Every new bit of news out of Uvalde makes me angrier and more depressed.
I can’t get over the image of do-nothing cops literally standing around for 40 minutes while the shooter rampaged inside a classroom he’d locked himself into. I can’t get over the number of people who shared misinformation and sometimes outright lies about the tragedy — from the 4channers who spread the lie that the shooter was trans to the cops who spent the first day after the shooting spreading blatant falsehoods about what happened in the school in order to cover up their bungled, disastrous, do-nothing handling of the crisis.
I knew it was my job to look and see how the Men’s Rights crowd reacted to the shooting, but when I finally did it was even more jarring than I suspected it would be.
In the first thread that popped up on the Men’s Rights subreddit about the shooting no one expressed sympathy for the children or the teachers killed in the school; no one expressed anger towards a shooter who had deliberately targeted the most vulnerable.
No, they decided to direct their ire at single mothers instead. The thread starter, a Men’s Rights Redditor called majestic_tapir, wondered aloud if commenters on the shooting were
[j]ust going to go ahead and ignore the fact that pretty much every single school shooter in the past however many years has come from a single-gender (female) household though right? We’re gonna blame it on how men are raised, where the people doing the abusive raising in these cases are predominantly women? We’re going to ignore the fact that these boys are always raised without a single positive male influence in their life, but are bombarded with the idea that they are lesser, and lash out?
A quick fact check: It is true that most school shooters — some 75 percent, by one estimate — come from broken homes, many of them headed up by women; it’s not true that “pretty much every single school shooter” was raised only by his mother.
Even if this were true, it would be wrong to assign all or most of the blame on the single mothers while ignoring the role of the often absent father, who may have been the one responsible for the breakup of the relationship in the first place and who often seem uninterested in playing the fatherly role or even paying child support. What little we know about the father of the Uvalde shooter suggests that he was mostly absent from his son’s life; though it doesn’t sound as though he was prevented from seeing his son.
Other Men’s Rights Redditors joined up with majestic_tapir, in scapegoating single mothers.
Aimless-Nomad asked
Who raised all those men, the violent assholes i mean? Who is it that has overwhelming custody of children? Why are the majority of criminals from single mother households?
Nah lets not answer that, doesn’t sit well with our narrative.
Added Vinniikii:
Single mothers profit every day from our current misandry … Like any other abusive group, the mothers themselves cannot ever face accountability or objective scrutiny. Instead, the victims of their abuse are contorted into grown, powerful men. Tragic, if only those women had taught empathy and love instead of lifelong obligation/penance.
Aimless-Nomad :suggests that single mothers just don’t know how to raise their sons properly.
This mass propaganda spread by feminists claiming men are useless and women can be both the parents (while leeching child support and welfare) is horseshit as data proves they failed miserably in that regard. …
Fathers doing something as simple as roughhousing their kids is crucial for their development. But women don’t know/care about that do they?
And the government/courts doesn’t give a shit as it gets a piece of every cent of alimony and child support.
There are couple of more reasons for the high rate of shooters but you can bet your ass this is one of the biggest ones.
Men not wrestling with their sons causes mass shootings?
If single mothers are the root cause — or at least a root cause — of school shootings, why don’t the daughters of single mothers shoot up schools? Majestic_tapir has what he thinks is an answer: “girls are bombarded from a young age that they are the future of humanity, and that they are the better gender.”
I don’t think they are.
Alongside single mothers, the MRAs in this particular discussion also want to blame society as a whole for, well, blaming men for things. It’s “[a]lways the case that men are immediately demonised” after a mass shooting “and then no other aspects of it are looked at.” claims Majestic_tapir.
“It’s almost [like] yes, it is a male problem.” writes GivePuppiesBazookas,
because we treat [boys] like shit from the get go and go figure, the more we do it the more they are snapping. There is a reason they are attacking schools for fucks sake, it’s a horrible place for boys now. …
It’s not ironic the people being constantly told they need to be taught this and that, that they suck, that they rape, that they can’t be around children, that they get zero say in something as important as their own child… fucking get REALLY pissed. …
America treats men like shit, blames them for virtually everything, So yeah, there is a reason it’s almost always young men from 16-23ish who shoot up these schools, it’s the original hell for so many boys and young men. It’s not freaking ironic this happens more the more men are blamed and the more it trickles down to young boys.
Do the shooters themselves deserve blame for their actions? No one in the discussion seems to think so — or at least none of them say so. Their attempts to find the “root causes” are not only wrongheaded; they also come very close to absolving the shooters for their crimes.
One commenter makes this point, and is downvoted well below zero for their trouble.
EdgarFriendly3 asks sarcastically
Why blame the criminals for shooting up schools when we should be blaming the mothers of the criminals. Why even lock the shooters up? Why not just lock the moms up since it’s their fault after all.
Alas, that would probably be a popular solution among Men’s Rights Activists.
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A quick look online says there are some 8 million kids being raised by single mothers in the US. This doesn’t smell like statistical significance here…
Aimless-Nomad probably got this talking point from perpetual dumbass Dan Bongino.
My father didn’t roughhouse with me. And I’m not a school shooter.
Oh, I see. You mean that roughhousing is crucial to the development of the important kids, the kids you care about: boys.
This women doesn’t know that roughhousing is important to kids’ development. And she doesn’t care what idiotic assertions MRAs make.
They can just eat all the shit.
Apparently at the NRA conference currently in progress, “demonic control” is a popular excuse.
Doesn’t roughhousing teach boys that physical dominance and power are how you get your way? Isn’t that the entire problem here?
Hey, MRAs! You know what else most school shooters are? White.
Why aren’t you asking why white people are such violent murderous thugs?
Yeah, I think we all know why you’re not asking that…
nice try
>The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency reports that the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a community is the proportion of fatherless families. Fathers typically offer economic stability, a role model for boys, greater household security, and reduced stress for mothers. This is especially true for families with adolescent boys, the most crime-prone cohort. Children from single-parent families are more prone than children from two-parent families to use drugs, be gang members, be expelled from school, be committed to reform institutions, and become juvenile murderers.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/single-parent-families-cause-juvenile-crime-juvenile-crime-opposing
>
I had to raise my 4 kids alone, starting when the oldest had just turned 10. The boys are all just fine now, prosperous, with degrees, engineering jobs, and financial comfort. My girl married a wonderful man, and they live in great comfort with their children.
For me, no alimony as it wasn’t even being awarded to able-bodied women in my state, the child support – a small amount and even that not paid, and the other forms of court-ordered assistance (medical insurance, help with college) never happened either.
This one wasn’t white.
But he was a raging misogynist who felt entitled to women’s attention:
https://news.sky.com/story/texas-school-shooting-what-social-media-posts-tell-us-about-gunman-salvador-ramos-12621863
One thing pretty much all mass shooters have in common is that they are severely misogynistic men. A large subset of those, in turn, have had a DV rap sheet.
There is clearly something wrong with how boys are being raised, and it’s significantly worse in the US than in most other developed countries.
Turns out the Uvalde shooter had a history of making online threats to teenage girls. Once again, a mass shooter is a raging misogynist.
@C_C:
(putting skeptic’s hat on)
Does that association remain statistically significant if you control for socio-economic status?
@C_C
I’m sure you think that was a mic drop, but blaming single mothers for crime is like looking at a whale through a pinhole. It ignores factors like poverty, access to decent education, jobs, and nutrition, drug use, abuse, etc., all of which contribute far more to crime.
These studies always have a racist undertone, with their dogwhistles and their focus on violent crime rather than white collar crime (which I would guess is mostly committed by people who grew up in two-parent households, but for some reason nobody is casting any aspersions on the nuclear family).
Furthermore, why do these studies always blame single mothers and not ABSENT FATHERS? At least Mom is there in the trenches, changing diapers and making dinner and checking homework and being the breadwinner. Where is Dad in all of this?
If the point of these studies is “men are necessary for well-adjusted kids”, then why are they dumping their kids on the mother and disappearing instead of making themselves necessary?
@Surplus and LouCPurr
It’s a definite pattern. These mass shootings so often start with the shooter killing the women who share the home with him, and then going out to kill strangers.
@C_C
May, just maybe, poverty and instability lead to more single parenthood. Not to mention that many Black children are deprived of their fathers by the prison industry.
@BQS: Or at least trying to. This latest one lived in his grandmother’s home and put her in the hospital before stealing her car and driving to the school where the rest of his rampage took place. Gabriel Wortman, the killer wannabe fed in Nova Scotia, Canada, tied his wife up then went to get his gun and other gear, only to find she’d somehow freed herself and escaped into the woods when he got back. He spent a short time fruitlessly cruising the nearby rural roads looking for her, then decided “fuck it” and carried out the rest of his rampage, annihilating most of his acquaintances and killing a fed before going down in a hail of gunfire at (of course, since this was Canada) a Tim Hortons.
Male cohabitants aren’t safe either. Infamous incel “hero” Elliott Rodger slashed his male roommate’s throat in his sleep before going on to besiege his university’s sorority building. Where, like the equally incompetent Uvalde police, he was apparently stymied by a locked door.
All were misogynists who especially targeted women, though, and all seem to have had a sense of grievance about not getting what they felt they were owed from the women in their lives. Ramos was creeping on Instagram models, Rodger was an incel, and Wortman was a wife-abuser … three different sides of the same coi, erm, D&D die.
I am not even certain that statistic is right. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mass-shooters-fatherless-us/
As for fatherlessness being the cause, it seems that there are possibly massive confounding variables in studies like that of poverty and domestic abuse. Being poor due to loss of an income can lead to this. Coming from an abusive home can also lead to divorce and acting out. There are millions of kids being reared in single mother homes. Plus, what no MRA ever points out, is that there were tons of single moms after wars and tons of essentially single moms in the military (where dad is absent a lot). No one ever points to these, so that seems to negate this absurd notion of always blaming the parent who stayed.
Even if we assume that, in some fraction of cases, fatherlessness is partially responsible for bad outcomes for children; wouldn’t the assumption be to blame the absent father for ditching his responsibilities? Or do we not see that because the folks who always jump to blaming problems on fatherlessness are folks who just assume no man anywhere is every really to blame for anything, so they just look to whatever women are connected and come up with some tortured rationalisation why it really those women’s fault?
Things MRA’s never talk about (like C_C) is the fact that men are almost always the shooters. If women are also brought up in these homes, but don’t turn into shooters, it makes no sense. They have the same economic hardships, same lack of attention, same lack of a father figure. Yet somehow the women don’t resort to randomly shooting up people. Maybe it’s that the women aren’t raving misogynists who believe they are entitled to women and get angry and violent when these hateful views don’t turn out to be accurate.
They also never address the fact that the reason the woman ends up as being the parent taking care of the kids is due to the view (which MRAs espouse) that only women are suitable for child rearing, that they should stay home and take care of the kids and give up everything since that is their biologic programming. Except this asinine belief system results in their own oppression when a divorce happens. So the mom gets custody. They are enslaved by their own patriarchal oppression, which they love before the divorce and then rail about it when they now become victims of their own limited view on gender roles.