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Suicide by Mass Murder: Masculinity, Aggrieved Entitlement, and Rampage School Shootings Notes
Suicide by Mass Murder: Masculinity, Aggrieved Entitlement, and Rampage School Shootings
Abstract
School shootings have become more common in the United States.
Media portrayals often obscure the fact that many of these crimes culminate in suicide and are almost universally committed by males.
The study examines three recent American cases involving suicide to understand how the culture of hegemonic masculinity in the US creates a sense of aggrieved entitlement conducive to violence.
This entitlement frames suicide as an appropriate, instrumental behavior for these males to underscore their violent enactment of masculinity.
Keywords
Sociology.
Masculinity.
Mass murder.
Suicide.
School shootings.
Introduction
Over the past three decades, the United States has witnessed nearly 30 'rampage' school shootings.
Many of these crimes culminate in the shooter’s suicide, possibly to avoid prosecution or as part of a premeditated plan.
Efforts to understand these acts have ranged from psychological assertions of mental illness to Pavlovian responses to violent video games or Goth music.
Some conservative commentators blamed an overly permissive 1960s culture, while others on the left claimed it was the restrictions of homogenous, evangelical jockocracies.
School shootings since 1982 represent a departure from prior years, which were more typically carried out by young black males in inner-city schools with specific targets.
Since 1982, the scene has shifted to the suburbs and rural areas, where white boys bring semi-automatic rifles or assault weapons to school and open fire seemingly at random; however, some individuals are specifically targeted.
Similar cases have occurred in Europe as well.
This essay examines school shootings that culminate in the suicide of the assailant(s) to elucidate how the culture of hegemonic masculinity encourages violence to avenge a perceived challenge to their masculine identity.
Committing mass murder can be an instrumental way to achieve a sense of power, and framing one’s suicide with violence and aggression may serve to make it appear a more potent act.
Three Cases: Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Northern Illinois
The rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, has become a synonym for rampage school shootings.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold brought weapons to their high school and shot whomever they found.
In a videotape made the night before the shootings, Harris and Klebold expressed their grievances and intentions.
Nearly 8 years later, on April 16, 2007, Cho Seung-Hui began his murderous spree at Virginia Tech, killing 32 people and injuring 17 more before taking his own life.
On February 14, 2008, Steven Kazmierczak entered a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and fired into the crowd, killing six and injuring 18 more before killing himself.
These three school shootings share characteristics typical of contemporary rampages: all perpetrators were males, students in rural or suburban schools, and evinced a self-justifying sense of righteousness.
However, these perpetrators were significantly older than earlier perpetrators.
These three terrible events were all homicide–suicides.
It is impossible to determine whether the suicide was planned, but it is clear that suicide and homicide were linked in all the perpetrators’ minds.
Analogous to ‘suicide by cop,’ these shootings can be called suicide by mass murder.
The similarities of both form and content are necessary for an adequate explanation of the differences.
The Sociology of School Shootings
The sociology of these school shootings need not ignore individual pathology but contextualizes it.
Race, region, and religion shape the social context in which school shootings take place.
There are discernible patterns among all the school shooters, and a group sociological profile sheds light on these tragic events.
Profiling the school shooters must be accompanied by a profile of the shooters’ schools.
A full picture requires attention to race, region, and religion, as well as psychopathology.
These perpetrators were not just misguided ‘kids’ or ‘youth’ – they're boys.
Feeling aggrieved and wronged by the world is typical adolescent feelings, but what transforms the aggrieved into mass murders is also a sense of entitlement and using violence against others.
Aggrieved entitlement inspires revenge against those who have wronged you; it is the compensation for humiliation.
Humiliation is emasculation: humiliate someone and you take away his manhood.
For many men, humiliation must be avenged, or you cease to be a man.
Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back; its gender is masculine.
The analysis relies on a sampling of media reports of the events to frame the national discussion about the cases.
Nearly all the boys who committed the violence had stories of being constantly bullied, beaten up, and ‘gay baited’ because they were different from the other boys.
Theirs are stories of ‘cultural marginalisation’ based on criteria for adequate gender performance – specifically the enactment of codes of masculinity.
The shooters display evidence of marginalisation and choose a decidedly heteronormative way to combat it: violence.
The Gender of Suicide
When gender is introduced to studies of suicide behavior, the results frequently describe women’s suicide behaviors.
Women engage in suicide behaviors more frequently than males, yet males have higher mortality rates from suicide; this is referred to as the gender gap in suicide.
The gender gap in suicide is not present at all ages or in all parts of the world, suggesting that cultural forces shape gender socialization.
Suicide rates among young children are quite low, with similar rates for male and female children.
Worldwide, among youth aged 15–24, the rate of suicides per 100,000 are 12% for women and 14.2% for males.
Exceptions to the suicide gender gap are found in Finland, among Native Hawaiian adolescents, and Puerto Ricans in New York, suggesting that cultural factors are important in the gender differences in suicide.
Being female was associated with a lower level of suicidality.
Women often use methods that take longer before resulting in death, while men tend to use more immediate methods such as firearms.
Differences in mortality can also be explained by the wound site, where men tend to shoot themselves in the head, while women shoot themselves in the body.
Nonfatal suicide is seen as a feminized behavior because women engage in suicide behaviors at higher rates than men.
People who lose their lives due to suicide are seen more positively than those who survive; women’s nonfatal suicide is often seen more positively than males’ nonfatal suicide behaviors.
Killing oneself is viewed as masculine.
Female suicide behavior is often thought to result from depression over relational failures, while suicide behavior in males results from achievement failures or identity threats.
Nonfatal suicide is seen as an impotent act, which is characterized as emasculating.
Suicide behaviors as enacted by females are seen as an expressive behavior, while those utilized by men are seen as instrumental.
Masculinity restricts the range of emotion afforded to men, while femininity encourages the expression of feelings for women.
Masked Suicide
In warrior cultures, men have access to a socially approved form of taking their own life: Masked Suicide, which occurs when an individual arranges for a high chance to have himself killed by others while performing an act that is culturally approved.
Even as these cases differ from masked suicides in their infrequency and lack of support from the larger society, the theory of masked suicide can help us appreciate the instrumental nature of the shootings which culminate in suicide.
The circumstances of the shootings detract from the events even being characterized as a suicide, and instead may be mistaken as a way to avoid being apprehended, but the shooter’s death in cases of suicide by mass murder is pre-planned.
Young men in the US today live in a culture characterized by glorified violence, and as such, they may take on an aura of warrior culture in their perception of their social worlds.
Young men are socialised to embrace a set of behaviours designed to prove or assert their masculinity and taught to use violence, especially in response to threats against one’s manhood.
School shootings take place in front of others, a public display of violence, to get a point across.
The detailed plans laid out by school shooters, as well as their methodical reasoning for their actions that impose blame on their peers demonstrate how they view their actions as public, as well as the entitlement the feel in their actions.
If young men are surrounded by messages telling them that real men are strong, tough, and violent, and that they do not back down to threats, then using lethal violence to prove one’s masculinity is not only expected, it supports those very values.
School shootings may be thought of as an appropriate, instrumental way for young adolescent males to commit suicide while preserving, if not actually enhancing, their perception of their own masculinity through the aggrieved entitlement of their violence.
Gender and the Dynamics of Aggrieved Entitlement
In all three cases, the shooters felt both victimized by others and superior to them.
All of the shooters described their inability to live up to their peers’ expectations of ‘cool.’
Constant gay baiting contributed to the shooters' feelings of marginalization.
Here are the words of Evan Todd, a 255-pound defensive lineman on the Columbine football team, an exemplar of the jock culture that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris found to be such an interminable torment. Todd said:
Columbine is a clean, good place, except for those rejects, ‘Sure we teased them. But what do you expect with kids who come to school with weird hairdos and horns on their hats? It’s not just jocks; the whole school’s disgusted with them. They’re a bunch of homos … If you want to get rid of someone, usually you tease ‘em. So the whole school would call them homos.’ (Gibbs and Roche 1999:40)
For some students, the high school environment continues in institutions of higher education.
Awkward socially, Cho never seemed to feel that he fit in. He had no friends, rarely, if ever spoke with his dorm mates, and maintained a near- invisibility on campus.
While a student at Northern Illinois, Kazmierczak was described as an outstanding student.
As is clear, all four boys felt themselves to be both victimized and superior.
Boys who are bullied are supposed to be real men, supposed to be able to embody independence, invulnerability, manly stoicism.
The cultural marginalization of the boys who committed school shootings extended to feelings that they had no other recourse.
In his exemplary analysis of the shootings at Columbine high school, sociologist Ralph Larkin (2008) identified several variables that he believed provided the larger cultural context for the rampage.
First, he stresses that the school must be characterized by the presence and tolerance of intimidation, harassment, and bullying within the halls of the high school and on the streets of the larger community.
Thus, Larkin concludes that:
[b]y allowing the predators free reign in the hallways and public spaces and by bending the rules so that bad behavior did not interfere too much with sports participation, the faculty and administration inadvertently created a climate that was rife with discrimination, intimidation and humiliation. (2008:121)
Larkin (2008) also argues that religious intolerance and chauvinism directly contributed to the cultural marginalisation of the boys.
It is the gender culture that is an important element in each of these young men’s decision-making.
They felt marginalized, less than, and they desperately sought a way to make themselves feel better and simultaneously punish those they saw responsible for their oppression.
In doing so, these boys chose over-conformity to gendered ideals.
These young men were all socialized to see violence as a way to prove their manhood.
Additionally, they were socialized in an environment that provided access to firearms.
Conclusion
Klebold, Harris, Kazmierczak and Cho Seung-Hui, experienced what we here call ‘aggrieved entitlement’ – a gendered sense that they were entitled, indeed, even expected – to exact their revenge on all who had hurt them.
It wasn’t enough to have been harmed; they also had to believe that they were justified, that their murderous rampage was legitimate.
Once they did, they followed the time-honored script of the American western: the lone gunman (or gang) retaliates far beyond the initial provocation and destroys others to restore the self.
American men don’t get mad; they get even.
It’s a truly lethal equation: weakness and explosive rage, tearing the whole town apart as a way to lessen your personal agony.
There are many Dylan Klebolds and Cho Seung-Huis out there, so many victims of incessant bullying, of having their distress go unnoticed.
But they don’t all explode.
In addition to their own psychological predisposition, we believe that it is important also to consider the environment in which they lived.
We believe that further study of rampage school shootings will need to include access to firepower, an explosive young man who is utterly marginalized, humiliated, and drenched in what he feels is righteous rage – as well as an environment that sees such treatment of its weakest and most marginalized as justified, as ‘reasonable’.
That narrative has become a globalized rhetoric of aggrieved entitlement, and teenagers all over the world have access to the same story.
And yet it is still an utterly gendered story, and that suicidal explosion remains a distinctly masculine trope.