Weaponized Masculinity: Gun Violence & Gender in The United States
Vol. 1: An Introduction
In the wake of the Boulder, Atlanta, Southern California, and now Indianapolis mass shootings, discourse around the implementation of common-sense gun laws and gun safety regulations are once again at the forefront of news outlets across the country.
Along with sincere “thoughts and prayers’’, the President, democratic lawmakers, and political commentators alike are urging for legislative change to help protect against future mass shootings.
But there is once again a glaring chasm, a missing narrative in the discourse on gun violence and mass shootings in the United States: the role of gender.
Gender is so deeply woven into our subconscious understanding of gun violence that if I were to ask you to imagine a mass shooter wielding an AR-15, you would envision a man. It goes against our collective mental construct to imagine a female mass shooter. The inclination to assume a shooter is male is so intuitive that we do not actively, or even passively, think about it.
The crux of the problem is that we are generally numb to the role gender plays in gun violence, so much so that we rarely talk about it.
Whether it be militarized or civilianized, gun violence is so gendered in our society that it is even reflected in our language. Gunwoman? That isn’t even a word, but gunman sure is.
We desperately need to examine gun violence through a gendered lens, and it is profoundly erroneous that the gendered nature of gun violence is perpetually absent in both news coverage and popular discourse.
In response to the tragic mass shootings over the past four weeks, all at the hands of men with guns, I have decided to write a series on the relationship between gender and gun violence. I hope my contribution to the ongoing discourse of gun violence widens your understanding of the role gender plays in gun violence and mass shootings in the United States.
This article you are currently reading serves as an introduction to the topic and article #1 in the series.
In this series I will explore the following distinct approaches (which are subject to evolution):
- Examine the ways women’s bodies are regulated compared to that of assault weapons, and reflect on the inconsistency within the narratives applied to bolster the restrictions placed, or lack thereof, on women and guns.
- Examine who commits gun violence and against whom: a closer look at mass shootings and domestic gun violence in the US.
- Examine who historically has control over our legislative processes and how a legislator’s gender identity informs one’s perspective on these issues.
If the topic of gender and gun violence interests you, if you are beginning to see the relationship between gun violence and gender, or if you have understood this relationship all along, I welcome you on this journey with me as I continue to dive deeper into the ways gun violence is a gendered American issue.
