Angry Young Men with Guns: An American Crisis

When an 18-year-old misfit stormed into Robb Elementary School in the sleepy town of Uvalde, Texas, barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom and started shooting his young captives, his bloodcurdling act was simply the latest in a long line of bloodcurdling acts by American males armed with guns and a grudge.

Of course, a few factors made this outburst even more bloodcurdling than most: the number of fatalities (21) and the age of the victims (mostly 9-, 10- and 11-year-olds, along with two of their teachers).

This unprovoked mass shooting followed the racially motivated massacre of ten black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, NY, by a mere ten days. So far this year, we’ve already endured 213 mass shootings (of four or more victims), 27 of which were classified as school shootings. In 2021, mass shootings took 703 lives and injured 2842.

When it comes to gun violence, America is off the charts compared to other high-income nations. And the mass shooting of random victims seems to be an almost uniquely American pastime. Yes, it happens occasionally in other countries, but not with the numbing regularity of mass murder in our beleaguered republic.

Are Americans really that much angrier, crazier and more violent than, say, Scandinavians, Poles, Greeks or Japanese? Well, yes and no. Every nation has its share of loonies, but we seem to produce an instantly recognizable looniness in the form of bitter, socially rejected young men with a penchant for powerful firearms.  

Why? We Americans, more than most of our fellow humans, tend to draw a sharp distinction between winners and losers. We value the former and reward them with adulation, generally accompanied by unimaginable wealth. Meanwhile, we can be merciless toward the losers. We taunt them, devalue them and essentially cull them from the herd. The losers sense that they’re being culled, and they must explode inwardly with rage until they can no longer contain it.

Equipped with powerful weapons, the rejected ones recover some measure of masculine pride and potency. They’re still full of rage, but now that rage can explode outwardly. They might stalk individuals who have wronged them in the past. Or they lash out at members of another tribe (like the Buffalo shooter’s black victims). More perplexingly, they turn their rage against random members of our species – individuals no longer viewed as individuals, but as interchangeable targets in some grotesque video game. The difference is that the blood is real.

The Texas shooter fits the pattern almost perfectly. Teased and isolated throughout childhood on account of a severe speech impediment, he eventually grew angry, cut his own face, got into fights, made threats on the Internet, and missed so many days of school in his senior year that he wouldn’t have graduated with his class.

We still have no idea why he shot his grandmother before heading over to the elementary school. I’ve read no reference to either his mother or his father. And why did he take out his rage on young children instead of his own peers? Is it because his lifelong misery was initially inflicted by young children… or that, as a friend of mine suggested, he felt a perverse need to spare them from the kind of misery he had endured? Did he simply choose the nearest available school… or a school with relatively defenseless humans who made easy targets? We’ll probably never know. We just know that he was angry and marginalized.

Why the surge in American mass shootings over the last 40 years? Let me count the reasons, both verifiable and speculative.

First, the sheer number of guns in circulation — some 390 million by current estimates – is greater than the U.S. population. Despite a shrinking percentage of American families owning guns, the number of guns per capita is roughly twice what it was in 1968. That means more guns stockpiled in fewer homes.

Of course, there’s the polarization factor. The wave of well-publicized mass shootings using high-capacity semi-automatic guns has split the country into two angry factions: as more Americans have decried the use of “assault weapons,” gun lovers have hunkered down and grown more assertive about their Second Amendment rights. (I have to wonder if they’ve read the part about “well regulated” militias.) When asked why they want military-grade weapons in their homes, Second Amendment diehards typically claim they need them to defend against a tyrannical government that might come for their guns. (And good luck with that.) But of course, semi-automatic weapons are also useful for mowing down a maximum number of victims in a minimum of time.

The Internet has been a boon for angry misfits as well as for the more sociable among us. Anyone with a gnawing quirk can find kindred spirits out there, ready to cheer them on and encourage the most extreme behavior. Feeling thwarted, rejected, full of rage? Just go online and commune with like-minded souls who feel inclined to commit mayhem.

And of course, the image of the lone, freedom-loving cowboy-pioneer-warrior has always loomed large in the American imagination. Has the macho Marlboro Man impressed himself into the souls of our boys even beyond the death of cigarette advertising? Probably not, but his like has given way to superheroes with fabulous unearthly powers. We’re not talking about good-natured Boy Scout superheroes like Superman; there’s an unmistakable aura of darkness surrounding today’s brooding comic book archetypes.

There’s a fifth, less obvious and more disturbing reason for the mass shooting epidemic: more American males are feeling aimless, hopeless and devalued. “Toxic masculinity” and “patriarchy” loom large in public conversations. Relatively fewer teenage males are opting for college: the gender split is nearing 60-40 in favor of women. Our culture celebrates blacks, gays, women and just about everyone except garden-variety men.

It used to be that society’s heroes, geniuses, politicians, authority figures and creators were overwhelmingly male. Today, women have muscled their way into that territory – and far too many young men skulk in their parents’ basements, wrapped in a stifling cocoon of violent video games, bad music and sick humor.

Young men need to go mainstream again – not reclaiming sole possession of their old leadership roles, but eager to shine, to build their character, to make a difference. Character is one of those archaic virtues that seem to have been discarded along with humility, temperance and chastity. America needs men of character, and we need them now more than ever.

But first, Americans need to agree on sensible gun laws. The majority of NRA members actually favor them, along with two-thirds of the American public; we simply need to convince the politicians who benefit from the NRA’s generous financial “gifts.”

I like the idea of regulating gun ownership the way we regulate driving: prospective gun owners would be required to take a course, pass a test, earn a license, and risk having that license revoked for serious infractions. Impose the same discipline on current gun owners as well.

Should we ban semi-automatic weapons the way we’ve banned machine guns and other tools of mass murder? After all, countries with strict gun ownership laws have seen sharp reductions in gun crimes. We actually banned many semi-automatic guns between 1994 and 2004, although there were too many loopholes for the ban to make a major difference. Still, gun deaths rose predictably after the ban was lifted.

It’s probably too late to ban semi-automatic guns from the American landscape; the government would have to confiscate the weapons already in circulation (and risk a mass armed uprising). 

How about restricting the types of ammunition used by these weapons? Now we might be on to something. Most of us would agree that nobody except a mass murderer needs high-capacity clips and magazines that can fire 40, 60 or more rounds in as many seconds.

What’s a sensible limit, then? Even a 10-round clip can inflict mass murder if the shooter brings several of them to the scene of his crime and keeps loading them one after another.

My preferred model would be the classic Western six-shooter: each bullet must be loaded individually, but the gunman would have enough ammo to dispatch murderous intruders with minimal effort.

Of course, there’s no going back to 19th-century gun technology at this point, so we might have to be satisfied with low-capacity semi-automatic clips: just make it a six-round maximum and call it a high-tech six-shooter.

Gun advocates will insist, not entirely without reason, that the most determined killers will find a way to skirt restrictive gun laws and carry out their bloody vendettas. It’s true that restrictions on semi-automatic weapons won’t prevent mass shootings, but they’ll be more difficult to carry out and therefore less common. By making them less common, we’ll be saving innumerable lives. And saving lives is always a good thing.

Rick Bayan is founder-editor of The New Moderate. His three collections of dark-humored essays are available for the absurdly low price of $2.99 each on Amazon and wherever else e-books are sold.