On the evening of May 23, 2014, I might have been murdered if I had just been a little hungrier and wandered out to my go-to restaurant. Instead of finding my usual delicious veggie sandwich, I might have found myself looking at dead bodies and bullets courtesy of the “OG incel” mass shooter Elliot Rodger during the Isla Vista killings.
I was studying psychology and sociology at a university known for wild partying and hot people, which unfortunately resulted in a lot of frustration and overwhelm for those who lacked social skills to fully partake in its debauchery. The shooter blamed his social failures on everybody else but himself, noticeably singling out women in his manifesto: “Why do women behave like vicious, stupid, cruel animals who take delight in my suffering and starvation? Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence?”
I was one of the few socially awkward students who struggled in the school’s rambunctious party and dating scene with my undiagnosed autism symptoms and diagnosed ADHD, but perhaps being a young girl socialized me to internalize my frustration rather than lashing out at other people. (Aside from questionably cryptic Facebook statuses which I’d like to apologize for over a decade later.)
So why did so many of my male American counterparts lash out in much more violent ways? Since I too grew up in the same nation and endured years of social exclusion, I wondered whether I’d also experienced certain cultural pressures and systemic issues partially driving this mass shooting prevalence. What did these pressures and issues entail in the first place?
I’ve always known that United States leads the world in many wonderful things: diversity, innovation, the Olympics, and talking to complete strangers unaided by drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately, we’re also known for our high amount of military interventions, terrible reality TV, Ozempic addictions, and our horrifyingly high rate of mass shootings. Over 600 people have been killed each year since 2020, towering our mass shooting rates over the rest of the world.
Our overall gun homicide rate is also 26 times as high as other developed nations. The US has higher rates of gun ownership than anywhere else in the world, with 45% of households having at least one gun in 2022, a number that’s been consistent since 1959. Part of this lies in American gun culture, which centers around the individual responsibility for self-defense rather than anything any intent resembling mass shootings.
Many Americans view guns and unrestricted gun accessibility as symbols of individual freedom, which is actually a relatively modern interpretation of the Second Amendment. Opponents of gun control typically worry about restrictions on their self-defense capability, whether or not they believe gun control will actually reduce gun homicides. They seem to feel that constant tragedies from unlawful gun violence just isn’t worthy of potentially restricting this capability, possibly due to caring more about their own lives than the grief of strangers.
That is, until the violence starts affecting those around them. Sometimes to the point of feeling too scared to go to church.
Research has found that across developed countries, the amount of present guns is positively correlated with gun deaths even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other crime.
American individualism, rooted in the belief that personal freedom and self-reliance are paramount, plays a significant role in the country’s relaxed gun laws and deep cultural attachment to firearms. The idea that individuals are responsible for their own protection and that government intervention should be minimal fuels resistance to strict gun regulations. The Second Amendment is often seen as a symbol of personal liberty, reinforcing the notion that gun ownership is an inherent right rather than a privilege.
In contrast, many other countries embrace a more collectivist mindset, prioritizing the well-being of the community over individual freedoms. Nations like Japan and the UK, where strict gun control is the norm, operate under the belief that public safety is best ensured by limiting access to firearms rather than relying on individuals to defend themselves. This collectivist approach fosters a sense of shared responsibility, where restrictions on gun ownership are widely accepted as necessary for the greater good. American progressives seem to embody similar beliefs backing their restrictive stance on gun control.
For example, Mexico only has one gun store despite scoring quite high on the overall homicides. One such motive for Mexico’s restrictions is to curb organized crime, which aligns with progressive American motives for gun control.
An article from Modern Diplomacy states “The Americans’ dire wishes for gun possession, however, stem less from their sense of personal or communal security rather more from an egocentric individualistic cultural reasoning that lacks the prioritization of collective communal safety. The unshakeable emotional and individualistic values Americans attach to guns frequently override concerns about the nation’s collective health and safety.”
American individualism literally has people caring less whether other people will live or die. This view deems other human beings as distinct entities rather than parts of a collective community, which probably makes it harder to empathize. Remember those COVID-19 anti-maskers? Their defiance represented a prioritizing their individual convenience over their environment’s collective health. You probably noticed that many anti-maskers were more likely than maskers to oppose universal healthcare and gun control.
Fortunately, individualism isn’t inherently always harmful and has plenty of economic and social upsides: people from more individualistic backgrounds are more likely to own patents, become entrepreneurs, participate in research, and a bunch of things that often lead to conventional measures of economic and social success. Our country’s strong legacy of progressive social activism may also be associated with our individualistic rights of free speech.
It makes sense that proponents of gun control staunchly believe limiting gun access will reduce the amount of mass shootings, often countering self-defense narratives with the perception that current gun laws heighten rather than reduce our collective danger. While the progressive push for gun control is valid and has been proven successful domestically and abroad, it only curbs the physical means to commit mass shootings and doesn’t address the shooters’ motives or circumstances.
The human element is what derails the lawful intention of American gun culture and the Second Amendment towards mass shootings. It’s already been proven frequently derailed in several other ways, such as the fact that US also experiences much more gun-related suicides and accidents than the rest of the world. Unlawful gun crimes are seven times as common as self-defense shootings, including shooting people mistaken as intruders just because they pulled up to the wrong house.
A common progressive strategy that does address the human element is the eradication of toxic masculinity. It’s an obvious factor behind violence in general and mass shooters, who are 98% male. However, patriarchy, male criminality, and toxic masculinity are hardly distinctive to the US, which ranks higher than most of the world (but behind most of the developed world) for gender inequality. While I’d prefer not to meet another man who thinks driving 30 mph over the speed limit (without signaling) is peak masculinity, I think eradicating toxic masculinity will only solve a portion of our mass shooter problem.
Although toxic masculinity is an undeniable catalyst in mass shootings, it seems to be the fuel in the roller coaster ride between gun ownership, gun culture, and mass shootings. How does the roller coaster’s track wind and drop?
Most factors contributing to mass shootings aren’t distinctively American enough to explain our ranking
Many researchers have theorized that our staggering amount of guns, crime rates, video games, anger issues, internet access, and terrible mental health can’t explain our mass shooting epidemic alone. A particularly noteworthy statistic is that this country actually ranks quite averagely for violent crime and overall homicides among other developed nations and behind Latin America.
We don’t particularly excel in our rates of that crap mental health and video game consumption — South Korea and Japan play the same video games at higher rates than we do and don’t fall that much behind us in rates of depression and suicide, but their amount of mass shootings pale in comparison to ours. They also have relatively restricted gun laws, so perhaps they’re taking their trauma out on alcohol, karaoke, and questionable affairs at love hotels rather than spraying bullets at their uniform-clad classmates.
(However, I haven’t been able to find data on whether American gamers play more violent video games compared to non-American gamers. That can be a topic for you actual academic researchers.)
Surprisingly, most mass shooters have been found to not have a history of mental illness. Some studies have found that playing violent video games is positively associated with aggression and risky behavior, but the games are theorized to act as a catalyst rather than a source. Toxic masculinity is also more worldwide than the singers featuring Pitbull in their hits. I guess toxic masculinity is the real Mr. Worldwide.
Non-Western countries also experience plenty of political violence and enough intergroup conflict for ethnic or religious nationalism to exist, sometimes to a more rigid degree than ours. “Honor” is also a common theme across several non-Western cultures, particularly Asian nations.
Evidence shows that many mass shootings as well as gun violence in general is often motivated by an emotional need to restore lost honor and a sense of one’s own power over others. A study found that gun owners were more likely to kill an intruder if the owner was feeling a sense of personal failure. While this all sounds plausible, I’ve been around non-American cultures enough to confirm these emotions are just as rampant abroad, if not more due to stricter social hierarchies.
I’ve watched enough international films to confirm that male-dominated action films with protagonists embodying heroic instincts of vanquishing threats and defending their families or kingdoms are pretty much universal. Part of toxic masculinity less addressed in the dialogue surrounding masculinity and mass shootings is the component of virtuous heroism, as explained by Youtuber Like Stories of Old in his video The Myth of Heroic Masculine Purpose, and How it’s Harming Men. The video points out that while generally positive, sometimes the gender role of “hero” is conveyed in a nebulous way, leaving enough of a slate for less well-intentioned viewers to shape it around their own motives.
Because I’ve observed more commonality than differences among my own country and the several others I’ve visited, I don’t think this country leads the world in bearing the recurring traits researchers commonly find in mass shooters: a greater likelihood than the general population to be unemployed, suicidal, single, having experienced childhood trauma, bullying, and domestic violence. Anyone who’s familiar with non-Western nations know how tough and traumatic it is to grow up there if you aren’t light-skinned and wealthy, which is one reason why migration over here to the US is so common.
Widespread access to fast internet connection, a treasure of living in a developed country, also opens up access to depraved spaces like 8Chan and insincere celebrity apology videos, but we’re not unique in that either. In other words, the diverse array of traumatizing factors that have motivated many of our mass shootings — romantic rejection, bullying, or social ostracization — aren’t unique enough to our country to explain our star-spangled predicament. Anyone who’s watched a tearjerking K-drama knows that.
The answers may lie in something that can’t be quantified with numbers alone: something emotional, subconscious, taken for granted, but distinctively American.
The possible answer: mass shootings are often an emotionally warped interpretation of American gun culture’s individualistic right to self-defense against your perceived threats
➡️ For more on the connection between the lack of gun control and individualism, see America’s Exceptionalism in Mass-Shooting and Its Culture of Rugged Individualism from Modern Diplomacy
Our tenacious, obstinate, historically-rooted gun culture is the supporting data that nationally stands out most. The primary intent of American gun culture centers on taking up individual responsibility for lawfully defending yourself against threats to your freedom and safety, such as intruders breaking into your home or a tyrannous government. It’s a spiritual continuation of how the self-reliant white “founding” settlers used their guns hundreds of years ago to liberate themselves from their British overlords and eradicate Native Americans to “create” the modern US.
But aside from the typical genocide or civil war, other nations generally aren’t known for the same type of mass murder despite having similarly high suicide and homicide rates. That’s why I keep coming back to the individualistic self-defense part of American gun culture. But given that mass shooting victims are generally innocent and unarmed, mass shooters are obviously on the offense rather than the defense. Technically speaking, that is.
So if they’re not being actively attacked, what are they defending themselves from? From the available data of mass shooting motives, I’m catching a vengeful theme of a subconscious desire to symbolically defend the country from the perceived threat of ethnic minorities in racially or sexually motivated shootings, such as the one I could have died in. Other shootings, such as the Columbine Massacre and others involving school bullies may have been a subconscious manifestation of defending the shooter’s own sense of power, masculinity, ego, self-esteem, whiteness, and dignity.
In other words, many shooters were retaliating against whatever psychologically threatened them most. While their victims were innocent by the law, their identities as people of color, women, classmates, coworkers, or just other human beings symbolized culpability to the shooter.
The evidence that supports my theory most is that mass shootings and general gun violence is often motivated by an emotional need to restore lost honor and a sense of one’s own power over others — an emotional need that I earlier stated isn’t likely more prevalent among Americans, but restoring it with a gun is. Another study found that gun owners were more likely to kill an intruder if the owner was feeling a sense of personal failure. Physical self-defense aside, I theorize that successfully killing the intruder also defends your ego from further feeling like a failure.
Around the same time I personally experienced a mass shooting, I was also feeling like a horrific failure due to struggles with socializing and dating. But rather than blaming the boys, I blamed myself for looking more like a Coke can than a Coke bottle. In retrospect, hitting the gym, writing terrible ghost stories, and striving for better grades was my way of restoring my degraded self-esteem from a pile of cringeworthy social interactions. In other words, I was metaphorically defending it from further erosion, but through my own non-violent means.
Everyone’s got their own version of what’s a “threat” worthy of self-defense, whether it’s an intruder breaking down your door, the undocumented immigrants “stealing your jobs” (they’re not), women who won’t sleep with you, or your drunk cousin hogging the attention at your birthday party with his off-key rendition of “Wonderwall”. Defending yourself in these cases above, respectively, can take the form of shooting the intruder dead, voting for restrictive immigration policies, and turning back time to make sure that darn cousin was never born.
It’s easier to feel like your honor, dignity, ego, or self-esteem is under threat when you keep hearing about the highest achievers on the planet, as Americans do every day in the wealthiest, most socially influential nation in the world.
Being surrounded by so many exceptionally successful folks compared to non-Americans can be threatening to one’s ego
Mass shootings may also be partially motivated by the US’s exceptionally dominant hard and soft power. Throughout my travels across the world, I’ve met plenty of non-Americans who have grown up on American media and speak American English while I knew nothing of their cultures beyond “so, how do you curse in your language again?” Impressing Europeans by naming more than one city from their country has been a canon event in my life.
Criminologist Adam Lankford also believes that a social pressure to align with notions of American exceptionalism in a systemically unequal society is associated with mass shootings: “There’s a social pressure to achieve the American dream, but a lack of means to do so. These types of attacks don’t happen because people are struggling or desperately poor. They happen because there’s a large gap between what people are aspiring to and what they can realistically achieve. In the context where people are reaching for the stars, and feel they will inevitably reach great levels of success – as many Americans do – it creates a problem when you have a small percentage with access to guns and mental health problems, who are failing and looking to blame those failings on their bosses, their teachers, and those around them.”
The findings of psychotherapist Harriet Fraad and economist Richard D. Wolff support this theory: they note that last few decades ushered in economic changes making it much harder for one person to provide for an entire family. This means men — who have always been expected to be the breadwinner — grew more and more likely to face failure in a particularly high-pressure, scrutinized part of their identities thanks to patriarchy. These findings theorize that this consequential rage, loneliness, and despair partially cause them to violently lash out as mass killers at a disproportionate rate.
🤔 While people from many Asian and African cultures also often face excruciating pressures to succeed, their nations have relatively restrictive gun laws, most likely due to higher collectivism. Lankford has found that high gun ownership rates in relatively collectivistic nations such as Finland, Serbia, and Yemen are also correlated with high rates of mass shootings compared to nations with lower gun ownership rates.
“Blame” can escalate into “lashing out”, which can culminate in mass murder and a desire to seek fame to compensate for this perception of failure. Many mass shooters have been found to be motivated by seeking fame (78%) and the emotional experience of power, glory, and triumph over their enemies or an inferior group such as an ethnic minority.
A lot of Americans view people of color, women, and other minorities as threatening just for existing
Many mass shootings are clearly motivated by white supremacy. I see it as disenfranchised white men weaponizing the only parts of their identities that represent dominance, control, status, respect, and dignity they dearly crave: their whiteness and their gun ownership.
Ethnic and sexual minorities are often targeted as detested, dehumanized scapegoats throughout global historical genocides and unsurprisingly throughout American mass shootings. My local shooting targeted women (the demographic of the shooter’s unfulfilled desires, particularly white women) and men of color (the demographic of his “they’re so ugly, how the hell do they get laid and my noble white self can’t” resentment). He described women as an alarming societal threat in his manifesto: “If their wickedness is not contained, the whole of humanity will be held back from advancement to a more civilized state.”
Unsurprisingly, men who feel their masculinity is under threat are more likely to develop an interest in guns. A third of mass shooters struggled with sexual frustration, so it’s plausible they also viewed women as a threat to their dignity.
Other shootings have specifically singled out Hispanic, Black, Jewish, or East Asian victims, perceiving them as threats to national security or the shooter’s own status. Given that the US is one of the most racially diverse countries in the world, it makes sense that our gunmen also have more face-to-face contact with the differently-hued humans they’ve been taught to hatefully view as subhuman as the spider in the corner of your room. (Don’t kick it out, it might catch bugs for you rather than paying rent.)
These motives sometimes overlap with the above sense of defending one’s own dignity and identity, such as the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings where a young white male shooter targeted East Asian women — the demographic he sexually desired — as that desire was a threat to his cherished Christian sexual purity.
⚠️ Let’s not use the above facts to rail against multiculturalism though, but rather improve how it’s approached. Instead of making the country so white we’ll need Duolingo to understand white people — I think we need a society where Americans are taught to handle growing multiculturalism with more acceptance, inclusivity, compassion, and empathy than we currently are.
While fighting for further social equality makes fewer people hate marginalized groups, the unfortunate possibility is that the leftover hate can turn violent and retaliatory.
Equality for marginalized groups can feel like tyranny for some
“We’re going back to the times of Mao Zedong,” said a gun owner I met. “Cancel culture is an example of that.”
I feel a loose connection between the Second Amendment’s intention of preventing tyranny and mass shootings: we all know that plenty of Americans (most notably white men) feel similarly subjugated by progressing cultural expectations as their forefathers felt by tyranny. The amount of mass shootings noticeably rose after 1970 and 2020 when major social activist movements were booming. We all know how plenty of folks were rolling their eyes or lashing out at evolving social obligations for “political correctness”, such as using proper pronouns, curbing the sexual assault jokes, or not wearing a shirt saying “Two Wongs Make A White” or “China Virus”.
The backlash against “anti-white” DEI, which has already been proven psychologically threatening to a lot of white folks, is one of the many examples of such retaliation. You can also see this desperation for maintaining the traditional social hierarchy manifesting in frequent book bans, lamenting the perceived teaching of critical race theory, or driving a swasticar cybertruck.
Another way that American gun culture has been warped to reinforce traditional hierarchies is that gun control measures have sometimes been passed to limit the gun ownership of people of color, particularly Black Americans.
American culture might also value going on the offense
Is there anything else cultural nourishing our star-spangled flavor of bullet-ridden dominance over masses of people? As an American who’s spent most of my life with immigrants and international students from all over the world, I grew to believe “there’s a distinct combative, belligerent essence in the heart of our culture I’m not sensing as intensely anywhere else similarly developed. Also, why am I louder than every exchange student except that Danish guy who jumped off my balcony?”
☑️ Yes, I know the US isn’t a cultural monolith. I’ve been to enough states to confirm that the slow-paced vibe of Honolulu and the “I hate my wife” apparel of Buffalo would never fly in Los Angeles. However, the national ethos of the American Dream and common history of settler colonialism applies throughout the country, just in different ways.
The US does lead the developed world in the amount of violent military involvement in the past century. YouTuber Second Thought in the video Are We the Baddies? notes “The United States is an exceptionally warlike nation. In the 247 years since its inception, the US has been at war for all but 17 of them. The country sees itself as the world police, the shining city on a hill that has the moral responsibility to force our conception of society on everyone else.”
Criminologist Scott A. Bonn states in Why Mass Shootings Are On the Rise: “It is my contention that the very roots of our mass shooting epidemic may be found in our core cultural value of fierce individualism, a belief in vengeance, and the ethic that might makes right. These cultural values have been central to what it means to be an American since our nation’s birth. We have always loved to settle disputes (at the individual and group levels) with violence and guns and we gleefully celebrate vigilantism in our popular culture.”
The theory above may be related to the chilling experiences many Americans have had meeting plenty of law-abiding gun owners who seem to have a latent hankering to shoot someone. These gun owners speak of unaliving an intruder with a look of glee rather than the expected grimace.
Fighting for your own or your group’s dignity isn’t always unjustified or violent. The desire for that American Dream may have contributed to progressive social activist movements such as feminism or Black Lives Matter — after all, an individual or group’s social and economic equality as well as its physical safety is essential for a better chance at attaining that success.
Our loud individualism and zealous need to physically and emotionally defend ourselves isn’t always malicious or right-wing. It enables social activism
Fighting for equality, whether violently or not, can also be seen as an emotional form of self-defense. I see activists challenging societal norms and advocating for change as metaphorically defending and rising up against injustice for themselves, their marginalized group, and for all of humanity. Our individualistic First Amendment has enabled much of our progressive dissent.
Fights for equality usually don’t involve guns, but they can. Throughout American history, multiple progressive movements have utilized guns as tools of self-defense, resistance, and empowerment in their fight against oppression. The Black Panther Party is one of the most well-known examples, openly carrying firearms to protect Black communities from police brutality and to assert their constitutional rights. Another notable example is the such as the Battle of Blair Mountain of 1921 which made a long-term positive impact on workers’ rights, most notably by bringing national attention to the brutal conditions coal miners faced.
Several American leftists are gun owners to assert their leftist values of protecting marginalized communities or themselves from right-wing violence. Similarly to right-wing rural gun owners, many feel unable to rely on the police for safety, just for different reasons than the physical isolation of rural towns. Some leftists raise the possibility of gun control measures taking forms that could exacerbate social inequalities by disproportionately disarming marginalized communities.
How might we keep defending ourselves without enabling further mass slaughter?
Some may disagree, but I don’t think the gun control American progressives want intentionally undermines the ethos of physical self-defense since most gun owners will still be able to keep their existing guns and buy new ones. Historians don’t believe that gun control will undermine our democracy, noting that threats to democracy are more likely to come from the gun-loving right end of our political spectrum. There’ll still be plenty of gun owners across the political spectrum left to organize against potential tyranny per the Second Amendment’s intention.
It’s unfortunately true that gun control measure may weaken the self-defense of the individuals newly restricted from gun ownership due to criminal or psychological backgrounds. Nuanced arguments posit that for each life that may be lost as a result of an individual’s inability to legally own a gun, there may exist a life that only continued because of gun control.
⭐️ These arguments also take into account the debunking the “good guy with a gun” myth, noting that unrestricted civilian gun use is more likely to lead to unjustified or accidental harm than self-defense or saving lives.
The gun control measures progressives want will only happen when the nation prioritizes our collective duty to keep each other safe over our individual right to unlimited self-defense, which won’t be easy for the most individualistic nation in the world, a nation full of rural residents logistically unable to rely on law enforcement or each other.
But that’s an article for another page. The point of this page was to liken the American ethos of physically shooting threats to one’s personal safety, whether in justified self-defense or unjustified offense, to the common theme of mass shooters symbolically and retaliatory defending their wounded egos, sense of moral purity, or whiteness against perceived threats.
Besides implementing further gun control and collectivistic “take care of other people” values, curbing mass shootings may require changing what people view as a murder-worthy threat. Perhaps we need alternative conflict resolution measures to handle school and workplace tensions, focusing on building supportive communities that prevent social exclusion. Even for those weirdos drawing questionable Sonic the Hedgehog fanart I grew up with.
In an ideal world, further teaching progressive, empathetic, compassionate values of equality and justice would curb violence, as many shootings were motivated by right-wing nationalism, racism, or sexism. But my theories above suggest that shootings are often a retaliation against increasing equality, so I’m not sure how progressives can move forward. Given that 80% of school shooters have told at least one person their plans, figuring out empathetic solutions might be worth it.
I think we need systemic reforms to better portray foreigners, immigrants, and people of color as normal human beings rather than threats to American freedom, national security, personal safety, and democracy. To address Adam Lankford’s American Dream theory, I think our culture needs to quell some of that pressure to reach for the stars and stop defining an individual’s or group’s worth by their income, achievements, sexual desirability, gender conformity, and other superficial metrics.
(That’ll be hard over here, as I’m writing this a few miles away from where ChatGPT was invented. Damn.)
I can’t figure it out on my own, so I invite everyone here to leave a comment below what your suggestions are so we can all help prevent mass shootings until gun laws strengthen. Perhaps we’ll be a bit more warmly welcomed abroad. Americans, you really don’t want to know how mortifying it is to be having fun at a social in Paris when “MASS SHOOTING KILLS 12 THE UNITED STATES” lights up the public TV and everyone looks at you.
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