The link between domestic violence and mass shootings, explained by a gun policy expert

[applegrove]

by Hope Reese at Vox

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

"SNIP...........


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.

............SNIP"

[Hoyt]

1. That does not surprise me at all. Everyone should spend a little time at gun shows, just

to see the gun culture at its drooling worst.

[flamin lib]

2. A woman is killed by her significant other every 16 hours.

With a gun.

[billh58]

3. Excerpt from the linked article:

"Hope Reese

After every lethal shooting, there's usually a conversation in Congress about enacting tougher laws, but they often fail to pass. What would it really take for this country to enact tougher national gun laws?

Robert Spitzer

We are in a situation where the NRA is thoroughly embedded in the Republican Party. The Republican Party is more conservative than it has been probably ever in its history, and is ever more loyal to kind of archconservative principles, including untrammeled access to guns. So it's not really possible to have a national debate when the leaders of the two elected branches of government don't want to talk about these things at all. Because leaders have an ability to shift the focus of debate.

So we would need to have a very different government in place. One where these issues could at least be discussed. And that's not going to happen in the near future.

I would add that at the state level, there's been a lot happening. And a fair number of states have enacted tougher laws in the last three years or so, three or four years. But more states have enacted laws to weaken their existing gun laws, so there's been a lot happening in the states.

Part of this puzzle is that the gun safety side, or gun control side, needs to continue the things it's been doing: raising more money, spending more money, making it a campaign issue, and building grassroots support to try and counterbalance the longtime dominance of the NRA. That could change things too. But these are long-term trends."

And there you have it: we need to continue the push for sensible gun control at the local level, and then spread out to the national level. We must reel in the public carry of guns, and deadly stand-your-ground vigilantism.