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.
Alan,
we definitely don’t “all know” that. Hell, I can’t even find any reference on Google to there *being* an Egyptian god named Puscht.
@Binjabreel the article also talks about how domestic cats contribute to the problem, you must have missed that.
Me-We should care about cats hunting wildlife, ecologists agree cats are a problem that needs to be addressed.
You-Not my cat, I have trees, #NotAllCats.
epitome,
I was in the middle of chewing last night when I saw a locust on TV. I could not swallow. That would be a very difficult hurdle for me.
@Lea – Yes, exactly. They think love is like ownership. They take the “Be Mine” sentiment of Valentine’s candy hearts far, far, faaaaar too literally… and apply it one way only, of course, because that’s supposedly Natural Law.
(Trigger warning for violence, possible spoiler alert:) In a James A. Mitchener book, one of his doorstopper historical novels, I came across a scene where soldiers find a woman who was recently killed in the tent of a defeated enemy. One of the soldiers figures that the enemy who had this “slave girl” must have loved her so much that he killed her (so the other side wouldn’t abuse her).
There’s so much wrong with that I’m not sure how to unpack it. The idea of a mercy kill, to spare someone suffering, makes sense, but I’m sure the “love” this guy was imagining was more like “no other guy can have you” rather than “I don’t want you to suffer.” Besides, if you love someone, you generally don’t keep them as a slave. What the fuck.
Oops, sorry. I type slowly and that was meant as a reply to the point before.
Now I’m picturing eating a locust and I find that gross too. It’s the legs and antennas and stuff. Ugh. A bug paste wouldn’t be so bad. I guess they’d have to find a better word for it than “bug paste” 🙂
@Binjabreel you’re arguing against a strawmen I never said that people shouldn’t own cats as long as people take care to make sure they aren’t over hunting. Just because feral cats do more damage than domestic cats doesn’t mean people should ignore the damage of domestic cats (who if left unmonitored can hunt almost as many birds as feral cats, who can breed with feral cats, hunt even more if completely abandoned).
Years ago, when the Houston Museum of Natural Science re-opened its butterfly/insect hall, they had several people there preparing and serving various insect based cuisine. My daughters and I tried some of each. The dragonfly tempura was quite good.
Admition:
I’m about to go feed feral kittens.
I complained bitterly when neighbor’s cats ruined my strawberry bed and I complain when they hunt birds at my feeders and spray piss on my umbrella when I leave it out to dry, but here I go anyway.
Like Ruth Gordon says in Harold and Maude, “Consistency is not a human trait.”
*admission*
WTF, Lea?
I’m definitely up for trying entomophagy. A pound of bugs is less harmful for the environment and cost efficient compared to a pound of beef, plus bugs don’t have as much fat in them. I’ve heard they’ve been trying to develop food-shaped bug products, but I think I’d rather eat the bugs plain. Spiders and tarantulas are pretty much land-lobsters anyway.
Besides, the average USAer eats a pound of bugs and insect eggs a year since many products often have bugs that get into the process.
Honestly, if it weren’t for some factors (like living with people who are picky eaters and not wanting to spend more money on food just for myself), I would probably be vegan since I can’t have dairy anyway…okay, pescetarian, but only because I really love fish and eggs, which is horrible because of overfishing but, goddamnit, come on.
I’ve been trying to convince my parents to eat less meat, which seems to be working, and I have been making them vegetarian and vegan meals which they like, but they’ll never convert to full vegetarianism/veganism because they’re stubborn.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/ad25e9fa25fbcd8e22ba8af5c0b32e8c/tumblr_mfoo262BE01r4xjo2o1_r1_500.gif
I’m sure that everyone’s already seen that, either here or some other kitty-loving corner of cyberspace, but I couldn’t resist. It seems so apt.
@Flying Mouse – Ah ha ha that is awesome. You are the best. (I haven’t seen that particular one. I’ve seen gifs of cats with rockets and rainbows, but not one bouncing on a sandwich.)
@epitome of incomprehensibility – I think there are gifs of cats doing pretty much everything. As is only right and good.
I hadn’t seen the sandwich version before, but I had seen this:
I …may have stared at kitty on a sandwich for an embarrassingly long time. Oddly soothing.
I’d be down for trying the deep-fried locusts described in this BBC article.
Spot on! I am one of those people who opposes factory farming.
@Moocow I know that that’s an issue, but I’m also asking the question of why some animals are deemed “too sacred” to be raised en masse for the sole purpose of mass-killing for human consumption (cats, dogs, etc.) but other animals aren’t.
I know in America, rabbits are kept as pets far more than they are eaten, and when you tell the typical American about how rabbits are raised largely for human consumption in Europe (and honestly they literally taste like chicken so it’s overrated) they’re shocked and appalled that Europeans eat cute little bunny rabbits.
I also wonder what the distinction is between pigs we keep as pets and pigs we raise for slaughter. To me, piggies are pretty cute a lot of the time, but we often deem their brethren to be acceptable to slaughter.
Of course, when I do eat meat, I try to find stuff that’s humanely raised, preferably grass-fed, and I never ever get eggs that aren’t cage free or milk that has rBGH in it. But even so, dairy cows have to be impregnated all the time (and of course, pregnancy is a major stressor for women and female animals in general and one reason some feminists such as Shulamith Firestone advocated mechanizing it in artificial wombs for humans) and then their calves are often taken away from their mothers at an early age to be raised for veal (which is known for being so cruel, a lot of meat-eaters won’t touch it).
@Pandapool
Also, ZOMG, HITLER WAS A VEGETARIAN!1!!11!1!
Which some carnists do use as an argument against not eating meat.
One reason why I desperately try to not make comparisons to Nazis/Hitler. As a Jew and grandson of a Holocaust survivor turned anti-genocide activist, I really resent how Nazis have become what is essentially a stock bad guy like zombies or orcs.
By not acknowledging that Nazis were humans like you or I, we make them seem like fictional characters like the stock zombies in video games and movies and therefore we forget how real they were and how it could’ve happened here and it could happen again if we’re not careful.
I thought that was a hoax?
http://www.naturalnews.com/025163_Hitler_vegetarian_vegetarianism.html
Some ableist language in the article, “sigh”, there always is, isn’t there?
So I know I’m late to this party, but I don’t see how this argument can be made without equating women with livestock.
“I will never understand feminists who eat meat”
Some people have medical conditions that render them unable to thrive on a vegetarian/vegan diet.
@Spindrift
Naturalnews is a website that claims that Bill Gates is attempting genocide by supporting research on male contraceptives. ’nuff said.
@ Katz
It can’t, but as I mentioned above, as far as my vegan mates are concerned this wouldn’t be a derogatory comparison. Cows are people too! (Seriously, “Non human person” is how they describe animals)
@Spindrift Natural News is a terrible source for just about everything.
It’s basically Infowars but relating to health and fitness.
They also believe vaccinations cause autism.
http://www.donotlink.com/bv6h
But about whether Hitler was a vegetarian or not, the point is not so much whether that’s actually true or not but that it’s a common belief just like other things that are false like that bats are blind.
@Mew York Kitty (@CCMSparkster)
Which animals are raised for food also has to do with the type of food you get out of it.
Raising carnivores like cats and dogs for consumption is, quite frankly, inefficient because you’re just lengthening the supply chain. Not to mention that carnivore meat tends to have its own host of problems.
Same holds for goats or rabbits in the US: the meat itself tastes weird for people who got used to beef and chicken for most of their lives, and therefore it doesn’t catch on commercially which makes the idea of rabbit meat even rarer.