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James Boulware: Another male rage bomb goes off in Dallas

A mug shot of James Boulware from a previous arrest
A mug shot of James Boulware from a previous arrest

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.

 

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sn0rkmaiden
9 years ago

@James Haynes,

while Boulware was not an MRA, his story reflects a trope commonly trotted out by the likes of AVFM et al, where a man is ‘pushed to the edge’ and explodes into violence because they’ve done badly in family court system. People like Paul Elam appropriate such men and turn them into martyrs and heroes, therefore validating the destructive anger suffered by many members of the manosphere, rather than trying to diffuse it and offer real support.

I’ll be surprised if Boulware himself is written about on AVFM because his story doesn’t quite fit the narrative, in that his ex-wife was also being required to pay child support and being denied custody. But then again I’ve seen the Walter Scott murder blamed on his ex-wife, so I wouldn’t be that surprised.

James Haynes
9 years ago

Solar winds aren’t the cause of disease, but you would’ve write a piece saying that solar winds didn’t cause diseases unless someone claimed that they did.

James Haynes
9 years ago

wouldn’t write a piece

James Haynes
9 years ago

@sn0rkmaiden

I refuse to read AVFM anyway, so if they do talk about it, i’ll only hear about it 2nd/3rd hand.

I guess my only real point is sort of saying it’s “too soon” not in regards to tastefulness but relevancy.

kyuubinokitsunehime
kyuubinokitsunehime
9 years ago

@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs:

Well I wouldn’t classify people who defend these sorts of people as just plain assholes, neither would I qualify Boulware as such. These people are disturbed in some way. Although perhaps some of it can be attributed to idiocy in the case of the defenders. Mr. Boulware was definitely mentally ill.

Also many of the best people I know/known are mentally ill, my mother suffered(passed away now) and a good friend of mine suffers from schizophrenia. Being mentally ill of course not mean that mentally ill individuals are violent, but there are violently mentally ill people. I just happen to be of the opinion that there was something seriously wrong in this guy’s head. Sorry if my post came off poorly, or it seemed like I was equating mentally ill to being violent.

EJ (The Other One):

Mental illness of course is not the same thing as just being violent. But Mr. Boulware did seem to be showing warning signs of having violent tendencies related to a mental illness. Apologies again if it seemed like that’s what I was doing.

Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
9 years ago

Even if Boulware wasn’t the sort of murderous right-wing rageaholic caused by toxic masculinity that fits right in with the other posts here – and he was! – it’s called “Heading them off at the pass.” Like Sn0rk said, they’ve used everything from racist police brutality to the existence of butts to advance their nonsense; they’ll use this too.

My question is exactly why you’re more upset at David for posting about this than at Boulware for doing it.

(… And didn’t you post this exact same stuff after the plane crash? Or was that another guy with a similar avatar?)

Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
Scented Fucking Hard Chairs
9 years ago

Slow posting. That was at James Haynes.

James Haynes
9 years ago

“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.”

Claiming ‘common-cause’ with all that, sounds like arguing against oneself.

kyuubinokitsunehime
kyuubinokitsunehime
9 years ago

Er equating mental illness and violence I mean. Posting while sleepy is obviously not my strong suit.

Bernardo Soares
Bernardo Soares
9 years ago

@James Haynes:
this is not an issue of direct connections. David mentions several elements of a specific discourse about violent men (“pushed to the brink”) and connects the events to a specific idea of toxic masculinity that is not limited to the MRM, but finds its most outspoken adherents in their representatives.

His argument is that in events like this, one can see the real life result of what the MRM wants. There doesn’t need to be a direct social or political connection between the perp and the MRM to see that the discourse is the same. AVFM doesn’t need to comment on the event for us to argue that their ideas align with Boulwares sense of entitlement and reaction to what he saw as his victimization.

James Haynes
9 years ago

@Scented Fucking Hard Chairs

The only other thing on here i’ve posted on was about mad max (can’t remember the specifics)

“Heading them off at the pass.”
(otherwise covered under the word “preemptive”)

My question is exactly why you’re more upset at David for posting about this than at Boulware for doing it.

this isn’t really the place, it wasn’t asking for my emotional response, i’m not upset at David (didn’t even say his name) nor was I “Who’s the Real Monster?” Davids character isn’t under scrutiny.

James Haynes
9 years ago

No i did read the full post, if i did get it i would not have used a question mark

What I said was that the MRM has made heroes of men LIKE him

– so it is a genuine possibly that they will do so this time

James Haynes
9 years ago

I’ve given it a quick try, not sure how i can see previous comments, my name just goes back to facebook. i’m not entirely sure how this site is set up, i don’t have a long history of using it

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

Just another day in Murrika where crazy people can easily get access to powerful guns.
Granted, as a libertarian socialist, I personally think we might need a revolution where we start again at Year One and get rid of the Ancien Régime of these current United States like what’s going on in Rojava right now (not unlike Revolutionary Catalonia from 1936-39). But then I see stuff like this, and while I don’t want to get rid of all the guns and repeal the Second Amendment, you’ve got to admit, maybe, just maybe, people should get background checks and be required to get gun safety lessons in order to get guns. FFS, it’s like letting someone buy a car without requiring Drivers’ Ed and a license. And at least cars do things aside from kill people.

autosoma
9 years ago

From a personal context of why I feel David is right to write about Boulware in the context that he has done, is that; my father was an angry entitled rage bomb that committed a very violent crime under similar circumstances.

Now, the fall out of that is that I lived a childhood full of “sins of the father” pushed upon me and “like father, like son”. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of stuff I experienced.

Now fast forward to today, stress issues, parenting issues and relationship issues are all in play in my life. It’s very, very easy to get Elam style advice from street corner or bar pundits.

There is no way I would want to reenact any of that, finding a counterpoint like David’s is very important as it allows for self-awareness and questioning.

Watching Breadwinner’s kids cartoon on Nicolodeon with my daughter right now shows that women have to be hyper cautious of entitled male rage bombs.

I feel David does an excellent job if bringing alternative interpretations to the table and gives alternative viewpoints to someone like me who could easily fall into the rage bomb pit.

Chie Satonaka
Chie Satonaka
9 years ago

Keith, you lost the debate the moment you compared a man who lost custody of his child after CHOKING HIS MOTHER and then who has spent years talking about shooting up schools and churches, culminating in an actual terrorist attack on a police department to the protests of police brutality following multiple executions of unarmed black men and children in which the police involved faced zero consequences for their actions. Civil unrest has its place, but claiming that Boulware had no voice and was unfairly targeted by police is ludicrous on its face.

Chie Satonaka
Chie Satonaka
9 years ago

And yes, David is absolutely right to link this incident with the movement of angry entitled violent men known as the MRM. They excuse and even celebrate every one of these attacks.

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@Chie Satonaka I guess so. Granted, while this guy, like much of the MRM, spent a lot of his time getting angry at random anonymous users on the internet, so far he hasn’t been outed as specifically part of the Manosphere like Elliot Rodger was. However, it’s pretty clear that his ideology is similar to that of that of the Manosphere.

Though tbh, I generally cringe when I see people trying to say that there is ONE cause for a specific tragedy instead of a whole maelstrom of them. Granted, a more feminist society might have made him less likely to do this, but he could just as easily have found another reason to go on a cop-killing massacre. Christopher Dorner massacred cops, but he did it because he was against the police ideologically, since he saw them (rather truthfully tbh) as the army of the 1% whose purposes are to protect the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class and to maintain a system of white supremacy.

tesformes
9 years ago

@MewYorkKitty

Hey, I’m sure you didn’t mean to step on toes, but we don’t use “crazy” as a pejorative here. Mentally ill people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrator. It’s easy to assume that people being irrational and hateful are just “crazy,” but it’s not true the vast majority of the time and doing that throws actual mentally ill people under the bus, so we don’t do it.

sunnysombrera
sunnysombrera
9 years ago

@Bernardo
@Chie
*applauds* Excellent posts.

@autosoma
*hugs* Sorry to hear about the crap in your life and good on you for keeping MRM bull at arms’ length.

Bernardo Soares
Bernardo Soares
9 years ago

@Keith:
I am so sick and tired of these false equivalencies. There is a fundamental difference between a broad, diverse movement with a long history like the feminist one, and a (relatively) small group of angry men who spout misogynist nonsense. The defense of violent men comes not from outliers, but from AVFM and other websites central to the MRM. The problem of the MRM is not identity politics, but hate of women. There are mens’ rights and fathers’ rights groups that are different (at least in Germany and Switzerland), but you will note that they don’t see the MRM as an “outlier”, but as opponent, because they want to work towards a better form of masculinity than the toxic shit AVFM spouts. Therefore, they are themselves and work together with other feminists.

Your insinuation that feminists don’t care about individuals rights is just bullshit. The difference between your libertarian smartassery and feminists, socialists, antiracists is that we have realised that in a society that is built on day-to-day discrimination of minorities and women, in which informal networks of white men control the seat of power, it is necessary to talk about and work against the dicrimination of groups in order to get to the point where everybody truly has equal rights – which, in consequence, also means equal access to education, material wealth, and the justice system.

Same goes for your equivalency between this and Ferguson. There is a fundamental difference between a largely peaceful demonstration against injustice, in which violence is limited to damaging stuff and maybe accept that somebody might get hurt in the process, and a deliberate, premeditated murder spree like this guy tried to pull off, and which the MRM in other, similar cases has endorsed and used as a threat.

Given that white riots after football wins and football losses are routinely excused as “the guys need to blow off steam”, and black riots are presented as dangerous and uncontrolled, your insinuation that white guys can’t be violent is at the very least inappropriate as fuck.

sunnysombrera
sunnysombrera
9 years ago

DAYYYM BERNARDO YOU ON FIRE TODAY.

Post more? Pwease? 🙂

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@tesformes Didn’t know that. I’ll keep that in mind here. Sorry.