As our campus mourns the loss of a beloved professor, I can’t help but to reflect upon a thought that passed through my mind last Thursday afternoon.
As I anxiously waited in my apartment watching news reports of the unfolding tragedy, I updated my roommate on the situation by saying “he’s still inside.” A few minutes later a TV reporter also referred to the shooter as “he.”
We know now that the shooter was female, so why did the reporter and I automatically assume the perpetrator was male? Did you think the same thing?
If so, it turns out statistics may have influenced us. Studies show that 97 percent of school shooters are male and if you include all mass killings the number sits at 94 percent. As school shootings have become increasingly common the past two decades, why has our nation not addressed or even mentioned this glaring fact?
Jackson Katz of the Huffington Post notes that after tragedies “we turn on the TV and watch the same predictable conversations about guns and mental illness, with only an occasional mention that the overwhelming majority of these types of crimes are committed by men — usually white men.”
Katz continues, “the key difference is that because men represent the dominant gender, their gender is rendered invisible in the discourse about violence. So much of the commentary about school shootings, including the one at Sandy Hook Elementary, focuses on 'people' who have problems, 'individuals' who suffer from depression, and 'shooters' whose motives remain obtuse.”
“When opinion leaders start talking about the men who commit these rampages, and ask questions like: ‘why is it almost always men who do these horrible things?’ and then follow that up, we will have a much better chance of finding workable solutions to the outrageous level of violence in our society.”
While what occurred on our campus doesn’t fit the norm, it gives us a chance to reflect on the numbers and start conversations in our community. We can’t keep having events like this, so we must think about past tragedies from all angles — weapons used, mental health, race and gender — to come up with viable solutions.