Friday, May 04, 2007
Guys and Guns
The ghastly events at Virginia Tech ricochoted me back to December the 6th, 1989, when I was a graduate student in Montreal, Canada. I got a call in the middle of the night. Dazed with sleep, I answered the phone and learned from my anxious brother that a student named Marc Lepine that day had rampaged through a Montreal college campus, shooting 14 female students dead, and injuring 10 other women and four men. My brother had called from across the Atlantic to make sure I was alright. In the following days, a familiar pattern unfolded: the candle-light vigils, the grieving families at memorial services, the struggle to understand.
As commentators examine the growing list of school-related shootings in North America over the last 2 decades, we latch on to certain features as the key: the shooters must be alienated loners; they are fascinated with violent video games or movies; or they wear dark clothes; or they are mentally troubled; they are from non-European immigrant families; they gave warning signs but were ignored….
What I keep noticing is that these school shooters are all males, and that this coincidence is rarely discussed in the mainstream media. Consider: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, Charles Karl Roberts IV, Duane Roger Morrison, Seung-Hui Cho. Can we imagine that no-one would comment on the state of femininity today, if the shooters had all been girls? I notice, too, that these gun-toting male killers often express virulent hostility against females.
In 1989, in Montreal, Marc Lépine burst into a classroom of mechanical engineering students at the Ecole Polytechnique. As he picked off only the female students, he shouted: “You’re women, you’re going to be engineers. You’re all a bunch of feminists. I hate feminists.” Fast forward to September 2006, Bailey, Colorado, where a gunman took 6 female high school students hostage, molested them, and then shot one 16 year old girl, who later died of her wounds. In October, 2006, in an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania, a 32 year old male shot 10 little girls, killing five of them. His suicide note spoke of his desire to molest girls. Seung-Hui Cho slaughtered 32 people at Virginia Tech, before shooting himself. He, too, had a troubled history of relating to women.
Let’s be clear that I’m not saying that all men are violent by nature, nor that women are by nature saintly victims. It’s possible that females are at least aggressive as males, by nature, but somehow the training of girls means that even unstable girls handle their aggression without shooting people. The men I love – my dad, my brother, my husband - are all gentle fellows, so the problem can’t just boil down to testosterone.
But I wonder whether there are links between conventional ideas about masculinity, being a real man, and certain ideas about violence. Are we raising too many boys to think of manhood as defined by the charismatic loner who shoots first and asks questions later, or the video game fighter who machineguns his way out when cornered and scores a babe as his exit trophy? Are we teaching boys who are unsure of their own sexuality that girls only matter as proving grounds for manliness?
There is much worth celebrating in old-fashioned ideas of manliness, such as the physical courage exemplified by Dr. Liviu Librescu, who barricaded his classroom door to protect his students from Cho, at the cost of his own life. Consider, too, the ethos of service demonstrated by the late South Bend police officer Nick Polizzotto. Or even my brother’s simple protective urge to call and know I was safe in the aftermath of tragedy.
These are honorable components of any good human life. How do we teach these lessons of self-restraint and responsibility to even the most troubled of our young men?