Triple Entitlement and Homicidal Anger

Abstract

In the Unites States, middle-class Caucasian heterosexual males in their teenage years and in middle age commit mass murder, the killing of at least three victims during a single episode at one or more closely related locations, in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population. Utilizing an intersectional theoretical approach, this article investigates the convergences of (1) white entitlement, (2) middle-class instability and downward mobility in the postindustrial economy, and (3) heterosexual masculinity and its relationship to violence. Such analysis concludes that, among many mass killers, the triple privileges of white heterosexual masculinity which make subsequent life course losses more unexpected and thus more painfully shameful ultimately buckle under the failures of downward mobility and result in a final cumulative act of violence to stave off subordinated masculinity.

Keywords

mass murder rampage homicide intersectionality race class and gender

Introduction

Mass murder is by no means a new phenomenon, but recent tragedies at a public meeting with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon, Arizona; at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado; at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut; and at a mall in Portland, Oregon have led both the media and public to be increasingly aware of this particularly heinous crime. This article investigates the dynamics of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, and age in an attempt to bring additional clarity toward understanding the motivations of American mass killers. Framed by the intersectional approach and literature, the convergence of various demographic categories offers new insight into this uniquely violent population. Such an intersectional approach includes the consideration of (1) white entitlement, (2) middle-class instability and downward mobility in the postindustrial economy (3), and heterosexual masculinity and its relationship to violence. Heterosexual middle-class white men in their teenage years and in middle age commit mass murder (but few other violent crimes) in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population. This has led Gloria Steinem (1999) to call mass murder, along with serial killing, supremacy crimes in terms of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Through the theoretical lens of intersectionality, these identity characteristics and any possible criminal motivations associated with them will be explored via their convergences and divergences.

Intersectionality stresses the importance of looking at how various identities interact, yet the literature on intersectionality is both largely theoretical (McCall 2007) and focuses almost entirely on those oppressed via racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, capitalism, and so on. This article will instead look at the benefactors of patriarchy, racism, and heterosexism (though crucially not postindustrial capitalism) in order to stress how white heterosexual male entitlement fuses with downward mobility, subordinated masculinity, and other disappointing life course events in a way that drives some anguished individuals to retaliate in true hegemonic masculine form through large-scale acts of retaliatory violence and murder. In this unique intersectional context, the performance of a violent massacre provides an illegitimate opportunity for entitled white men to regain lost status and forge a powerful, successful, masculine identity through infamy.

The vast majority of previous studies of mass murder have either not addressed the impact of identity or done so peripherally and without theoretical depth. While Leyton (2001) discusses social class and political economy, Wise (2001) focuses upon race/ethnicity, and Collier (1998), Mai and Alpert (2000), and Neroni (2000) address gender/masculinity, all of these authors have focused upon the impact of a singular component of identity. The few studies which seem to have acknowledged the importance of intersecting identities exclusively concern themselves with school shootings, a particular subset of mass murder (Levin and Madfis 2009). School shootings (the tragedy at Columbine High School in particular) have been analyzed through the converging lenses of race and gender (Schiele and Stewart 2001; Consalvo 2003), the fused vantage points of homophobia, masculinity, and socioeconomic status (Klein 2006), and via the amalgam of homophobia, masculinity, race, and political ideology (Kimmel and Mahler 2003). Aitken (2001) looks at school shooters’ demographic traits and the intersection of racism, sexism, and ageism, though this study explores how moral panics over such shootings develop rather than as a means of understanding etiology. Despite these initial forays into the intersectional identities of school shooters, no study has yet addressed intersectionality and mass murder more generally.

The Supremacy Crime of Mass Murder

As it has come to be known in the contemporary literature on criminal homicide (such as Fox and Levin 2012; Holmes and Holmes 2001; Kelleher 1997), mass murder refers to the nonstate-sponsored killing of at least three victims during a single episode at one or more closely related locations by one or more individuals.¹ Thus, mass murder is considered to be a distinct phenomenon from both state-sponsored genocide, in which powerful nations, organizations, and individuals slaughter whole strata of society in the interest of their own wealth and power, and serial murder which signifies the killing of at least three victims whose deaths have occurred over an extended period of time with cooling off periods in between each killing (Holmes and DeBurger 1985; Fox and Levin 2012). Recent research indicates that mass murders take numerous forms and various typologies (such as Dietz 1986; Holmes and Holmes 2001; Meloy et al. 2001; Fox and Levin 2012) have split what was formerly essentially an operationalization masquerading as a phenomenon into more descriptive categories dictated by motivation, the massacre’s location, and by victim/offender relationships. These archetypal offenders include (but are not limited to) family annihilators, disgruntled citizens, set-and-run killers, criminal opportunists, disgruntled employees, workplace avengers, school shooters, and disciple killers. The analytic scope of this article will extend to all of these forms of mass murder except for criminal opportunists, who commit a massacre during the course of another crime, as this subset constitutes an entirely distinct phenomenon in terms of criminal actions and motivations. Likewise, gang-related shootings in which multiple people are killed have not traditionally been counted as a form of mass murder, and much like criminal opportunists, gang multiple homicides demonstrate motivations quite distinct from the aforementioned types of mass murder upon which this article is focused.

The number of American massacres, like homicide more generally, saw a significant increase in the 1970s (Duwe 2004; Fox and Levin 2012). Though the United States experienced a similarly significant surge in mass murder during the 1920s and 1930s (Duwe 2004), the 1970s saw a serious elevation in the mass murder rate. Duwe (2004) finds that only twenty-one mass public shootings occurred in America from 1900 to 1965, while there were ninety-five cases between 1966 and 1999. Likewise, a study compiled by the New York Times suggests that there was a second major increase in the mass murder rate during the 1990s (Fessenden 2000). Most recently, Fox and Levin (2012, 137) find that during the years 1976–2008, mass murders occurred approximately twice per month and caused an average of 125 deaths per year in the United States.

The academic study of mass murder is still fairly new and undeveloped as it was only defined as a distinct phenomenon in the mid 1980s (Holmes and DeBurger 1985; Levin and Fox 1985). Though recent research suggests that mass murder accounts for nearly as many deaths per year in the United States as serial murder (Fox and Levin 2012), serial murder has been the subject of both plentiful research and interdisciplinary theorizing, while mass murder scholarship is still in its infancy and theoretical insight on the topic is extremely limited (one exception is Levin and Madfis 2009). As significant and unique patterns can be discerned among the identity characteristics of mass murderers, their downwardly mobile heterosexual white male identities are ample ground for theoretical exploration of an intersectional variety.

The Theoretical Development of Intersectionality

The term intersectionality, first coined by Kimberle Crenshaw (1989) in her discussion of African American women’s employment, generally refers to the importance of studying the intersections between race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and gender as their fusion and interplay more accurately reflects the complex dynamics of each. Though it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that it became common practice for feminist scholars to question the notion of “global sisterhood” as not taking the power dynamics of race and class into account, the concerns over intersectionality have historical precedents in the conflicts between white and African American women in the abolitionist and suffrage movements of the nineteenth century (Brah and Phoenix 2004). As African American women questioned their subordinate positions in the women’s movement and their exclusion from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, there was a desire to challenge essentialist and universal notions of what it means to be a woman (Brah and Phoenix 2004). One of the most notable people behind this movement, Sojourner Truth, gave a speech in which she declared that while she was both a woman and a mother, she had not been treated as a human, let alone a lady, due to her race. Her speech is considered by many to be the starting point for the idea that oppression may be multifaceted as in the case of Black working-class women suffering a “triple oppression” of racism, sexism, and classism (Yuval-Davis 2006, 194).

Though originally focused upon “black feminist thought” (Collins 1990), intersectionality theory has moved toward the investigation of the relational, constructed, and structural experiences of all women. Though still used largely in women’s studies (McCall 2007), the idea that race, gender, and class “are not distinct and isolated realms of experience” can just as easily be applied to any other segment of any other population (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 80). Thus, the analysis of mass murderers, who are disproportionately more likely to self-identify as heterosexual white males, may greatly benefit from an intersectional approach. Though intersectionality has historically focused upon those faced with various forms of oppression, if not triple oppression, this article will forge an intersectionality of entitlement and domination, perhaps even a “triple entitlement” of white male heterosexuality.

Race and Ethnicity: White Entitlement and High Expectations

Richard Scott Baumhammers, a white heterosexual middle class male and unemployed immigration attorney, feared that white Americans were destined to become a statistical minority and that Americans of European descent were rapidly losing their advantaged position in society. On April 28, 2000, he began a shooting spree in suburban Pittsburgh to allay his hatred and fear of job-stealing immigrants. On that day, he perpetrated one of the most multi-cultural massacres ever, shooting and killing one of his Jewish neighbors, an Indian-American man leaving a grocery store, a Vietnamese-American employee and Chinese-American manager of a restaurant, and an African-American man leaving a karate school (Levin and McDevitt 2002, 93).

Mass murder is the only subset of homicide that can be considered a predominantly and even disproportionately white phenomenon. As such, white privilege and entitlement play a major contributing role in the phenomenon.

Whites commit mass murder in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population. Fox and Levin (1998, 435) find that 69.9 percent of American mass killers are non-Hispanic whites,² while non-Hispanic whites make up only 63.7 percent of the US population (Census Briefs 2011).

This white disproportionately (albeit fairly close to proportionality) is exclusive to this type of killer. In contrast, the violence of single-victim homicide is most frequently the domain of excluded and marginalized minorities in American society. While mass killers are slightly more likely to be white, African Americans are overrepresented among every category of single-victim killers from infanticide and eldercide to gang related homicide (Fox, Levin, and Quinet 2005). The aforementioned white 69.9 percent of mass killers is significantly higher than their single-victim counterparts who are only 46.4 percent white (Fox and Levin 1998, 435). In addition and quite in contrast to the lily-white public perception of a serial killer, new evidence suggests that African-Americans may also be overrepresented among serial killers (Walsh 2005).

As a disproportionate amount of both serial homicides and single-victim homicides are committed by minorities and a disproportionate (or even proportionate) amount of mass murders are committed by non-Hispanic whites, theoreticians ought to consider the role of racial and ethnic identity in understanding the various forms in which homicides occur, rather than seeking general or race-neutral theories of homicide.³ As mass killers are, by and large, unique in their disproportionate whiteness (or at least in their lack of minority overrepresentation), a different theoretical understanding is warranted. Conventional criminological theories often emphasize the role that disorganized neighborhoods and cultures of disadvantaged minority groups play in crime causation. For example, social disorganization theory posits that high crime rates in urban areas result from a lack of community cohesion and informal social control in neighborhoods where heterogeneous populations do not live in the same places for extended period of time (Shaw and McKay 1942). Likewise, theories of differential association (Sutherland 1947) as well as culture conflict and subculture (Cohen 1955; Miller 1958) link criminal behavior to the values and attitudes of groups understood to be distinct from those of the mainstream public. These approaches do not prove particularly helpful, as mass killers are just as likely, if not more so, to be the privileged suburban white majority members of our society. Likewise, labeling theories (such as Becker 1963; Lemert 1951; Tannenbaum 1938) which assert that overzealous reactions by authority figures may actually cause and exacerbate criminal behavior are often less applicable as the privileges of white middle-class male heterosexual identity afford this population a measure of distance from many stigmatizing labels—though their working and lower middle-class identities later discussed would afford them no such privilege. To move instead toward a theory of mass murder as white violence,⁴ scholars must look toward the notion of white entitlement.

Antiracist activist Tim Wise (2005, 135) has stated that while violence committed by African Americans:

always gets viewed through the lens of race as in “what’s wrong with black people” or “that underclass,” which is white-folk code language for black people—violence by whites, whether kids or middle-class stock brokers who wipe out their entire families because they lost their job, is never viewed this way: it is never viewed as racial, as somehow signifying something about the group and its genetic or culturally ingrained flaws.

This is a reasonable point made to suggest a move away from “culture of poverty” and other traditional criminological arguments. However, rather than discounting cultural arguments (flawed as some may be), it may prove fruitful to unearth the other route implicitly suggested by Wise. That is, scholars of crime might have something to gain from looking at the culturally ingrained flaws of white society in America. The dysfunctions of white (male) privilege are perhaps overdue for the critical criminological examination of mass murder.

Of particular relevance to the study of race and mass murder is Wise’s (2005) description of a potentially problematic aspect of white entitlement and expectation. He characterizes the American dream of always expecting to perpetually and seamlessly move onward and upward as a particularly white cultural phenomenon in America. Wise (2005, 140) illuminates the significant idea that “[b]eing the dominant group can set you up for a fall, can prevent you from building up the kinds of coping skills needed to deal with setback, because so often these skills are ones you just don’t need.” White men are not systematically disenfranchised, and so they have not built up the requisite psychological and emotional mechanisms for dealing with loss. One of the white American men in his book states that:

[w]hen one is top dog, one has the luxury of not really worrying all that much about the consequences of our actions. And nine times out of ten that works out okay for us: our behaviors don’t lead to catastrophe, be it personal or communal. But all it takes is that one time to demonstrate the limits of privilege.

Similarly, Wise (2005, 140–41) describes another young white male as saying:

I never realized how messed up it could be, being a white male … I was raised and encouraged to always see myself as being in control, in charge, stable, together … That’s how white men are portrayed, and that’s the stuff I ingested from the time I was a kid. It wasn’t you and Dad’s fault … It’s just the constant message I got growing up: always be in control, always win. Then when a few things went wrong, I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t know how to cope … because I’d never had to cope with anything before.

Wise goes on to assert that whites experience a serious feeling of emptiness as a result of their own lost ethnicity, particularly when faced with the multiculturalism of others. They fill this void with privilege upon which they become dependent. In her interviews with white students, McKinney (2005) finds that her respondents frequently feel their privileged status is threatened and that their chances at success have been significantly diminished. Many students in her study construct their whiteness to be a cultural and economic disadvantage through personal stories of victimization. She states that “[i]t is difficult for young white people to conceive of their whiteness as a privilege when it is consistently presented to them in everyday and political discourse as a liability” (McKinney 2005, 151). This conclusion, however inaccurate, allows whites to feel like blameless victims of affirmative action and reverse racism rather than the gleeful recipients of an inheritance of white privilege.

The externalization of blame has been cited as a predisposing psychological trait of mass murderers (Fox and Levin 1998; Levin and Fox 1999). Interestingly enough, from McKinney’s analysis, it seems that the externalization of blame, at least in the sense of always perceiving oneself as a victim and never as the culprit, may be a widely prevalent rationalization and commonplace in mainstream white society. When mass killers also exhibit this symptom, it may be an artifact of their racial upbringing and situation in the American hierarchical structure.

An indeterminate future where privileges are taken away is genuinely frightening to many young white American males who, according to Gallagher (1997, 28), think that:

the American dream of social mobility has stopped or at least stalled with their generation. They are anxious and uncertain about their futures … They have heard countless times that their generation will be the first not to replicate, let alone surpass, their parents’ class position.

White males are the segment of the U.S. population most dedicated to Mertonian (1938, 1968) conformity in pursuit of the American dream in eager anticipation of material success and occupational prestige. They are also the population least able to cope psychologically with failure. When entitled white males encounter this newfound indeterminate future where they are no longer assured status and success through privilege, some may blame everyone and everything but themselves. Their sense of white male privilege does not permit them to acknowledge their own role in any mistakes, let alone any personal limitations. Accordingly, major life stressors or acute losses, such as getting fired or divorced, prove particularly unbearable for white males who have already lived lives replete with shame and disappointment as is the case with the vast majority of mass murderers (Fox and Levin 1998, 2012; Levin and Madfis 2009; Madfis and Levin 2013).⁵ Many studies of mass murder (such as Palermo and Ross 1999; Fox, Levin, and Quinet 2005; Meloy et al. 2001, 2004) have addressed the presence of such acute losses and life stressors, known in the homicide literature as precipitating factors and best conceptualized in criminological theorizing by Agnew’s (1992) General Strain Theory.

Meloy et al. (2001, 722) determines that precipitating events or triggers were recognized in 59 percent of their thirty-four cases of adolescent mass murder, while Meloy et al. (2004) locates precipitating events in 90 percent of their thirty cases of adult mass murder. Such straining events have included financial losses (such as losing money in the stock market, being robbed, etc.), occupational losses (such as getting fired, demoted, censured, passed over for a promotion, etc.), relationship losses (such as being dumped, getting a divorce, being subjected to abuse by a peer group, having a loved one pass away, having one’s romantic advances be rebuffed, etc.), health losses (such as being diagnosed with an illness, being harmed in an accident, etc.), and losses of mental illness (such as failing to take medication, experiencing a particularly negative episode, etc.; Madfis and Arford 2008). It is likely that certain types of strain may more typically be associated with specific manifestations of mass murder—for example, relationship losses are perhaps the most significant for adolescent school shooters (Levin and Madfis 2009). However, losses of occupational prestige and financial success are potentially the most paramount for adult mass killers, particularly in American society where all noneconomic functions, goals, and roles have been devalued in comparison to the demands of the workplace (as Messner and Rosenfeld 2012 discuss). As such, it is important to situate the discussion of white male entitlement and straining loss in the larger context of American postindustrial capitalism and its subsequent class structure.

Social Class: When Entitlement and Expectation Meet Downward Mobility

“It's a bad trading day .and it's about to get worse!” screamed white heterosexual middle class male Mark Barton as he waved a nine-millimeter semiautomatic in one hand and a Colt .45 in the other. The forty-four-year-old Barton then proceeded to shoot everyone around him at Momentum Securities, the Atlanta brokerage office where he had lost tens of thousands of dollars playing the stock market. Two days earlier, his trading privileges had been revoked. In three short days at the end of July 1999, Barton had slaughtered his wife, two children, and nine others at the brokerage offices (Bell n.d.).

Leyton (2001) argues that contemporary multiple murderers, both serial killers and mass murderers, come predominantly from the working and lower-middle classes and suffer from an inability to cope with their comparatively low social status position. Accordingly, they engage in their extreme violent actions as a form of class-conscious vengeance specifically, though perhaps subconsciously, against the upper classes. Leyton states that “psychology and psychiatry … cannot account for variations in homicide rates over time or between societies” (Leyton 2001, 327). He stresses that the political economic circumstances of an era define which individuals will make up the majority of multiple killers. In any given era, it is the members of the social class whose very existence is threatened that will engage in violence en masse. He suggests that, while aristocrats dominated the activity in the preindustrial age and the new bourgeois murdered en mass in the early industrial age, the contemporary postindustrial multiple murderer “is most often a faded bourgeois” (Leyton 2001, 331). This means such killers now typically come from working and lower middle-class backgrounds and frequently work as “security guards, computer operators, postal clerks, and construction workers,” while victims have become university students, shoppers in commercial establishments, and numerous other symbols of middle-class prosperity (Leyton 2001, 353). Leyton (2001, 353) posits that the typical contemporary multiple murderer is an “excluded individual wreaking vengeance on the symbol and source of his excommunication” from the financial stability and prestige of the middle class.

Unfortunately, Leyton only supports his assertion that the majority of multiple murders occupy working and lower-middle-class statuses in an anecdotal fashion. Surprising as it may seem, no quantitative social scientific study of any kind has yet to explore the socioeconomic or class composition of multiple homicide offenders, neither serial killers nor mass murderers. Further, as the majority of all homicide offending “is concentrated at the bottom of the class structure in all Western societies” (Beeghley 2003, 74), this characteristic does not distinguish multiple murderers. However, if the disappointing experience of downward mobility is indeed closely related to mass murder, this would explain the fact that the mass murder rate in America raised significantly in the 1970s (Duwe 2004; Fox and Levin 2012) just as the nation experienced a major restructuring and deindustrialization of the economy (Bluestone and Harrison 1982).

For previous generations of working and lower-middle-class people during America’s industrial age, upward mobility (or at least job stability and security) was a reality largely attainable through manufacturing jobs that paid reasonably well, even for workers with extremely low levels of education. Up until the 1970s, middle-class anticipatory socialization and high expectations of upward mobility were fairly functional thought processes for white working-class Americans who desired to live a middle-class life according to middle-class values. However, the decline of well paying manufacturing jobs has left millions of individuals with declining job prospects (Bluestone and Harrison 1982).

While it used to be fairly commonplace for an uneducated but hardworking white man to make a successful living as a factory worker, mailman, or numerous other blue-collar positions, this is largely no longer the case. These stable and good paying jobs for the less educated segments of society have rapidly moved overseas or not kept pace with rising inflation rates (Wallulis 1998; Blau 1999; Rifkin 1995). At the same time, America’s swelling credentialism, the gratuitous occupational emphasis on academic degrees, and other technical qualifications as the chief indicators of an individual’s intellectual development, financial worth, or social status, has made the dream of middle-class life much less of a reality for a large portion of the American populace (Collins 1979). Though these economic shifts were devastating for many Americans, “blue collar white males and their families may have been particularly caught off guard” as they felt not only accustomed to economic stability and prosperity but entitled due to their race and gender to occupational privilege (Schiele and Stewart 2001, 261).

Newman (1988, 229) explicates the way that many Americans understand and reconcile issues of transition to the new economy and downward mobility. In Falling from Grace, Newman discusses people’s feelings of anger, shock, and unfairness as they responded to downward mobility after following the legitimate route to success throughout their lives via hard work, deferred gratification, and sacrifices for their country and/or family. She brings attention to the fact that, in modern America, “[o]ne can play by the rules, pay one’s dues, and still be evicted from the American dream.” Newman (1988, 230) goes on to state that:

[d]ownward mobility is not merely a matter of accepting a minimal job, enduring the loss of stability, or witnessing with dismay the evaporation of one’s hold on material comfort; it is also a broken covenant … It is so profound a reversal of middle-class expectations that it calls into question the assumptions upon which their lives have been predicated.

Thus, personal identity may be profoundly threatened and individuals left feeling truly anomic, not knowing which cultural rules apply. Newman points out that, as a society, we have no cultural scripts or national dialogue for downward mobility. Accordingly, there is no established way of explaining the situation even to oneself to enable individuals to come to terms with what it means for one’s own sense of identity (and perhaps, white male identity, in particular). Individuals, unable to reconcile their cherished meritocracy with the reality of their own situation will occasionally (though admittedly, very rarely) resolve to utilize mass murder as a mean-spirited solution to their disillusioned woes and disappointing life.

Previously functional American dreams have turned dysfunctional, leaving many working and lower-middle-class people with the material desires and norms of a middle-class life style that they can no longer attain or afford. Merton’s (1938, 1968) notion of innovation referred to this very problematic situation where people who lack the legitimate means of material success begin to utilize illegitimate means to achieve that same goal of material success. While mass murderers may not become classic Mertonian innovators, such as bank robbers or drug dealers, in large part because they lack the opportunities, learning, and performance structures which Cloward and Ohlin (1966) describe as necessary to access these illegitimate means, they do innovate in their own disturbingly violent manner. Barricades to the legitimate means to success (which may extend beyond poverty to personal occupational failure) lead some entitled white males to make one final illegitimate violent act in order to gain back conventional masculine goals of power and domination. These are essentially shows of status, a way to tell the world that they are still important, authoritative, and accomplished. Their form of innovation, a massive outburst of homicidal violence, occurs in the form it does, not only as a result of a perception of lost white privilege and a demoralizing status loss due to changes in the economic structure but because the massacre serves as a masculine reaction to perceived injustice and shame.

Gender: Heterosexual Masculinities and Violence as a Solution

Marc Lepine, a Canadian white heterosexual lower-middle class male, was furious at being rejected from the Universite de Montreal’s engineering school. Lepine hated to see women in traditionally male occupations such as the police force but especially as engineers. He saw them all as feminists who were taking men’s rightful place in the social structure, as well as his rightful place in the engineering department. Lepine’s admittance to engineering school was crucial because he would gain status as a “white Canadian” and “Francophile male” (Chester 1993, 204–7). His rejection from the school had constituted a devastating precipitating event, and it became “a situation that the acutely status-conscious man found intolerable” (ibid, p. 209). He needed to regain his manhood somehow, and on December 6, 1989, Lepine killed fourteen female engineering students at the Universite de Montreal (Chester 1993).

Though crime in general is a disproportionately male endeavor, and violence even more so (Alvarez and Bachman 2008), mass murder is a profoundly masculine act. According to Fox and Levin (2012, 140), 93.4 percent of mass killers are male. This may be contrasted to homicide offenders more generally, who are 88.3 percent male (ibid, 140). The overwhelmingly masculine nature of this crime then is overdue for examination. To this end, one must turn to a new and burgeoning literature which explores the connections between masculinity (or better yet, masculinities) and violence.

As the field of men’s studies has developed across the humanities and social sciences, the criminological investigation of masculinities has taken shape (Collier 1998). Though the study of men and crime lacks complete cohesion, Messerschmidt’s (1993) Masculinities and Crime constitutes a pathbreaking seminal work of the field. Messerschmidt’s notion of masculinities is deeply indebted to prior ideas about the socially constructed nature of gender. Of particular importance is Butler’s (1990) interactional notion of gender performativity where gender is enacted daily, performed by actors, and interpreted by others as well as Connell’s (2005) conception of multiple masculinities. Fusing these two influences, Messerschmidt conceptualizes masculinities as more social than biological and accomplished through constantly “doing gender.” The notion that gender is a creational act rather than biological destiny is crucial, as this explains the utility of mass murder as a masculine gender performance. From this framework, we can begin to comprehend the despicable act of mass murder as a deliberate action designed to control the (powerful white male) image that others have of the killer. By one last catastrophic show of force, entitled but continually emasculated men feel homicidal violence on a massive scale will regain lost feelings of masculinity, superiority, and power.

Though women may also experience white entitlement coupled with status loss, they do not react violently with the same frequency. Scholars have argued that this is the case because of differential socialization (Hoffman-Bustamante 1973) and the symbolic equation of masculinity and violence (Neroni 2000). Thus, masculine gender identity is paramount to the explanation of violence as a solution to the predicament of status loss to the entitled.

First and foremost, it is crucial to understand the manner in which violence operates “as a signifier of masculinity” (Neroni 2000, 256). In American society, violence is a masculine act; the more violently men behave, the more manly they are viewed. Neroni (2000, 257) discusses the fact that in both legal and criminal institutions, “the most violent is most capable, the most skilled, and the most worthy of a leadership position.” The military soldiers who engage in the most combat (such as Marines and Navy Seals) are widely considered to be the toughest and manliest of their kind, as are the police officers who work the most dangerous beats, the sports stars whose bodies suffer the most debilitating injuries, and the gang members who commit the most violent crimes. When violence is synonymous with masculinity, boys and girls are socialized quite differently and carry these gender constructions into adulthood. It should come as no surprise that men commit more than their share of violence. This does not explain, however, why the act of mass murder is an even more masculine atrocity than other forms of violence. In search of this answer, the literature on adolescent violence and school shootings once again proves ahead of the curve in its exploration of shame and subordinated masculinity.

As previously mentioned, several scholars have noted the importance of masculinity as a factor in school shootings, particularly with regard to bullying and gay baiting (Kimmel and Mahler 2003; Klein 2006). Much of the work of James Messerschmidt (1993, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2004) has focused upon the manner in which violent confrontations arise as a result of gender challenges where someone’s masculinity or femininity has been questioned by others. To this end, Messerschmidt discusses the notion of hegemonic masculinity as “the culturally idealized form, of masculinity in a given historical and social setting” which constitutes “social structural dominance over women as well as over other men” (2004, 42-43). In addition to oppressive domination over others, “heterosexuality and homophobia are the bedrock of hegemonic masculinity” (Donaldson 1993, 645) and American masculinity in particular (Kilmartin 2007). As Kimmel and Mahler (2003) discuss, gay baiting of the type that hegemonic masculinity encourages is more about taking away someone’s masculinity than it is about sexual orientation.

In contrast to hegemonic masculinity, subordinated masculinity refers to those at the losing end of the domination spectrum (Messerschmidt 2004). In the high school setting, “jocks” exhibit hegemonic masculinity while “wimps” and “nerds” live subordinated existences. Most careful observers of school shootings have noted that the offenders, while often being white males, were also picked on for being “shy, bookish, honors students, artistic, musical, theatrical, nonathletic, ‘geekish,’ or weird” (Kimmel and Mahler 2003, 1445). In fact, Leary and his colleagues (2003) find that acute or chronic rejection of the shooters to be present in thirteen of the fifteen school shooting cases under their examination. Nearly all of the shooters experienced subordinated masculinity of some form and were denied full male status as a result. This established fact is worth highlighting, as it is a commonality discussed frequently with regard to school shooters, yet never addressed among the larger population of mass murders. In fact, the vast majority of mass murderers similarly suffer from subordinated masculinity. The life histories of mass murderers are replete with a variety of frustrations, rejections, and disappointments (Fox and Levin 1998; Fox, Levin, and Quinet 2005). They have often been failures in work, in love, and in many other interpersonal interactions (Fox, Levin, and Quinet 2005) and this has a devastating effect on their masculine sense of pride (and, often, their white sense of entitlement). Accordingly, they respond to this emasculation in the socially approved manner for men, with violence.

In America (and many places elsewhere), violence serves as a solution to men’s problems, not only because of their differential socialization and the equation of violence with masculinity but because our culture fosters the notion that violence serves as an appropriate masculine reaction to any shameful loss of masculinity (Neroni 2000; Gilligan 1996). In his book Violence, Gilligan (1996, 75-76) suggests that feelings of shame and being disrespected are the primary motivation for violent behavior among men. Though he discusses male violence more generally, his analysis seems particularly well suited to the crime of mass murder. Regarding the relationship between downward mobility and masculinity, he states that it is:

not unemployment as such that causes violence; what causes violence, rather, is the loss of self-esteem and feelings of self-worth, the blow especially to one’s sense of adequacy as a man … and the shame brought on by rejection and enforced passivity and dependency, which can all be precipitated by being fired from one’s job.

Gilligan (1996, 112) even notes how the “total loss of honor, prestige, respect, and status” may amount to “the disintegration of identity, especially their adult, masculine, heterosexual identity.” Further, Gilligan states that “the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the myth to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation … and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride” (ibid, 29). Though many mass killers experienced gender challenges as a result of downward mobility, subordinated masculinity, and/or other personal life failures such as divorce, this shame and humiliation may be replaced with a gender performance, and as violence is synonymous with masculinity in American culture, the mass killer perceives that the more violent his actions, the more manly and respected he will be. For entitled white men who long to feel the masculine pleasures of power, strength, and domination, a massacre can be a show of force, even if it is a life-ending one, which serves to bring the killer back (or forge anew) a masculine identity full of pride, accomplishment, and even international fame.

Identity Intersections—When White Male Expectation Meets Strain

Some scholars of intersectionality have argued that the traditional models of societal oppression based on race/ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, and socioeconomic status do not act independently; rather, these oppressive structures are interrelated. In much the same way, privilege is intersectional in nature. This is true in the sense that wealthy white heterosexual males are privileged fourfold. However, intersectionality proves crucial in that it is frequently the convergence of variables that matter. In the case of many mass murderers, the privileges of white heterosexual masculinity ultimately buckle under the failures of downward mobility and subordinated masculinity. Through the lens of intersectionality, one is able to assert that today’s typical mass murderer is not simply a white man with all the trappings of pride and privilege granted within the context of gender and race relations in the United States. His privileged white racial identity does not necessarily save him from the diminished socioeconomic status of downward mobility, nor does his privileged male gender guarantee the dominance of hegemonic masculinity over others. In fact, it is the very entitlements of his race and gender which make any subsequent life-course struggles and failures all the more unexpected, and thus all the more painful and humiliating.

The implications of the theory suggested by this intersectional formulation are worthy of mention. If postindustrial American society continues to face more downward mobility for the middle and lower classes, and less racial and gender privilege for white males with high expectations, and both of these developments are quite likely, the potential for increased incidents of mass murder is not insignificant. Newman (1988, 240) concludes her book by asserting that downward mobility can “undermine society’s values and threaten its prosperity.” She means this mainly in terms of lost productivity and loyalty for American employers. However, downward mobility for large segments of white middle-class American society may be threatening in a more viscerally primitive fashion, through shockingly explosive instances of mass murder.

Finally, as this article puts forth a theory that is inductively derived, future scholarship should test this empirically and quantitatively assess the extent to which white entitlement, conformity to typical gender norms, and downward mobility are present in the population of mass killers. Furthermore, it would be worth studying whether this particular intersection of identities is more or less common among certain types of mass murderers, such as family annihilators, school shooters, workplace avengers, set-and-run killers, discipline killers, or disgruntled citizens.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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