Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, Gavin Long, Esteban Santiago, Devin Kelley and Nikolas Cruz are all young men with evidence of mental health problems who obtained semi-automatic weapons and turned their violent fantasies into national headlines. Interspersed between those stories are 20 others in which a man fired some kind of weapon into an unsuspecting crowd. On the other side of all those bullets are 300 people who will never have their “Me Too” moment.
And that’s only since December 2012.
I’ve chosen that date to return to an argument I first made three weeks before Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. I brought it up again after the Umpqua College shooting in 2015. Since 1982, there have been about 90 mass shootings in America. All but four have been committed by men. And men have pulled the trigger in more than 90 percent of gun-related homicides. Meanwhile, we tip-toe around the truth that gun violence is predominantly a male power problem.
Power and superiority go hand-in-hand. Giving up one undermines the other. Fear of losing them is why the white men in power turned a blind eye to the South’s Jim Crow laws and extrajudicial lynchings. It’s why, despite the fact that wife-beating was outlawed in the mid-19th century, until the 1970s for most cases still were never reported to the police. Fewer yet made it to the courtroom. Marital rape wasn’t even outlawed until 1993.
And yet sexual violence, abuse and harassment remained a societal scourge for the next 25 years. Did it take the #MeToo movement to expose how little we men have learned? Did the false notion of gender superiority enable men to continue looking the other way? Or was it a fear of empowering women to be our equal?
Just as rape isn’t about sex, guns aren’t about freedom or self-defense. Even when not turned into a weapon for murder, possessing one instills a sense of power that insecure men are afraid to relinquish. And the historical pattern in which our patriarchal has failed to address violence against women being played out in the debate over gun violence.
In cases of rape, victim blaming or shaming often kept women from reporting crimes to the authorities. That’s how some gun rights fanatics are responding to the latest school shooting and the public outcry for stricter gun control laws. Newt Gingrich’s call to arm teachers and school administrators isn’t new, but it’s essentially blaming liberal politicians for not having given them guns to defend their students.
It’s well recognized gun possession and domestic violence are a dangerous mix. Alaska Statute 18.66 grants the court the authority to force a respondent to surrender the firearms in his possession. And according to mass shooting complied by the FBI, one in six offenders had previously been charged with domestic violence.
Another place to examine this correlation is the U.S. military. It’s not so much that its soldiers possess guns and often have higher power weaponry at their disposal. About one-fifth of female soldiers have been sexually assaulted while serving our country. As has been the case in civil society, very few cases were reported. Fewer yet resulted in convictions.
What makes that all worse are cases like Lt. Col. James Wilkerson. After being sentenced to a year in prison and dishonorably discharged for sexual assault, dozens of his male officer buddies got Gen. Craig Franklin to overturn the verdict.
Franklin was the commanding officer who recommended prosecuting Wilkerson. His about-face suggests another aspect of male insecurity came into play. He was afraid to cross the culture where men have been protecting men from being held accountable for abusing their positions of power.
Defense of gun rights is also a culture of men looking out for men. After all, about 60 percent of gun owners are men. But only one in five women own one. There isn’t any doubt we’d have much stricter gun laws if those statistics were reversed. The first thing men would have done is take away their semi-automatic weapons. And we’d being arguing the power anyone gets from possessing one is only an illusion.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector. He contributes a regular “My Turn” to the Juneau Empire. My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.
