fact that we have guns lying around everywhere is the basic root of the problem. People are largely the same in every country and every culture, and they have the same mental health issues. So, if you’re serious about fixing the problem, you have to look at what’s unique about our country. I don’t think we’re unique in how we treat boys. I do think we’re unique in how we feel about guns.
There’s clearly something wrong with how we feel about guns and changing that has to be a part of the solution.
But if we want to work a little on getting back to letting boys be boys, that’s not a bad idea for completely unrelated reasons.
