Let’s Examine the Real Causes of Mass Shootings.
There will be spoilers as I examine the book, so if that bothers you, read the book first. Or read this blog first, then read the book to see whether you agree.
Mass shootings in America are regular everyday occurrences. They are not isolated acts of madness as the press and the NRA-backed politicians would have you believe. Mass shootings are not the work of uniquely evil individuals who suddenly snap because of some Satanic cult worship. These are part of a pattern, a symptom of an American culture that cultivates violence, entitlement, and resentment. I was reading Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, which, on the surface, is about a mother struggling to understand her son’s murderous rampage. The author wrote the book in a way that forces us to hold a mirror to the American psyche.
In the novel, Kevin is the villainous teenage character who murders his classmates and teachers with a bow and arrows. I couldn’t help but feel like he was more than a devil boy. He was like some perverse blueprint or template, a consequence of a system that rewards certain men for their anger and belief in their own supposed dominant ideals and perspective of the world while punishing others for their fear.
Kevin’s father, Franklin, enables his (Kevin’s) worst instincts. The father dismisses his wife’s concerns as feminine hysteria and as an overreaction. Always be cautious of people who tell you that you are overreacting, paranoid, or hysterical. By the same token, it could equally mean they are underreacting, careless, and unaware of the danger. We have instincts for a reason—to survive!
Eva—the mother and main viewpoint from which we read this story—is vilified and blamed for the very monster of a son she saw coming. The book may be fiction. But this stuff happens every day in real life. The book shows how American society operates at the family and societal level. The question is not just why Kevin did what he did but why so many men like him do the same, repeatedly, without systemic change.
White Patriarchy and the Cultivation of Violence
I know people love to blame mothers for kids who get in trouble. But, the father’s role in Kevin is the most alarming part of the novel. He is a middle-class white man riddled with American exceptionalism in his head. He is not overtly abusive or cruel, although this is debatable in the rubbish he says to his wife. However, he is willfully blind. I could not help but wonder how women put up living with men with such toxic and misguided masculinity.
Franklin, the father, embodies the American myth of white manliness: the benevolent patriarch, the family man who sees himself as rational, reasonable, the breadwinner, all-American red blood, and the protector. But in reality, he is the white enabler. He chooses not to see Kevin’s darkness because to acknowledge it would be to question his own authority, his own beliefs, and his purpose as a man. Even when he was about to die, he was paralyzed by disbelief, as Eva points out, likely recasting reality into some fiction of perfection he could accept, thus pausing time enough to facilitate his demise. And men like Franklin never question themselves, their actions, their beliefs, their pretend perfect worldview, whether it’s about other races, aliens, evil immigrants, or supposed unintelligent and undeserving Black and Brown.
https://www.thetrace.org/2023/02/gun-violence-map-america-shootings
People like Kevin do not just emerge from thin air. They are the inevitable product of a culture that nurtures male violence while calling it strength, firmness, decisiveness, and leaders of the year. Franklin excuses his son’s manipulations, just as American society excuses white male rage. When mass shootings happen, the media scrambles to find explanations that absolve the perpetrator: he was bullied, he was mentally ill, he was lonely, he was in a cult, a woman or girl spurned his advances. Anything to avoid acknowledging that he felt entitled to power and took it back the only way he knew how. (By the way, the same goes for someone who kills for allegedly religious purposes—why should someone’s religion and beliefs, whether Islam or Christian or whatever, matter to anyone else outside that culture?)
This denialism plays out on multiple levels:
- Mass Shootings and White Male Rage: The majority of mass shootings in America are perpetrated by white men and white teenage boys. And yet, these men are never called what they are—terrorists. Instead, they are “troubled loners,” “misfits,” or victims themselves. We should forgive them, pray for them, and feel sorry for how they suffered such that it led them to this point of mass murder.
- An Opposite World of the Narrative of Victimhood: White men are taught that they are owed the world and all its resources. It should come easy, too, with little effort on their part, kind of like manna from heaven. When reality doesn’t comply, they lash out, convinced they have been wronged by some imagined enemy. The shooters in Buffalo, Parkland, and Uvalde—none of them were real victims, but their manifestos and personal histories paint a picture of men who believed they were.
- White Women, aka the Karens of this World: This article points mainly at white men, but it spills over to white women, too. Many white women have a similar delusion. They, too, believe that being white promised them power and glory. Many want more, to be treated like a powerful white man, and also lash out with whatever power they possess when challenged. So, the suddenly crying white woman upon being asked to be held accountable, the woman in Central Park, and so many others calling the police to murder a black person, the temper tantrums we all see these days on Youtube and TikTok, or white female rage. This is all part of the fantasy that the world has victimized them.
- Gun Culture as a Symbol of Control: Guns in America are more than weapons. They are symbols of white male power, the last resort when other forms of dominance—economic, political, social—begin to slip away—or just to maintain their social order. This is why the fiercest defenders of gun rights are also the most resistant to racial and gender equality. Like in a cowboy and outlaw country, the gun is their equalizer.
America is experiencing demographic transformations. Projections indicate that by 2045, white people will be less than half of the U.S. population, marking a transition to a “minority white” nation. This is the reason for the Conservative campaign against brown and black immigrants, disparaging LGPTQ+, and banning abortions. This shift is mostly driven by growth in Hispanic, Black, Asian, and multiracial populations. Source: Brookings
The Cancer of White Patriarchy and the Violent Backlash
White patriarchy, for many white men in America, looked like it was crumbling. So, they are fighting their demise with bullets, scaring brown and black immigrants away, blocking the votes of non-supporters, and banning abortions. Through radical movements like MAGA, they are trying to avert a collapse.
The post-WWII era created an idealized version of the white American man: the breadwinner, the homeowner, the unquestioned leader of his household and community, the Marlboro man. Remember those ads? Did you ever see a Native American, Black, or Hispanic man in them in the 1950’s? The white-run federal government used taxpayers’ money to subsidize their rise to the middle and upper class through GI bills and housing subsidies while crippling black and brown communities with eminent domain laws to build highways and subjugating black people to overpriced redlined communities.
White men felt threatened by women as they gained rights, as Black and brown people asserted their humanity, and as LGBTQIA+ voices emerged, that unquestioned, unthreatened power began to fade. For many white men, this was beyond a shift. Equality for them was an existential crisis.
Psychologists call this Terror Management Theory (TMT)—the idea that when people feel their way of life is threatened, they cling harder to the beliefs that sustain it because they are invested in the big lie. For white men, the response has been extreme reactionary politics, extremist violence, and mass shootings. They will kill Asian people at spas and roam the Mexican border with guns, looking for undocumented immigrants. They will police people speaking in a foreign language in the grocery store, rip a hijab off Muslim women’s heads (examples from my book), put their knees in Black and Hispanic boys’ necks, or just chase them down while jogging and shooting them.
They believe they are fighting for their own survival and for the survival of a system that puts them at the top. And when that system betrays them (because it has to since it’s based on a grand lie)—when they lose their job, their wife, their social status—they do what they have been conditioned to do. They retaliate with violence. The nation is built on such violence as it is proudly sung in the National Anthem.
We saw this on January 6, 2021, when a mob of white men, many from various nazi, KKK, and Confederate extreme groups, stormed the U.S. Capitol, convinced that their country had been stolen from them. We see it every time a young white man walks into a school, a church, or a grocery store with an assault rifle. They are not anomalies or oddities. They are not exceptions. They are like foot soldiers in a cultural war against progress, modernity, equality, and the truth.
What Roles Do Women and Mothers Play in the Cycle of Violence
One of the most insidious aspects of this system is how women are held responsible for the actions of men. In Kevin, Eva is blamed for her son’s rampage, as though her motherly instincts should have been enough to override an entire culture of violence programming. Society does this all the time: when a white boy shoots up a school, the mother is scrutinized. She must be a bad mother! What did she do wrong? Was she too cold? Too distant? Did she work too much? Was she a nurturing mother?
Meanwhile, fathers like Franklin fade into the background, untouched by blame. The same people who believe women should be the emotional caretakers of the home also believe they should bear sole responsibility when their sons turn into monsters.
This extends beyond parenting. Think of the Daughters of the Confederacy (DOC). White women have long been the enforcers of white patriarchy, the gatekeepers of the very system that subjugates them. The white women who stood by their husbands and packed picnic baskets for their children as they lynched (a nice-ish word for burning at the stake) Black men, who called the police on innocent Black boys and men, who upheld racist housing policies and school segregation—these women protected white male power, even as it restricted their own freedoms.
Eva in Kevin does not fit the mold of the white woman who defends the patriarchy. She is skeptical. She sees through the illusion. And for that, she is punished. She is ridiculed by her husband, her son, and society. The real world works the same way: women who question toxic masculinity are ridiculed, ostracized, and sometimes even killed. Like the DOC, they know that despite not having power as a man, the best they can get is worth protecting. Besides, it’s better than being treated as a Brown, Black, or Native American person. As long as they toe the line for white men, they will get to live and have babies—hopefully, more sons for foot soldiers or more gurls to have more babies.
We ask Ourselves, Will This Ever Change?
America does not want to talk about Kevin. It does not want to talk about the white men who pick up guns when they lose control or feel slighted by someone they think is inferior to them. It does not want to talk about the fathers who raise them, the mothers who are blamed for them, or the cultural mix of toxic cocktails that creates them. America is a place of delusions, where we pretend reality is not happening, that the country is not now a dictatorship. We watch our federal agencies, like the FDA, designed to protect us, approve narcotic drugs that create an opioid crisis and do nothing but attack the suppliers of ingredients, and not doctors pushing the drugs on unsuspecting patients. We pretend our government is not captured by the rich private sector.
But we must talk about them because this is not just about one fictional boy in a novel. This is about every mass shooter who will emerge today, next week, next month, next year, and the year after that. With those frequencies, the odds are everyone will or will personally have someone ensnared in a mass shooting.
The solution is about dealing with the unchecked entitlement that allows men to believe they are owed power, resources, and the good life and the violence they resort to when that power is denied.
If we are serious about stopping mass shootings, we need to stop pretending this is about mental illness, video games, bad apples, or bad parenting. It is about the very foundation of American masculinity, built on dominance and preserved through violence like a Western cowboy movie. And until we dismantle that foundation, until we redefine strength, responsibility, and accountability, the Kevins of the world will keep pulling the trigger and murdering our loved ones and us, too.
Coming Next: America’s Masculinity Crisis: The Root of Mass Shootings and the Need for Accountable Capitalism – Part 2
This was Part One of a three-part series on a new take on mass shootings. In the following article, I will examine the policies that allow mass shootings to continue unchecked, from gun laws to media narratives, and explore the structural changes necessary to break the cycle of violence. In the final article, I will look at policy solutions.
For now, let’s sit with this truth: Kevin is not an outlier. He is a reflection. And America needs to take a long, hard look in the bloody mirror.
Other Sources:
The smug style in American liberalism | Vox. https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism?utm_source=akdart
Black, D. (2024). White Christian nationalism has no place in politics. Indianapolis Business Journal, 45(22), 8D.
Southern Service Workers Launch A New Union – PopularResistance.Org. https://popularresistance.org/southern-service-workers-launch-a-new-union/
If We Need to Talk About Kevin forces us to confront America’s obsession with violence and entitlement, then Economic Racism by Martin Kush peels back the layers of a different but related truth—the racial inequalities embedded in capitalism. This book exposes the systemic structures that have kept Black and Brown communities locked out of economic power while reinforcing white wealth. If you want a deep, unapologetic analysis of how money and race intersect in America, this is your next must-read.
Get your copy now: Economic Racism on Amazon
