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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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EJ (The Other One)
EJ (The Other One)
9 years ago

Also, on the cats thing, is it just me or does everyone seem to forget that cats are highly lethal predators who’ve been estimated to be behind, what, twenty or thirty percent of human-civilisation-related wildlife deaths? Then again, humans are also highly lethal predators, so I suppose it makes sense that we’d empathise with them.

I have been known to fuzzle my (now deceased) cat with the words “who’s an adorable little mass murderer? Who’s a pretty fuzzy cold blooded killer? Yes you are! Yes you are!” For her part, she would glare at me with a “what the fuck are you saying, human?” look in her eyes whilst permitting me to fuzzle her.

NothingClever
NothingClever
9 years ago

@Pandapool

Thanks for the rec. I’ll check it out.

Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
Pandapool -- The Species that Endangers YOU (aka Banana Jackie Cake, for those who still want to call me "Banana", "Jackie" or whatever)
9 years ago

@NothingClever

It’s also a movie but the movie goes into a puddle’s worth of detail about wolves so don’t even bother.

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@AllisonW I know that, but generally, RadFems are trans-exclusionary from what I’ve seen like Julie Bindel, Janice Raymond, and of course, Cathy Brennan. However, I’ll be honest, sometimes they have a point when they point out that the experiences of transwomen are not the same as those who have been socialized as women their entire lives. What TERFs don’t get though (or more likely, deliberately ignore due to them being the Gamergate of feminism) is that that doesn’t mean transwomen aren’t oppressed; it just means transwomen face a different sort of oppression.
Also, I’ve generally found that there’s a strong generational divide regarding feminists and transwomen/porn/etc., that those who are over the age of 40 tend to be against them and those under the age of 40 tend to be either for them or not totally against them.

Though I consider myself radical but in another way. I’m against our society’s focus on monogamy and I believe that free love and polyamory is a better solution. I like that I can finally get married in my state, but for me marriage would be a strictly legal contract for the sole purpose of government benefits and I plan to have it an open marriage where we can see other partners as we wish. I also have other radical beliefs, such as that homemakers should be financially compensated for their domestic labor like a maid would be, and I kind of like Shulamith Firestone’s idea of creating artificial wombs to free women from childbirth. (That last one is kind of ironic, since some MGTOWs also support the creation of artifical wombs, but in their case it’s out of an extremist misogyny-based gender separatism.)

@Bernando The IWW has definitely made a bit of a comeback, unionizing places like Starbucks and Jimmy John’s. And I’m sure kitties have something to do with it. People like their cats, and revolutionary Leftism sounds just so damn cute when it comes from cat pictures.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-teCEh84LgCQ/UPL35f1arXI/AAAAAAAADmM/3itdxSyoUaU/s1600/I+can+haz+union.jpg

weirwoodtreehugger
9 years ago

I don’t think anybody who lives with a cat doesn’t understand that they’re predatory. It’s pretty obvious from the way they play even if they don’t go outside and get to hunt. My Dracarys hunts centipedes for me and for that, I am grateful. Who cares if they kill some urban/suburban wildlife? No matter how many birds and rodents they kill, there’s still plenty more around. Controlling the small animal population was the whole reason we started living with them in the first place!comment image

Rabid Rabbit
Rabid Rabbit
9 years ago

It is curious that cats are gendered female, given that we all know how dem uppity wimminz are “bitches”.

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@EJ It’s stuff like that that makes me think that maybe those lolcats about kittehs taking over teh wurld are up to something. I’m curious about how intelligent cats could actually be if intelligence tests were more species-inclusive.

Which has also made me consider becoming vegan as well. (Yeah, a cat furry being vegan, lol.) Why is it that the pigs for food are somehow different from the pigs kept as pets? Why is it that eating dogs and cats isn’t considered acceptable? Just because we happen to keep those animals as pets?
We seem to draw the line based on how intelligent we believe the animals are, hence we generally don’t like the idea of eating chimpanzees and dolphins. However, we don’t know how intelligent other animals really are because our ideas of intelligence are quite likely designed to maintain a system of human supremacy.
This is especially important since intelligence tests in the past were designed specifically to maintain systems of racial and gender supremacy with Northern Europeans at the top and Sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom, and women lower than men.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be true.

And now I feel terrible for the dogs that Certified Alfalfa Males keep as their pets. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s legitimate animal abuse.

I’d imagine they’d see their Alpha as Fuck Red-Pill Mankiller looking all cute like this…comment image
…and then beat it into submission like they would for a woman because they make them feel feelings aside from unwarranted pride and self-entitlement.

Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)

@Rancid Rabbit Yeah, but those beta as fuck mangina white knight men who are into all that ess-jay-dubya feminazi bullshit like consent, nonviolence, and acknowledging their feelings are Pussies, so there’s that too.

Spindrift
Spindrift
9 years ago

I thought whether we eat an animal or not was more of a cultural thing and less of a percieved intelligence thing. Though culture may shape how we percieve animal intelligence ofcourse.

Snuffy
Snuffy
9 years ago

No matter how many birds and rodents they kill, there’s still plenty more around.

@WWTH, cats are actually considered a huge environmental problem by ecologists because of the damage they do to local populations. They’re responsible for the extinction of several species.

http://www.ecology.com/2013/08/27/global-impact-feral-cats/

steampunked (@steampunked)

Mostly unrelated, but for a RadFem who isn’t trans-exclusionary, see Twisty Faster of http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/, though she’s slipped off the radar more as 1) she’s gotten a bit over everything and 2) she’s acquired more complex relationships with the ever-growing number of centipedes invading her house in Texas.

Anyway, http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2013/03/25/shirley-theres-nothing-more-to-say-on-the-subject-of-radfems-vs-trans-women/ at least has some pleasing rage in it.

Tracy
Tracy
9 years ago

Why is it that the pigs for food are somehow different from the pigs kept as pets? Why is it that eating dogs and cats isn’t considered acceptable? Just because we happen to keep those animals as pets?
We seem to draw the line based on how intelligent we believe the animals are, hence we generally don’t like the idea of eating chimpanzees and dolphins.

This seems to be a cultural thing, from what I understand… not a lot of insect eating in western cultures, for example, and it’s completely just based on ick factor. I’d say also, it’s how much our particular culture tends to anthropomorphize.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

What we eat is fairly arbitrary. Pigs are smarter than a three year old human. It’s more about how we are socialized to see animals than how smart they are. Though I hear meat eating animals taste bad and have less nutritional value. That is probably a factor.

The availability of meat and the culture’s treatment of it has alot to do with it. I once invited a Japanese exchange student to come over for a catfish fry. She said, “Don’t you know what catfish eat?” I did. She looked at me like I’d just said I eat things that eat poop and declined my invitation. We eat catfish because they are plentiful, affordable and our grandparents ate them. So, who cares if they’re bottom feeders?

Speaking of food, I’m making fried green tomatoes tonight. YUM. I will pair it with some greens and dead cow. Nom Nom Nom

To be honest, sometimes I get turkey instead of ham just because pigs are cuter than turkeys. Despite their reputation for being stupid, turkeys are actually fairly cunning.
Still, they look like tiny evil dinosaurs so…into the hopper.

Tracy
Tracy
9 years ago

@Lea I shall forever think of turkeys as tiny, evil dinosaurs.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

Mew York Kitty,
If going full time vegan or vegetarian isn’t something you can do (I tried for over a year. I can’t manage it.) but you want to consume fewer animal products you can do a meatless day a week or learn some vegan or vegetarian recipes or products that you like and munch on them from time to time. Eating less meat = less deforestation and pollution. The more plant based food we feed to animals so we can eat them, the more that food costs. So eating less meat also helps poor people afford to feed themselves. Small changes add up. Post Punk Kitchen is an awesome vegan cookbook. Almond milk is delicious. Tofu and rice milk based ice creams are decadent. Nutritional yeast and butternut squash will make your mac and “cheese” rock your socks off. Gravy made from white beans or garbonzos is awesome on biscuits. You might try little things like that and see if you want to ease into a solely plant based diet. Just watch your D and B12 intake. Protein is easy. B12, a little tricky without a supplement. My other vegan advice is to treat meat like you would an addiction. If you fall off the wagon and go on a meaty bender, don’t give up on your goal. Just do your best. Unlike addictions, occasional to regular meat eating won’t kill you. Failing to live our convictions 24/7 is just a human thing to do. You don’t have to be hardcore to make a difference.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

Tracy,
If one flew at me, I’d scream and run. No joke. They’re scary.

Lea
Lea
9 years ago

Or possibly a cenobite.

BritterSweet
9 years ago
Lady Mondegreen
Lady Mondegreen
9 years ago

“Love.”

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?

*spits*

Elam and Co. call the rage of narcissists who see their lovers and family members as extensions of themselves “love.”

Not long after the verdict in O.J. Simpson’s trial, an old man said to me, “he must have loved her very much.”

*spits*

The sense that you are entitled to possess another human being is not love. It’s toxic egocentrism, and MRA fuckheads absolutely encourage it.

steampunked (@steampunked)

I’m pretty sure they don’t see other people as fully human as they are – it’s automatically assumed of women. Other men are granted temporary humanity until they do something ‘inhuman’ such as be a feminist, then they, too, are tossed into the outer ring.

Once people are things, it’s easy to get angry at them for not doing the ‘thing’ they were ‘designed’ to do, nhhh.

weirwoodtreehugger
9 years ago

Snuffy,
I didn’t read the article yet, but it sounds like they’re talking about feral cats? I’m all for spay/neuter and release programs to get feral car populations down. I’m not for ending the cat/ human relationship. Not that anyone was explicitly suggesting that.

Snuffy
Snuffy
9 years ago

@WWTH it is mainly about feral cats, but domestic cats contribute to the problem if they go outside and hunt, go feral and/or mate with feral cats.

I am answering your question here:

Who cares if they kill some urban/suburban wildlife? No matter how many birds and rodents they kill, there’s still plenty more around.

Ecologists do care about cats killing wildlife. No one is suggesting ending the cat/human relationship, but hand-waving the damage cats to the environment isn’t a good idea.

Binjabreel
Binjabreel
9 years ago

I’m pretty sure that having a yard full of fruit and nut bearing trees, with a massive songbird and other wildlife population, is doing more good than my cat does harm.

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