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Let's Talk About The Young White Guys
There must be a reason they're the ones committing mass shootings
A young white guy came over for breakfast yesterday. It was my son, who is about to turn 30, so he is slightly older than the young white guys who keep shooting strangers, but I thought he might have some insight.
"You're a young white guy," I said, handing him a plate of eggs, sausage and biscuits. He'd just come off the graveyard shift in a steaming hot factory. "Why are almost all the mass shooters from your demographic?"
He speculated some of them have been radicalized online. It's even possible, he thinks, that in some cases they're recruited and their social media feed is manipulated to send them down the kinds of dangerous rabbit holes where violent people have formed communities that glorify mass shootings.
Indeed, I had heard a piece on NPR just the day before that posited a similar theory. It's worth reading.
It's a clear pattern
But still. Why are young white guys the ones susceptible to this?
Let's face it. If almost all our mass shootings were perpetrated by middle-aged Asian ladies or elderly white women or young Hispanic girls, we'd be right on that pattern.
"Why are middle-aged Asian ladies/elderly white women/young Hispanic girls so violent?" we'd ask. "Could it be the dangers of too much tofu/excessive knitting/extreme hot sauce causing this?"
Those are all dumb and obviously false reasons. But we offer equally dumb theories of why almost all mass shootings are committed by young white men.
No, it isn't video games, lack of prayer in school, the type of music they listen to or whatever.
The despair theory
So here's my theory, and I'd really like some experts to study this and see if I'm right.
Many people are in despair because they can see their chances of living a good life are dwindling. We have always been told America is the land of opportunity, and a lot of us have found that to be anything but true.
What happens when you want to live a good life but you can't seem to manage it by doing all the things that everyone has always told you would work? What happens when you realize all the promises have been lies?
Our widening income inequality has convinced at least half of Americans that there's no American Dream for them.
You feel despair. And depending on who you are, you will deal with it in various ways.
These are all my own non-expert theories and are not to be taken as fact:
Middle-aged women
If you're a middle-aged woman, you'll do your best to carry on and will probably take antidepressants. You have given up on your own life, but you will lean on pharmacologic help in order to continue supporting those around you. That's what middle-aged women do.
Middle-aged men
If you're a middle-aged man, you may take your own life. You feel shame that you haven't been able to give your family the American Dream you have striven to provide for decades. Now you're getting older and you're tired and the whole thing seems futile.
Young women
If you are a young woman, you still believe you have a good future in front of you. More women than men finish college. You will study your ass off. You know what is at stake. You know it's a jungle out there. In other cases, you might have your children far too young and be too busy to think as you try to cobble together a way to support them.
You'll keep trying and trying and trying until you make it or until you give up somewhere around middle age. Or, you'll hide and deny your depression and will cope via secret self-harm.
Black men
If you're a black man, you always knew the deck was stacked against you. You don't need to have an epiphany about life not being fair. You have known that shit your entire life. In my non-expert opinion as a white woman, this is why young black men aren't out there angrily shooting up schools or churches.
When people from any other demographic other than young white men do shoot someone, they almost never target random people in a crowd. They shoot someone they know, someone they want to kill for a specific reason.
But the young white man grew up expecting his life to be a certain way, and now it's not.
If he excels in school and is helped to graduate from college, he will probably end up near the top of society, just as he always expected. However, if this young white man is poor, or has difficult family dynamics, or has a mental health issue, he sees this system has nothing to offer him, and he wants to lash out.
Maybe he blames society, maybe he blames women or people of color or Jewish people. His anger bursts out of him like a bomb.
I do favor reasonable gun control, and I do favor better mental health treatment.
We have lost hope
But I don't believe either of those changes will fix the fact that the United States is a place where vast numbers of us have lost hope. We take pills. We use drugs. We cut ourselves. We kill ourselves. We binge TV for hours, alone. We sedate ourselves with junk food. We struggle to pay for our most basic needs.
The biggest piece of evidence about American despair? We literally voted in as president a man everybody knew to be hateful, crass and incompetent just because he paid attention to the people most in despair.
When half the families in this country can't afford basics like rent and food, what kind of results would you expect? (And that link is from 2018 — before the Covid shit show hit.)
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We generate plenty of money in this country, but we've decided to set up a winner-take-all system.
A lot of people can't pay for the basics, and they know they're one medical diagnosis away from a personal financial Armageddon.
Individualism is a dangerous lie
And although I shout from the rooftops that the problem is our society, not the individual, that's not the official message. Everybody is taught to believe the power to make it is in their own hands.
So if they're not making it, they believe, it's because they are just not trying hard enough. And they are trying so, so hard.
Gee, why are these people so unhappy?
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