The link between domestic violence and mass shootings, explained by a gun policy expert [View all]

by Hope Reese at Vox

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/6/21/15840652/mass-shootings-domestic-violence

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Robert Spitzer

It's interesting to look at the connection between what's generally labeled gun culture and male/female attitudes. Sociologists and writers go to gun shows and talk to people there about their interest in guns, their affinity to guns. And oftentimes, the people being interviewed say, "Please don't use my name because I'm divorced from my wife and she thinks I'm hiding income," or they raise very specific issues about marital troubles or male/female troubles and express resentment over the idea that the estranged spouse might try to get more financial support, which seems to be a rather odd sort of thing.

Joan Burbick, who wrote Gun Show Nation, saw that marital problems very much came to the fore in her interviews with men at gun shows, and this was going back 10 years. It's not just a proclivity to violence, but it's closely related to traditional notions of male behavior — and by that, I mean macho behavior. One of the arguments about gun ownership is that men, to some degree, are expressing a hypermasculinity, and that is very much married to what you might call traditional attitudes about marriage, about male/female relations. Which include subjugation of the woman, a woman's place is in the home, that sort of thing.

Of course, in the modern era, those attitudes rarely prevail. There aren't that many women who would meekly accept this idea that the woman should stay in the home, should not argue with the man — this whole bundle of old attitudes.

In the gun culture, there is also an extolling of what might be identified as traditional male values of male dominance, of the man properly expressing the use of force.

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