Last night, as you probably have heard, a Dallas man named James Boulware launched a one-man quasi-military assault on the Dallas Police Department headquarters, firing an automatic rife with such abandon that early reports suggested that there were as many as four different shooters. After fleeing the scene in an armored “Zombie Apocalypse Van,” leaving behind an assortment of improvised explosives as a kind of going away gift, Boulware was cornered in a restaurant parking lot; after a long standoff, he was eventually killed by a police sniper’s bullet. It was something of a miracle that no one but Boulware ended up dead.
Boulware’s father told local news that his son had been “pushed past” his “breaking point” after losing custody of his son. Men’s Rights activists often describe men who “resort to violence” after losing a custody dispute as victims of a cruel family court system.
But in Boulware’s case, it appears, nothing could be further from the truth.
Because, you see, he lost custody of his son two years ago — after a violent incident that offered a chilling prequel to last night’s rampage. As the local NBC affiliate reported at the time
A Paris man was arrested after family members reported to authorities that they were concerned he could go on a shooting spree. …
Officers confiscated several guns from a Paris home, after arresting the owner. “There are four or five long guns and three or four pistols, tubs full of ammunition, and the body armor,” says Paris Police Chief Bob Hundley.
James Boulware, 33, allegedly grabbed and choked his mother in Dallas on Tuesday morning, and he has made other threats, police and family members said.
“That he was going to just kill all the adult members of the family and then that’s when he made the comment he may shoot up some churches and schools,” says Hundley.
“He had been talking about the schools and churches being soft targets, being easy targets because no one in them was armed,” a man who identified himself as Boulware’s brother “Andrew” said.
After this incident, a judge handed over custody of Boulware’s son to Boulware’s mother; it seems rather clear that the court was right to deem him unfit to care for the boy.
Further confounding the standard Men’s Rights narrative is the fact that the mother of the child, reportedly a drug addict, was also deemed unfit; both were ordered by the court to pay child support to Boulware’s mother.
Boulware was well-known to local police for this and other family disputes — as well as for repeatedly threatening the judge involved in his case.
Indeed, he littered Facebook and other websites with comments ranting about the alleged injustice done to him, alongside angry and often hateful attacks on “Comrad [sic] Obama” and the “fag loving, abortion have typical queer American brain washed troll[s]” who argued with him online. After a commenter called him “dumb” in one recent discussion of American foreign policy, Boulware declared that “I’M TRYING TO FIND OUT WHERE YOU LIVE SO I CAN DRAG YOU OUT OF YOUR TRAILOR AND BEAT YOUR BITCH A$$!!!!”
His conspiracy theories may have been driven by delusions; Boulware’s mother says her son “heard voices” and that she and other family members had tried in vain to get him the mental health treatment he needed.
After last night’s events, Boulware’s father told local media that, while he didn’t think what his son had done was right, “we all have a breaking point, and they pushed him past it.”
But Boulware, it seems fairly clear, was already plenty broken long before “the system” got to him. And no matter how sad or angry he was about losing custody of his son, nothing justifies a violent attack on innocent strangers with assault rifles and explosives. Most people, even if they were pushed far past their breaking point, wouldn’t respond with attempted mass murder. We are not all rage bombs waiting to go off.
And that’s when this post comes back around to the Men’s Rights movement. No, despite his anger at the police and courts for “taking away his kid,” and his penchant for calling people “BITCHES” in comments sections he doesn’t seem to have been a Men’s Rights activist.
But his was the kind of rage that Men’s Rights activists like to “warn” us all about; his violence was the sort of violence that MRAs all too often excuse.
I’ve written many times before about the way the Men’s Rights movement has lionized Tom Ball, a New Hampshire man who committed suicide several years ago by lighting himself on fire outside a court building — in hopes, as he explained in a long and inflammatory manifesto — of inspiring other men to start fire-bombing courthouses and police stations to avenge the wrongs allegedly inflicted on men by the family courts.
We’re lucky no one took him up on this suggestion, just as we are lucky today that no one except Boulware died in his assault on the Dallas police.
Boulware’s apparent mental illness, and the extreme nature of his assault on police, may keep him from becoming the MRA martyr that Ball became after his death. But MRAs have been willing to excuse if not justify similar violence in the past.
Consider, for example, “How we kill Johnny,” the story Men’s Rights celebrity Paul Elam has just posted to his new “consulting” site An Ear for Men.
In the story — presented as a true one — Elam describes his feelings upon learning of the murder-suicide of a young man he’d worked with as a substance abuse counselor. After a quick mention of the murder part of the murder-suicide — Johnny was said to have “killed that little girl he was married to” and shot, though not fatally, the man she was sleeping with — Elam moves on to the real victim, in his estimation: Johnny, the guy who pulled the trigger.
Johnny, as Elam sees it, was really only guilty of loving the woman he killed too much.
You see, men love. They love with the most profound intensity and selflessness of which any creature on this earth is capable. And the steely bond between them and women is, unlike their hearts, unbreakable. …
They will lay down in traffic for the women they love and stand in the way of bullets to protect them.
Yes, that’s right. He’s waxing poetic about men protecting the women they love — in the middle of a story about a man who killed the woman he loved.
I hope, more than anything else, that at some point in our future that people start to think. When you see the story on the evening news about a man who set himself ablaze outside a family court, ask yourself what kind of pain could drive someone to cure it with fire?
I can only assume this is a reference to Ball, who hoped that men would rise up to avenge his pain with firebombs.
When you read in the newspaper about the man who holed up in his house with a gun and his children, threatening to take them all out, ask yourself if this is just a crazy man, or a man driven to the brink by a pain so monstrous and devastating that even the unthinkable could become an option?
The fact is we “read in the newspaper” and on the internet about men like this all the time. And they are virtually always men. Murder-suicide, while rare, is an overwhelmingly male crime. Women lose custody too — as did the mother of the child in Boulware’s case — but outside of a few exceptional cases they don’t react to this by trying to murder fathers or judges or an entire police departments at once. Men sometimes do.
Elam has in the past “warned” us all that unless we start kowtowing to angry men like him, and soon, we will create a massive “male bomb” that will tear apart society as we know it today.
But men — or at least the vast majority of them — aren’t rage bombs. Those men who do resort to extreme violence — like Boulware and all the men we read about who kill their partners and sometimes even their children before, as they say, “turning the gun on themselves” — aren’t the victims they and Men’s Rights activists would like us all to see them as. They’re the perps — invariably men with an overgrown sense of entitlement, too in love with their own rage.
Those who use these men as a “warning” to the rest of us are playing a very old game, perfected by domestic abusers and bullies of all sorts. Abusers and bullies learn very quickly that they don’t always have to use violence to get what they want; the threat of violence is enough. “Don’t push me,” they say, and the implicit threat of an “explosion” of rage does the rest, all while enabling the bully to pretend to be the victim.
The Men’s Rights movement, to a large extent, is all about taking that implicit threat to the societal level.
It’s up to us to keep them from getting away with it.
Great piece, David. It’s sobering to realize that underneath all the ridiculousness of the Manosphere that we love to mock here, there are serious issues of entitlement and rage with real-life consequences.
A great post, David.
Am I the first one here? Then ALL COMMENTERS, ESPECIALLY NEW ONES, nothing about mental illness or Internet diagnoses! Just don’t go there! Not here.
Oops, not first. And I wrote this comment before reading the article, where his mental health is mentioned. But still, I and probably quite a few other people here would like to avoid a heated debate that may not end well.
I hope Boulware’s ex at least can breathe a little easier tonight. But still, this is just plain awful. It should not have had to end like this.
And if the MRAssholes make hay of this one, or a martyr, they will have made common cause with murderous violence. NOT love.
Great post, David. I really, really hope that people look more closely at the details before assuming that Boulware was unjustly deprived of custody or that that loss of custody happened recently.
As for Paul Elam and his claim that Johnny loved selflessly…if you kill the person whom you love when they cheat on you, you’re not loving selflessly! I mean, selflessness would imply that you loved them so much that you let them go and live with the other man/woman because you just wanted them to be happy. Granted, I know that in real life, cheating hurts, and you’re probably going to be angry (though for most people, not so angry that you would feel justified in committing murder or causing any form of bodily harm) but that’s what full, selfless love would entail. Shooting your cheating spouse and their lover, though? That’s completely and utterly selfish. That is the definition of selfishness.
Seconding BritterSweet. It is not okay to throw mentally ill people under the bus to excuse Boulware’s actions. Plenty of people hear voices as Boulware is said to have done and never hurt anyone. Heck, the mother of his child was sick with addiction and did not pull the shit he did. This is not a mental health story.
@alaisvex
They’ll likely spin it as the mother’s fault, putting the blame for his behavior and the outcome on her, like because she was a shitty mother or something, they lost the kid, so he went on a rampage. :/
Great work David, this is a very important piece, and it won’t be long before the MRA start heralding this guy as they do to any high profile case of male violence (especially family violence).
@Pandapool,
I have no doubts that that’s how MRAs will spin it. I just hope that non-MRAs who hear the story will get the full scoop and won’t fall for MRA bullshit about men being driven to murder after being “unfairly” deprived of custody.
Thank you for this. May I say hesitantly that society must find a better way to control such men? We must take away their weapons, force them into treatment, sequester them if they are a threat? Society must do a better job of controlling untrammeled male violence.
@alaisvex
I will probably also be the rhetoric of the whole “family first” crowd, too, unfortunately. Lot’s of people shit on people with addiction, but of course the fact that the mother is a drug addict will make it even worst.
I rather doubt that anything precludes someone from becoming an MRA martyr (except showing signs of feminism). These guys are literal Nazis, after all.
(Content note: domestic abuse)
You know, I really wish the whole “so-and-so just hurts this or that person because so-and-so loves them” thing would die. I didn’t buy it when my parents hit me when I was a kid, and it’s no more convincing now. People like the shit-weasel in Elam’s story want to control the people they hurt or kill, which is pretty much the opposite of love.
It reminds me of an incident wherein a good friend of mine told her abusive father that she was leaving. He grabbed her and started choking her, screaming he’d kill her first. My friend was capable of great violence when necessary, but she didn’t fight back. For all that he was a contemptible POS, she didn’t want to hurt him. Because she loved him. Her father though, just like the rest of these guys, really only cared about control.
@Vucodlak,
It’s awfulness from abusers like that that makes me terrified of people like Paul Elam who claim that those who abuse and even kill others who try to leave them are the ones who love most passionately. Not only does it romanticize abuse to a sickening degree; it implies that people who don’t become abusive, violent, or even murderous when someone leaves them never really loved the person who left in the first place.
*slow clap*
Couchelliotrogercough
Not wanting to be deprived of your emotional crutch–so badly that you’re willing to hurt someone–is not the same thing as love.
Who exactly is this “they?” Assuming father has similarly right wing beliefs to the son, you gotta love the hypocrisy. Poor people/POC/liberals/city dwellers/single moms shouldn’t have any kind of social welfare because personal responsibility. But whenever one of them does something wrong, it’s always somebody else’s fault. Personal responsibility is only for “those people” in the minds of the right wingers. Ugh.
No, no, no. A million times no. Abuse is not selfless love. It’s not selfless to decide your ex should die for rejecting. It’s the epitome of selfishness. Love and obsession aren’t the same things. Love is selfless. Obsession is inherently selfish. Abusers are obsessed. Not loving.
From what I quoted, it sounded like I was saying men aren’t capable of selfless love. But I was talking specifically about abusers as Elam’s quote was. I’m sure most of the regulars get that, but just in case some trolls want to not all men me.
I feel like a lot of the core issue (besides the faults in the mental healthcare system and the ease with which even clearly disturbed and violent people are able to get guns in this country) is what the gun-culture itself has become. Being real about it, the most likely people to perpetrate mass-shootings are people who own a lot of guns. Or people exposed to a lot of guns and who are very familiar with their use.
In turn, people who own a lot of guns and are passionate about guns are more likely to be immersed in the gun-culture as well. And, to a large extent, the current American gun-culture has been co-opted by reactionary, paranoid loons. The kind of people who have convinced themselves that we live in a state of tyranny and that Obama is a secret muslim-socialist-marxist-spineless-ruthless tyrant who could send out federal agents to take their guns by force at any moment. The kind of people who sit around having a circlejerk about the idea of a civil war when the vast majority don’t know shit-all about what actually happens in a war (or have a cohesive enough political ideology worth fighting a war over for that matter). It’s like those morons who showed up with tactical vests, military surplus fatigues and assault rifles to “protest” outside a mosque in Texas, or those idiots who think they’re super badass for walking around a public area with an assault rifle scaring everybody. They desperately want to play soldier and be a ‘hero’, and they desperately believe that mindless macho violence will solve all of their problems.
Most of them are relatively harmless, if annoying. Some of them though, like the guy in this story, are deranged enough to actually act out on their looney revenge fantasy, might-makes-right bullshit and try to hurt a bunch of innocent people.
The gun-culture didn’t used to always be that way either, which is the annoying part. It used to be about, well, sport and hobby. People who either liked the mechanical precision of guns as machines, or the historical aspects of them, or the skill involved in the various different types of target shooting. Nowadays though, it’s become a political thing, with far too many looney, objectivist, wannabe paramilitaries for my liking.
http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/f-p.gif
What did PPT JUST SAY?
This tends to be my experience as well – right wing people use ‘personal responsibility’ as shorthand for ‘everything that goes wrong for you is your fault because you didn’t take responsibility. Everything that goes wrong for me is the tragic result of other people not taking responsibility. Because I say so that’s why.’
I’m just so glad that MRA’s didn’t get their awful hands on the awful awful story of what happened in Dunedin last year – Edward Livingstone killed his two children and himself, in front of his ex-wife. He’d breached protection orders and was obsessed with getting revenge on his ex for leaving him and taking the kids. He loved those kids enough to kill them entirely to destroy his exes life.
And all I keep thinking is “If he was black the cops would’ve turned him into wet rags on the pavement as soon as he brandished anything vaguely gun-shaped.”