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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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Bernardo Soares
Bernardo Soares
9 years ago

@sunnysombrera:
Thanks 🙂

MovieBuff
MovieBuff
9 years ago

A bit aside from all the discussion on Boulware and the MRM, I would like to say that I really, really feel sorry for his son and hope that he is properly taken care of, as every child deserves to be.
It is horrible enough when one parent is abusive and incompetent… it must be doubly horrible when both parents are so. Isn’t is great that at least his grandmother is sane enough to look after him?
Even so, old people must find it terribly hard to chase after children and do all the little things they need… I really hope she can get enough help.

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@Bernando Soares Since when did MRAs care about individual rights? They were pretty damn violently pissed when that DC comic artist CHOSE to remove his Killing Joke covers. As well as when a game dev has sex with multiple partners.

EJ (The Other One)
EJ (The Other One)
9 years ago
PussyPowerTantrum, the Lousy Flouncer
PussyPowerTantrum, the Lousy Flouncer
9 years ago

@EJ

Where the hell were the police in this? If a person stockpiles enough weapons and ammunition to wage a land war, and then starts talking tough about carrying out massacres in schools and churches, that person must not be permitted to do so. Two years later he goes and carries out a terrorist attack. Nobody can claim that this happened by surprise.

The most plausible route seems to have been to try him for the terrorist threats and the assault on his mother, and the cynic in me thinks this is what would have happened if Boulware were black or brown. Would it have been enough to stop him? I don’t think it would have been enough to put him away for very long. Maybe a felony conviction would have stopped him from owning a small armory, but gun laws in America are pretty lax and he probably could have gotten around them if he were determined enough (and he seems to have been).

Another possibility is involuntary confinement to a mental institution if he was mentally ill. Maybe he fit the criterion of being a danger to himself and others, but involuntary hospitalization is getting difficult as mental health budgets are slashed. Plus, as SFHC has pointed out being an asshole is not a mental illness and for all we know he could have walked out a raging asshole with a perfectly sound mind.

I guess there were a number of failures in the system that left someone like Boulware free to terrorize people despite the warning signs. Reasonable firearm restrictions and rehabilitation in prison might have stopped Boulware’s bout of violence and his own death, Intervention might have succeeded and it might not have, but maybe the disturbing part is that there was no intervention at all that we know of.

@Pandapool

As far as I know, “loony” is from “lunatic” and “deranged” is another word for “psychosis”. I’m not sure those words have evolved enough to divorce them completely from defining people’s mental states yet, ya know?

Oh, I completely agree it was ableist language. And the worst part is, it probably wasn’t even deliberate–the conflation of mental illness and moral failure is so embedded in our culture, it takes effort to get away from it. An effort worth taking, but an effort nonetheless.

@kyuubinokitsunehime

Being mentally ill of course not mean that mentally ill individuals are violent, but there are violently mentally ill people.

To which I could just as easily say (correcting for your sleepiness), “Of course being black does not mean the individual is violent, but there are violent black people.” Yes, there are violent black people. There are also violent white people, violent Asian people etc. To say there are violent black people as though it were somehow inherent to blackness, or violent mentally ill people as though as though violence were inherent to mental illness, stigmatizes an already-marginalized group. Human violence is a complex phenomenon, and mental illness and race (or more precisely, racial marginalization, identification, and culture) are probably contributing factors. I think it’s hurtful and unhelpful to pick out a single characteristic, particularly that of belonging to a disadvantaged group, as the predominant cause.

David Schillings
David Schillings
9 years ago

Another wifebeater goes nuts. Wow surprise surprise. That judge did the right thing. Good riddance

sunnysombrera
sunnysombrera
9 years ago

@MewYorkKitty
It wasn’t Bernando that said that, it was Keith or James, I think.

James Haynes
9 years ago

sunnysombrera | June 14, 2015 at 8:56 am
@MewYorkKitty
It wasn’t Bernando that said that, it was Keith or James, I think.

– said what exactly

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@sunnysombrera
I knew that, lol. I was agreeing with @Bernando

So to @Keith I guess…

MRAs don’t care about individual rights if people do stuff they don’t agree with. Hence, their reaction to a feminist criticizing video games is to dox and threaten her, as if their vidja would just disappear from the face of the Earth if they don’t try to silence these people into submission. So much for supporting free speech. It’s been several years since Sarkeesian emerged from complete obscurity to worldwide fame, and video games are still here, including major blockbuster games. They just have slightly more diversity in them than they used to. I honestly don’t get what the fuss is about with MRAs being so afraid of some person on the internet saying something negative about specific video games.
You could, you know, acknowledge that some video games can be great works of art, even if they have sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist/etc. elements in them. After all, in the case of film, I still watch It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas, even though it’s kind of sexist when Mary is depicted as “an old maid” who “works at the library” all because George Bailey was never born. As well as the fact that the only black character is a maid. Still a Christmas classic.

So the point is, why are you so afraid?

Bernardo Soares
Bernardo Soares
9 years ago

@MewYorkKitty @James

I responded to Keith, who said that he doesn’t care for womens’ (etc.) rights so much as for individual rights. I find that this sounds like womens’ rights and individual rights are mutually exclusive (especially in the context of his post), which is bs.

James Haynes
9 years ago

@Bernardo Soares

ah okay, is that an example of the inverted commas “egalitarian” perspective.

http://smitethepatriarchy.tumblr.com/tagged/egalitarians

TheAdversary
9 years ago

A problem with the MRM is that they cannot avoid conclusions of violence because of the nature of the case they are arguing for. And then they have to hide their vices in virtuous words, making their point illogical and easy to refute. If they would stop acting so cowardly and start being truly honest with themselves they could be much more effective and dangerous …

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@Bernardo
I say then that women’s rights are individual rights. Right to self-determination of gender* and gender roles, right to bodily autonomy, right to free expression of speech/sexuality/etc.
As someone who had “been there done that” regarding men’s rights, I can tell you that one of the things that got me back to feminism was recognizing how women’s issues are issues of the individual and not just women as some monolithic identity group separate from all other groups. So, intersectionality, Marxism, anarchism, and sex-positive feminism* helped in that regard.

*TERFs and anti-sex-positivity feminists not included

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@James That perspective is saying that the police aren’t enough to stop rape. Honestly, I wouldn’t trust the police with much either, since my experience with activism has shown me that police are far more concerned with the “safety” of the 1%’s wealthy and power than the safety of everyone else.

Furthermore, considering our culture’s tendency to believe that a lot of rape is interracial (namely, black man raping white woman) and the fact that the police tends to have a bad history with black people to put it very lightly, that’s definitely another reason why police aren’t the be-all-end-all in stopping rape.

Though personally, I don’t agree with the specific phrase “Teach Men Not To Rape” because the real issue is that while men know that the concept that is called Rape is wrong, they might still commit rape if the act isn’t called rape (such as having sex with a person who’s passed-out or coercing someone into sex). We also need to address that a lot of guys don’t know what is and is not consensual. And police can’t really do that.

Furthermore, prison doesn’t work either, as prisoners will generally just end up committing crimes again once they’re released since our society denies opportunities to ex-convicts that so many of us take for granted. So the only thing they can really do is go into illegal trades and the cycle happens all over again.

Point is that our entire system is fucked-up from race to gender to sexuality to class.

Bernardo Soares
Bernardo Soares
9 years ago

@EJ (The Other One)
I’m going to save that gif, put it on the side and return to it when I need a standing ovation. Thanks 🙂

boogerghost
boogerghost
9 years ago

“I’ve decided you don’t get to live any more” = pinnacle of romantic selflessness. Yup.

opium4themasses
9 years ago

@Mew York Kitty I want to come to a partial defense of “anti-sex-positivity” feminists. I will probably mess this up because I don’t agree with them.

Basically, a lot of what I read from them is that we as a society have been doing the same sexist objectification but started calling it empowering. I think it’s problematic to think you know someone’s motivations better than they do, but the point makes me more carefully think about what empowerment is.

As far as the Not an MRA shit. @keith. Oh those silly feminists! How could someone read a site that had the Thomas Ball manifesto, a writing about how men should rise up violently in regards to custody issues, and compare it to a man who violently responded to a custody issue? /s soooooooooo much s

scarlettpipstrelle
9 years ago

Lots of bizarre, entitlement-rationalization belief systems out there. Here is our local superstar’s condensed story, and thank goodness nobody died. An additional ominous and disheartening thing – every time this story appeared, a small army of commenters sympathetic to him would chime in. http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_26985076/monty-turner-sentenced-36-years-kidnapping-son-longmont?source%3Drss

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@opium4themasses I understand their concern. And no, I don’t go by the libertarian argument that ALL of them are doing what they do consensually. But the sex-negative RadFems tend to go too far in the opposite direction, essentially becoming the straw feminist that we often try to fight against, claiming that anything a woman does that conforms to more traditional ideas of women’s gender norms is done out of societal coercion. Of course, some of them, such as Katharine MacKinnon, go as far as to say that even the act of sexual intercourse is something No True Woman would enjoy.

On that note, seeing that Return Of Kings post where the writer claimed the original purpose of sexual intercourse was to make women submissive to their male masters makes me afraid that MacKinnon and Dworkin might be right, despite me being a bottom and a BDSM sub and enjoying it far more than topping and domming. It makes me wonder how different MRAs really are from RadFems in some respects. Neither seem to have a very positive view of men’s ability to control rapist urges, neither have much respect for male rape victims, and they tend to be transphobic as hell.
Also, what is MGTOW other than the Manosphere’s answer to Political Lesbianism?
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2013/12/16/roosh-vs-return-of-kings-blog-offers-sex-tips-inspired-by-prison-rape/

Yet another reason why I switched back to feminism. Though having gone on here a bit more, I’ve realized that it’s a lot more liberal (reformist) than I thought. As I said before, I’m a libertarian socialist (not an oxymoron btw) and I see the struggle against patriarchy as the same struggle against capitalism, i.e., a struggle against arbitrary hierarchies created in order to give one group illegitimate power against another.

I do like the cat presence though, and I’m trying to understand why MRAs are so anti-cat and why feminists here seem to be so pro-cat
.
Maybe it has to do with stuff like this:

http://pre09.deviantart.net/f055/th/pre/i/2012/205/6/3/an_injury_to_one_is_an_injury_to_all_by_black_cat_rebel-d58haux.png

Shotagonist
Shotagonist
9 years ago

I bet you half a glass of lukewarm coke that AVfM will see this article and write a “rebutal” of sorts that you try to blame his actions on them etc.

weirwoodtreehugger
9 years ago

Hopelessly flawed thesis, essentially painting all MRAs with a broad brush because of cherry picked examples of stupidity. I often see people attacking feminists by picking the most egregious examples of loathsome bigotry and threats of violence on the internet. But, as with MRAs, the outliers don’t define the movements and they get much less support and agreement than detractors suggest.

Oh good. An “I’m not an MRA but…” troll! The thing is, extremist and violence promoting feminist quotes are actually cherry picked. Most feminists are not violent or manhating and there is no famous mainstream feminist right now that is. With the MRM on the other hand, misogyny is a feature, not a bug.

Yes that’s right. It’s time to play the name an MRA who isn’t a misogynist challenge! I’ve never seen anyone win this. Most don’t even bother to play. Maybe you can be the first Keith! Yeah, right.

The biggest problem I see with the MRA movement is that, instead of dealing with the inherent flaws of identity politics, they adopt such collectivist nonsense to “fight fire with fire.” I don’t care about women’s rights, men’s rights, gay rights, or short-stature left-handed atheist diabetics’ rights. I care about individual rights, to which every person, regardless of identity, deserves the same.

It says a lot about you that your biggest problem with MRAs is identity politics. Not the rape and DV apologia. Not the constant insinuations they make that if women stop being so uppity and demanding to be viewed, men will snap and commit acts of mass violence and it will be all women’s fault.

As for ignoring demographic classes and only focusing on individual rights; that would be well and good if we lived in a society in which everyone started out on equal footing and there were no prejudices baked into culture. We don’t live in a world like that. We live in a world that is misogynist, racist, classist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist and in the west, Christian supremacist. I’m guessing you want to ignore that because you are privileged on all or most axes and would like to keep it that way.

Looking at the stereotypes Boulware’s actions bring out, I’m struck by the vast contrast between the reaction to racial riots in Baltimore, Ferguson, and elsewhere, or riots by Muslims over cartoons, versus the reaction to white men who go berserk. In the former cases, we’re charged to understand the anger, told to look at how the victims might have provoked their attackers, about “punching down” and such rot. When a white guy does likewise, his motives aren’t to be understood with any sympathy. That’s how it should always be when someone attacks innocents. Except, as with this article, the thug’s motives are then projected on to other white guys, particularly those of disfavored political groups, regardless of how little he actually represented such people. This is an obvious double standard.

I especially think that you’re more interested in preserving your privileges than anybody’s rights after seeing this ridiculous want about how people are just so mean to white men.

I’m happy that Boulware failed to inflict any actual harm on any persons. And, I note for those wanting to blame guns that gun control laws (automatic weapons) and laws against making bombs utterly failed to stop him. As is often the case, laws don’t stop evil people with evil intent.

Because if we had stricter gun laws, he wouldn’t be able to amass an arsenal. Or if he did, he could be arrested for that and wouldn’t have had the opportunity to carry out any kind of attack. Countries with a lot of guns have a lot of gun crime. Countries without a lot of guns don’t have a lot of gun crime. People who own guns are a lot more likely to die by guns (by suicide, homicide and accident) than people who don’t own guns. The notion that gun control laws don’t stop crime is ridiculous.

weirwoodtreehugger
9 years ago

Here’s why I think it makes sense to discuss Boulware here and draw parallels to MRA rhetoric.

Right wing anti-government gun fellator types and MRAs aren’t the same groups with the same goals. Although there is overlap in some of their ideologies. However, they both have their roots in our toxic patriarchal culture. A culture that encourages men to feel entitlement and to be angry when they don’t get their way. A culture that encourages men use violence and intimidation to solve their problems. Both groups are extreme manifestations of this culture. It’s all connected. The other day a security guard who had just been fired after a string of sexual harassment reports against him shot and killed the last victim who had reported him. Again, aggrieved entitlement. Violent anger at not getting his way.

This shit is all connected.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

MRAs in the comment section trying to pretend MRA ideals are not consistent with this “make bomb’s” violent rampage? Color me shocked.

MRAs are allergic to honesty. It gives them hives.

autosoma
9 years ago

One of the feelings I’m getting so far, really, is that we are looking at a reactive system, Boulware could have been stopped earlier, but, as several have noted there was enough to flag but not enough to proactively prevent this tragedy unfolding. It’s a shame that there isn’t enough cash diverted to programmes to aid prevention.

I’m probably going to be terribly lambasted here, but I do feel that underclasses in society (and by underclass I mean the non- controling, non-maintream, non-norm elements), should have wider regard and wider consideration as, historically, they’ve had less. Having served in Ulster (sorry habit) in the ’80’s, I became introduced to the concept of a civil rights movement and what it actually ment to people trying to attain their civil rights and what they didn’t have by not allowing someone not to have the rights that I (as a secular jewish squaddie) took for granted.

I do find that the MRM to be very insular in their viewpoints and their mandate to be at odds with what I understand of a rights movement.

sparky
sparky
9 years ago

So, here’s another great post by David, connecting the dots – again – between the violent rhetoric and aggrieved entitlement of the MRM and the violent actions of an entitled man. And as I’m reading, I’m thinking, whelp, the troll’s will be all over this with “But he wasn’t an MRA! No True MRA!”

Because, of course, there is absolutely no links between a movement that glorifies violence and misogyny and promotes the view that the oppressors are the ones truly oppressed, and a violent and misogynist asshole who tried to murder people because he thought he was the victim here. Nosiree, there’s no way this is all the result of some kind of toxic oppressive system like the patriarchy! Nope, no parallels here at all! /s

Thanks for proving me right, Keith!

Really glad this Boulware asshole didn’t kill anyone.

I feel so bad for his son.