BORN BAD?

If you watch or listen to the News, it’s difficult not to notice that most, if not all, of the perpetrators of mass shootings are men. Many studies such as the “The Violence Prevention Project,” (theviolencepreventionproject.org-Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 2024) confirm this with reports that about 98% of identified shooters since 1966 are male. The FBI agrees, with a little lower percentage of 94% of male shooters, from 2019-2023.

In short: when gun attacks on the public happen, men are almost always the ones pulling the trigger. Does this mean that men are just biologically violent or is something else going on here?

Most databases define a mass shooting as more than four deaths, excluding the perpetrator. There are documented cases of female shooters. Jennifer San Marco was a former USPS employee who killed a neighbor and 6 co-workers in 2006 at a postal plant in California. Audrey Hale killed 6 people at the Convent school in Nashville in 2023. Cases involving mass shootings with women as perpetrators are atypical and make up about 3% of all mass shooting incidents.   

Obviously, mass shootings involve guns. The Pew Research Center finds roughly six in ten U. S. gun owners are men. Men have the means to effectuate active shooter incidents but what makes them more likely than women to go on a rampage? And keep in mind that the statistics also mean that four in ten women have guns ,so why don’t they run amuck?

A study from the University of Chicago Press (February 2021, by Eise Eliot- Brain Development and Physical Aggression, How a Small Gender Difference Grows into a Violence Problem) stated that no child is born preprogrammed for violence but learns to balance pro-and antisocial impulses according to the specific resource and social demands of their rearing environment. If a boy is taught that “real” men are physically aggressive than this characteristic will be part of their behavior. Gender differences in aggression and violence depend on cultural teaching and the quality of the early environment.

Cultural norms about what defines masculinity can lead some men to react to humiliation, misogynistic grievance, sexual frustration, status loss or rejection by spiraling into violence. In their disturbed minds they might believe that public violence will help them reclaim their masculinity. These beliefs are often amplified by the media and online platforms.

Women, on the other hand, are characterized as the gentler sex. Just remember that the little infant all in blue in that beautiful bassinet isn’t tainted with any murderous genes, it’s societal bias that acts as a determinant of a man’s character.

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