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.
I don’t understand why White males like Keith think it’s their place to tell Black people what we can or cannot protest about or who we decide can speak on our behalf. That’s not for you to say and no one cares about what you think. Your opinion means nada to the Black community.
If Black people don’t march about police shootings where White males are the victims, that’s our business. Many of us feel that White police officers shooting down Black victims is a real problem which has racism as its root cause and dates back to the founding of this country. That’s our business.
We’re not your children. We’re not your family. We’re not your friends. But keep running your mouth about how much it irks you to no end that we speak up for our rights. That’s your problem that you’ll have to work out. Not ours.
I mean phrases and insults we use, not used on us.
Here in Picksburg we call ’em “jag offs”.
Sometimes two words, often one. But yinzer is known for squishing entire sentences down into a single word.
http://www.pittsburghese.com/glossary.ep.html?type=phrases
Right, I was just aboot to go for a Tim’s run, but I couldn’t leave SFHCs and Sunnysombras rants unaccompanied, eh? Wouldn’t be terribly polite. So, hey, Keith, some of us Canucks up in the Great White North can manage to drag ourselves away from the hockey game long enough to boot up the laptops we have in our igloos, too. And I’m sorry, but you make more useless nose and leave more shit behind you than a Canadian goose does. How’s aboot you scamper off and I’ll give you a shiny loonie, eh?
*noise, not nose.
And damn stereotypical Canadian politeness. Couldn’t give him a proper telling off. Sigh.
(It always amuses me that Canadians see themselves as so polite, when over in Europe they have a reputation as blood-soaked killers. Canadian soldiers terrified everyone during the world wars with how horrifyingly good they were at the business of violence, and then went back home promptly afterwards; with the result that they are now something of a bogeyman.)
The scariest people are usually the nicest.
You don’t want to push someone so kind and polite over the edge. Because when their patience snaps, it SNAPS.
Hey, it is perfectly possible to be polite AND terrifying.
Or, as our boatload of tone-policing trolls have shown, to be polite and also a complete asshole.
You know, looking back over Keith’s posts, I don’t think he’s that old. I mean, I’m 25 (though I assume Keith thinks I’m a teenager, judging from the amount of condescension he’s attempting to lay on in a very sorry attempt to save face), and he can’t be much older than thirty or forty judging from his writing style.
He’s trying (poorly, might I add) to co-opt feminist language and use the term SJW, and the internet wasn’t made for public use until around the late 1980’s, shortly before I was born (like a year or so). So if Keith was, as he claims “arguing with bigots on the internet long before I was born”, then he had to have been at the very least twenty when it came out. I can’t imagine someone younger than that “arguing with bigots”, unless his memories of events are fuzzy, as old memories tend to be with everyone.
Or, he’s a frequent flyer at AVfM, and trying to lie to make us take him more seriously.
It’s not working, Keith.
@Paradoxical
Did they have bigots on those old BBS boards? I mean, there couldn’t have been many people on there. The internet didn’t be mainstream until the late 90s/early 2000s anyway.
I don’t know, Panda, but I imagine that most people who were that biased or racist were too stuck in their ways by the time the internet became a public thing to even bother with it. People who are that bigoted tend to hate change of any kind.
Would some of our confirmed older Mammotheers like to weigh in?
Well, I mean they probably did have bigots, but as I understood, BBS boards weren’t very popular and were told about through word of mouth and stuff. Like, people had to tell you the number and you had to dial it in to get to the board. That’s pretty much what I’ve heard.
YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN! IT’S NOT LIKE YOU COULD JUST POP IN AND TROLL PLACES BACK THEN! AND NOT TO MENTION PASSWORDS AND SHIT NEEDED!
CAPSLOCKED.
I first used the DARPAnet as it was back then in the mid 80s. That’s when mail addresses (wasn’t called email as I recall) had exclamation marks in them. I was a grubby kid in those days and we used to sneak into the less than secure computer rooms at the local uni.
First started using home PCs in the early 90s. Dial up modems that could theoretically run at 14.4k but bulletin boards ran at between 150 and 300 baud. Didn’t notice a lot of bigotry back then, but when each letter was appearing at the rate of a slow teleprinter who had time to waste on epithets?
EXCUSE ME.
WHY WAS I NOT INFORMED THERE WAS A TRAILER FOR KINGDOM HEARTS 3.
PARADOXICAL WHY HAVE YOU FAILED ME.
YOU DIDN’T TELL ME ABOUT THE NEW ANIMAL CROSSING OR ABOUT DISHONORED 2, SO WE’RE EVEN.
I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW YOU LIKED THOSE GAMES. WELL, MAYBE ANIMAL CROSSING BUT I HAVEN’T EVEN HEARD ANYTHING ABOUT THE NEW ANIMAL CROSSING YET MYSELF. I HEARD IT FROM YOU FIRST.
It is fucking hilarious that Keith’s counter to the mountain of evidence that the MRA is misogynist that David has collected on this blog, including from prominent leaders of the movement like Elam, is this guy he knows on Facebook. Who Keith says has said he doesn’t hate women. Who’s actual views we can’t see for ourselves but have to take Keith’s word for.
My feminist friend Katie also thinks this is hilarious, and that Keith is talking out his ass.
@EJ (The Other One)
Blood-soaked killers in the name of niceness, please. Holland still sends us tulips for it. Unless it’s that the Dutch are actually so terrified of us that they’re trying to buy us off. “Feed the Canadians tulips, and maybe they won’t come back.”
But yes, those of us who know still take a great deal of pride in the words of the German general who insisted that World War One would have lasted well into 1920 without the Canadians. Or, for that matter, all the German soldiers who turned extremely pale when hearing that it was the Canadians setting up across from them.
@Paradoxical Intention
Some of the calmest people in the world are actually some of the angriest, or those with the worst temper. Unlike people like Boulware and company, though, they’re aware of how dangerous they are, take steps to control it, and are *actively* calm. Not unlike those beta soldiers who don’t punch out PUAs in bars, but only because they’re aware that they’d quite literally kill the tiresome sleaze.
Panda, they’ve released another Animal Crossing game.
It’s like Mario Party, but now it’s Animal Crossing themed.
And I’m okay with this.
@Paradoxical
Sweet. I haven’t really play the games but I should.
Dishonored 2 is coming?
Wut.
Aaaaaagh. I am torn. On the one hand, Dishonored was totally so good oh my god you guys, and I want more of it.
On the other hand, Dishonored was good largely because it was a straight-up remake of Thief 2. This means that Dishonored 2 might be a remake of Thief 3, which would be bad. Very bad. Thief 3 belongs in the set of things which people do not speak of in polite company.
Aaagh. So torn.
@EJ
I think it has a playable kick ass woman.
Also, I’ve won 10 out of 14 Tavern Brawls in Hearthstone and I feel awesome.
Make that 11 out of 15. o3o
@EJ As an atheist and a scientist living in Texas, I often find myself in the opposite situation,
In this comment section, I’m the scientist surrounded by creationists accusing me of worshiping Satan, of hating gawd, having no morals, etc.. I’ve got people flat out lying, calling me a racist, woman-hater, neo-Nazi, and being in favor of all sorts of things I never said. There’s one nitwit who has been hounding me about mentioning how Muslims treat “women, gays, religious minorities, etc..” Somehow, that was morphed into me using the phrase “the gays” (which is a phrase I only use to satire anti-gay people, though it’s usually stylized as “teh gays”).
If you would like to address particular issues, feel free. Your allegories just don’t work.