MY GRANDMOTHER ALWAYS SAID, “NEVER TALK POLITICS OR religion.” But she didn’t live in the age of Make America Great Again, alternative facts, Twitter, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and this batshit-crazy climate in which truth seems to matter less than blind allegiance. So, with apologies to Grandma, I’m about to get pretty controversial because it is not only impossible to avoid talking about these things in front of or with your children; it’s also shortsighted and, I’d argue, irresponsible.
Racism, misogyny, bigotry, and alpha-male nonsense has always been present in American culture, so I’m not blaming Donald Trump’s rise to power for the introduction of these societal ills. What I am saying, without an ounce of hesitation or equivocation, is that since Trump became president in 2016, he has legitimized and even encouraged these belief systems. Because of Trump, fellow morons feel enabled to spew their toxic bullshit in public, and it’s quickly becoming the norm. He’s cleared the way for white nationalists to come out of their basements and into the mainstream, made pussy-grabbing a presidential trait, turned back the clock on the LGBTQ+ movement, and single-handedly made being an egomaniacal strongman fashionable while simultaneously vilifying what we’ve always considered good leadership qualities—having experience, education, and a calm demeanor. It’s as if we elected as president the comments section of every terrible online article. We took our collective drunk, racist uncles and put him in the Oval Office. We set ourselves back a-yet-to-be-determined number of years as a country by giving in to our worst and most basic tendencies. And we did it all in front of our kids.
Make no mistake, our kids are watching, and they’re soaking this in like sponges. It’s not all about Trump, either. Listening to progressive Democrats swear up and down that they want a woman to be president but then refer to Hillary Clinton as “shrill” or claiming that all of the female presidential candidates have an “electability” problem is frustrating and hypocritical beyond belief. The fact remains that everything feels more polarized now because the issues we’re discussing aren’t just political—they’re representative of our values as a society.
If you’re a parent who is currently bringing up young children during these watershed times of Trump’s presidency, you have even more cause to be vigilant and to talk about politics openly with your kids. This isn’t just immigration we’re talking about; it’s whether we’re okay with family separation and locking kids up in cages. It’s not just Supreme Court nominations at stake; it’s literally the ability of women to control their own reproductive health decisions. It’s not just agreeing or disagreeing on environmental policy decisions; it’s recognizing we’re at a tipping point regarding climate change that will determine the sustainability of the planet for the current generation. Not to mention that young people today are paying special attention to how messages of these environmental issues are being treated, specifically Greta Thunberg, the seventeen-year-old Swedish climate change activist who has been repeatedly mocked by the President of the United States for her outspoken nature. It’s also impossible to ignore the fact that transgender soldiers are no longer deemed fit to serve in our military, while discrimination protections don’t apply to members of the LGBTQ+ community in certain states due to religious exemptions. The point is parents who say they don’t want to talk about politics or controversial topics are really saying they don’t want to talk about issues that impact all of us—and these issues are too important to society and to our kids for us to remain silent.
Perhaps the number one complaint I get on my social media channels and website is “I followed you for parenting stuff, not politics, so stick to talking about fatherhood.” But that, my friends, is utter crap. You can’t separate politics from parenting because politics impacts everything we do in society. The laws that govern us, the policies under which we have to live—it’s all political, and it’s all going to come up in the course of raising children.
So, let’s just dive right into what is arguably the most important and heartbreaking issue in America today—gun culture and mass shootings.
PARENTING TIP #25: Don’t let boys fall victim to gun culture
Three mass shootings occurred during the time it took for me to write this chapter. Three. All of the shooters were men. There can be no more whistling by the graveyard when it comes to men and mass shootings, and parents need to know that male anger and the inability to deal with rejection or meet society’s masculine ideals is resulting in violent deaths.
“Because I’m really angry.”
That’s what nineteen-year-old Santino William Legan reportedly said when someone in attendance at the Gilroy Garlic Festival asked him why he was going on a shooting spree, which resulted in the deaths of three people, including a six-year-old boy. According to news reports, Legan bought an AK-47-style weapon just before the July 2019 incident (in neighboring Nevada, where the gun laws are more lax than California), referenced a neo-Nazi manifesto that targeted women and minorities on Instagram, sneaked through a fence, and started gunning people down before police killed him. But not before a witness, quoted by multiple news outlets, shouted out, “Why are you doing this?”, to which Legan issued the horrifyingly chilling but all-too-common answer. “Because I’m really angry.”45
I was putting together this chapter in July 2019 when this tragedy occurred, and truth be told, I was struggling mightily with the writing. Every statistic out there tells a story we already know—that the overwhelmingly majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by men. Most of them white men. Many of them angry. Angry at minorities who they see as taking over society and taking what’s theirs (El Paso Walmart shooting). Angry at women for not paying them enough attention or not sleeping with them on command (Tallahassee yoga studio shooting). Just . . . angry. But while I can cite statistics all day long, I was struggling to properly convey just how much our warped gun culture and gun violence are very much a male problem that ties in directly to toxic masculinity and how men view themselves in the world. I must’ve started and then deleted this chapter twenty times because I couldn’t get it right. And then came Santino William Legan and his white male anger.
When searching for a common denominator in mass shootings, a lot of people go right to mental illness. But a University of Texas research study from February 2019 found that “counter to a lot of public opinion, having a mental illness does not necessarily make a person more likely to commit gun violence” and that “a better indicator of gun violence was access to firearms.”46 However, the one thing that can’t be denied when examining gun violence (and violent crimes in general) is that almost all of the attacks are carried out by men. An FBI report from 2014 titled “A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013” found that of 160 such incidents, only six were committed by women.47 That means more than 96 percent of those incidents saw men pulling the trigger. This makes gun violence very much a problem perpetrated by men.
Not many people want to talk about this generation of men that is killing others and themselves, though. It’s much easier to blame it all on mental illness instead of acknowledging how our culture of toxic masculinity turns boys into men who are unfeeling, robotic, and completely lacking in coping mechanisms. That’s probably why, according to a report by the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, men are four times as likely to commit suicide compared to women.48 Meanwhile, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention found that nearly 51 percent of suicides in 2017 involved firearms.49 And you know what the craziest thing is? It seems to me we already know the answer.
We raise our boys to be tough at all costs. They are not allowed to cry. They are mocked and ridiculed if they openly express their feelings. They are told to be strong and silent and to never seek help, because “real men” figure things out on their own. They are told to be dominant and aggressive in sports, work, dating, and life in general. Then, after we’ve stunted their development as fully formed human beings and made them incapable of having any kind of wherewithal to be emotionally intelligent and competent, know what we do? We arm them.
Yup, we create hypermasculine male automatons and raise them in a toxic stew soaked with misogyny and stoked by racism, but we give them none of the tools to understand or cope with their surroundings. Eventually, they succumb to these alpha male attitudes, and the bullied become the bullies. Then, somewhere along the way, we hand them one of the 300 million guns in circulation today. Then we make ownership of said gun a central component to their manhood, and suddenly, confused and angry-as-fuck men are now holding legally purchased killing machines as they hop onto Reddit and 8chan to discuss far-right manifestos and blame women and minorities for everything that hasn’t gone right in their lives. And when all that violence and anger in which they’ve been raised finally bubbles to the surface, and these men have no idea what a healthy coping mechanism looks like, it becomes easier just to grab the gun—which will only end in two possible ways, and neither of them are good.
To make things worse is how we talk about guns, shootings, and the cause of all the violence after it happens, as if we don’t already know the answer. What do we do as a society when these men blow up and hurt themselves and/or others? We throw our hands up in feigned confusion and shout to the heavens, “Why is this happening?” and “What could possibly make someone do this?” Well, you have most of your answer. This happens because of a confluence of events and factors that are part and parcel of the toxicity in which we raise men, combined with an embarrassingly easy access to guns in this country. This is the reason you see so few female shooters. This is the inevitable conclusion to the terrible way we box men in emotionally and raise them in what amounts to a microwave that blasts and cooks together toxic masculinity, misogyny, and white supremacy.
I disagree completely with those of you who say, “It’s mental illness, dumbass!”, or who blame violent video games for gun violence. Countries all over the world contain people who suffer from mental illness; and kids from all nationalities are playing Grand Theft Auto and other video games. Also, both men and women are susceptible to mental illness. Yet, despite the fact, they are not shooting up malls, grocery stores, and music festivals with the appalling frequency of the incidents in the United States. Why? Because of the inordinate number of guns the United States has in circulation, the embarrassingly lax background checks in far too many states to own one, and this country’s uniquely warped gun culture and version of masculinity. I understand it’s easier to blame the mental health boogeyman, but doing so only ignores the actual problem of how intrinsically intertwined masculinity and gun ownership is.
And if you think that gun companies don’t already realize this and actively tap into it, then let me tell you a tale about how one gun company advertised to men for two years prior to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
In 2010, Bushmaster Firearms began an advertising campaign that will long live in my mind as the gold standard of poisonous, dangerous, and irresponsible marketing. That was the year the company began running promotions that featured an AR-15 rifle with five simple words splayed across the front: “Consider Your Man Card Reissued.”50 The implication is quite clear—if you’re a real man (and you can always tell the real ones from the fake ones because they have their handy dandy Man Card at the ready), you own a gun. If you don’t own a gun, well, then have a seat on the bench, Sally. Because what could go wrong by insinuating you need to own a weapon that can fire thirty bullets in rapid succession to rightfully consider yourself masculine?