Discussion List for campus-based and allied personnel working to end gender-based violence on campus.

["Molly Dragiewicz" <>]

New York Times

April 19, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist


A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun 


By BOB HERBERT
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists
/bobherbert/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

"God I can't wait till I can kill you people." 
- A message on the Web site of the Columbine killer Eric Harris.

*

In the predawn hours of Monday, Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a former
marine and Eagle Scout in Austin, Tex., stabbed his wife to death in
their bed. The night before he had driven to his mother's apartment in
another part of town and killed her. 

Later that Monday morning, Whitman gathered together food, water, a
supply of ammunition, two rifles, a couple of pistols, a carbine and a
shotgun and climbed the landmark 30-story tower on the campus of the
University of Texas.

Beneath a blazing sun, with temperatures headed toward the mid-90s,
Whitman opened fire. His first target was a pregnant teenager. Over the
next 80 or so minutes he killed 14 people and wounded more than 30
others before being shot to death by the police.

More than four decades later we still profess to be baffled at the
periodic eruption of murderous violence in places we perceive as safe
havens. We look on aghast, as if the devil himself had appeared from out
of nowhere. This time it was 32 innocents slaughtered on the campus of
Virginia Tech. How could it have happened? We behave as if it was all so
inexplicable.

But a close look at the patterns of murderous violence in the U.S.
reveals some remarkable consistencies, wherever the individual
atrocities may have occurred. In case after case, decade after decade,
the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and
humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have
decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get
the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.

Dr. James Gilligan, who has spent many years studying violence as a
prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts, and as a professor at Harvard and
now at N.Y.U., believes that some debilitating combination of misogyny
and homophobia is a "central component" in much, if not most, of the
worst forms of violence in this country.

"What I've concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists
and every kind of violent criminal," he said, "is that an underlying
factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a
feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do
that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent
act."

Violence is commonly resorted to as the antidote to the disturbing
emotions raised by the widespread hostility toward women in our society
and the pathological fear of so many men that they aren't quite tough
enough, masculine enough - in short, that they might have homosexual
tendencies.

In a culture that is relentless in equating violence with masculinity,
"it is tremendously tempting," said Dr. Gilligan, "to use violence as a
means of trying to shore up one's sense of masculine self-esteem."

The Virginia Tech killer, Cho Seung-Hui, was reported to have stalked
female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate
photos of women. A former roommate told CNN that Mr. Cho once claimed to
have seen "promiscuity" when he looked into the eyes of a woman on
campus.

Charles Whitman was often portrayed as the sunny all-American boy. But
he had been court-martialed in the Marines, was struggling as a college
student and apparently had been suffering from depression. He told a
psychiatrist that he absolutely hated his father, but he started his
murderous spree by killing his wife and his mother.

The confluence of feelings of inadequacy, psychosexual turmoil and the
easy availability of guns has resulted in a staggering volume of murders
in this country.

There are nearly 200 million firearms in private hands in the U.S., and
more than 30,000 people - nearly 10 times the total number of Americans
who have died in Iraq - are killed by those guns each year. In 1966
Americans were being killed by guns at the rate of 17,000 a year. An
article in The Times examining such "rampages" as the Charles Whitman
shootings said:

"Whatever the motivation, it seems clear that the way is made easier by
the fact that guns of all sorts are readily available to Americans of
all shades of morality and mentality."

We've learned very little in 40 years. 

 

Molly Dragiewicz

Assistant Professor

Faculty of Criminology, Justice, and Policy Studies

University of Ontario Institute of Technology