I spent a good chunk of this summer training for my tennis team’s USTA sectional playoffs last weekend at the Costa Mesa Tennis Center. I put in the “hard yards” both on and off the court to prepare for a weekend of intense tennis against players likely better than myself. I ended up winning neither of my two matches, as expected. I made my opponents work for their victories, though, and I was not unhappy with my performance: I left sectionals with my athletic ego only semi-ravaged. But I was physically exhausted at the end of some five hours of hard tennis under a hot Southern California summer sun.
Around three pm I went to my car to escape the sun for an hour and change out of my sweat soaked clothes. I put on fresh socks, shorts, and shirt for my second tennis match. It was then that I made the mistake of checking the news and heard the developing news of a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. I could hardly believe it. After the tennis was over I went to a birthday party in Irvine for my nephew, niece, and brother. Family members filled me in on the details of the Texas shooting. I was horrified. I heard later there had also been another similar shooting in Dayton, Ohio.
Wtf?
The news of these two shootings hit me hard.
I felt similar to how I felt when I first heard about the Sandy Hook shooting. Or when I first heard about the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. I am not sure why. Maybe it was because in the middle of these intense tennis matches I was particularly unprepared psychologically for tragic news. It was an unguarded moment.
I was also intrigued at the timing, as I had just before written about lonely Americans finding their tribe,” a theme much on my mind as of late. I was pretty sure these El Paso and Dayton shooters were similar to the Gilroy one in that they were young males with few friends and no romantic connection to women. Pissed off virgins with mass mayhem on their mind. Not unlike Mohammad Atta of the 9/11 attacks. Sexually famished angry self-immolation.
President Trump later blamed these shootings on video games and mental illness — which to me seemed farcical. Too much playing of video games might result in bad grades and a flabby body from lack of real life engagement, but drive one to mass murder? And mental illness — that is a big target. All these garden variety depressives and bipolar sufferers and schizophrenics? They almost never get a gun and start randomly shooting people at the mall. Some blame white supremacy and President Trump’s political rhetoric – which, in my opinion, is a symptom but not the cause. It is a certain kind of alienated and vulnerable young white make who listens to the siren song of white extremism in some dark corner of the Internet and allows himself to be seduced by it. The same as some similar young Muslim who devotes his life to Jihad or ISIS or whatever. Past a certain point, it is unhelpful to dive too far into the rabbit hole of their fetid, half-formed ideologies.
Clearly as I wrote before Rise of the Lonely Losers Part One and Part Two, this meme of shooting up a place and becoming an infamous anti-hero is run amok across the land. This description of this thankfully rare person is apt:
“Cold Methodical Killers: The Psychology of Mass Shooters”
by Shavaun Scott
Some deranged loner somewhere is studying these latest shootings on the Internet in private where nobody can see him, and he is planning to emulate them in his own fashion. An entire country will know that guy’s name after he makes his move. It is like a virus that has infected the body politic.
Sigh.
The day after the El Paso/Dayton shootings I was lying in bed thinking about these nihilist/terrorist shooters (whose names I will not deign to mention) and the script they follow. I thought of the story of how in the 18th century the French tried to destroy a English lighthouse off their coast and took its builder prisoner, and King Louis XIV ordered him released and to leave the lighthouse alone. “France is at war with England, not with humanity,” the king explained. These terrorists really are at war with HUMANITY, in contrast. The cultural script since The Basketball Diaries and Columbine has been the black-clad man walking into a crowded public place and opening fire on everyone. “What is next?” I thought to myself. What is to stop murderous psychopaths from poisoning reservoirs? Or starting wildfires in the forest outside town during periods of high wind?
And how exactly did we allow such a very small amount of people to gain such power to command our attention? This is what they are after: infamy, their carefully planned violence a sort of performative act. They want to kill cold-bloodedly as many random victims as they can before committing suicide or being killed by the police. Future mass shooters will study their acts and seek to top them, and they will garner their own fifteen minutes of fame. Journalists will write about what they did long into the future.
There are no easy answers. One can hardly prevent the media from reporting a murder — and thereby giving the acts of these psychopaths the oxygen they need to live on in cultural history. The press is protected by the First Amendment. And try to ban or eradicate 8Chan or some other dank white supremacist corner of the Internet? You will play whack-a-mole, as extremists move around the Internet of the dark web. I have hard it is thus online with the Muslim extremists. And there is again the First Amendment protecting political speech, even extreme political speech. In a nation with some 393 million guns, tinkering around the edges of firearms law is not going to change things substantially. An ocean of print will be spilled about gun control and a thousand talking heads will scream about it, and the law will change a bit here and there, but the core 2nd Amendment is not going to change. None of these three recent mass shooters had criminal records, and they bought their weapons legally. Unless you make purchasing a gun next to impossible and owning a gun rare, you are not going to change much. Although that would be a wet dream for a certain kind of American liberal, I will be long dead and buried before the 2nd Amendment is overturned. Freedom can be messy but it is freedom, nonetheless. I even heard some calling for possible mass shooters to be involuntarily medicated! Wow.
There will be work to be done around the edges with the current law, but damaging the liberties spelled out in the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments could do more damage to American democracy than these terrorist shootings. By all means use FBI agents to try to surveil and infiltrate these far right groups online and off, and local police to pounce on the first hint of planning for such an attack — and seek to use “red flag” laws to prevent deranged individuals who demonstrably threaten others with violence from possessing firearms (with due process given to the accused along with a “clear and convincing evidence” standard). But if anyone thinks this is going to stop the cultural meme set forth at Columbine, they are deluding themselves. The cultural taboo against indiscriminate slaughter has broken down, and every further such mass shooting makes the next more possible, even likely.
Again, there are no easy answers.
But I would return again to the pathetic spectacle of these fearsome, rifle-bearing, body-armored, and black-clothed mass shooters — the way they want you to see and remember them. Then there is the truth of their interior emotional lives — man-children who are angry, lonely, and sexually famished — the way they don’t want you to see them. Most of these young men are virgins, or something awful close to it.
I want to focus on this important fact.
There will almost surely be another 19 or 22 year old shooting up a school or synagogue or wherever. He will not have many friends, I suspect. But more to the point, I promise you he is not getting laid on a regular basis.
I wrote that last sentence using colloquial language on purpose.
Am I saying that if these guys had girlfriends and “got laid,” they would want to lay there in their lover’s arms satiated, and hence feel less of a need to explode in murderous violence?
Yes, that is what I am saying.
If they had the tools to find human connection with others, they would have more of the “milk of human kindness” and less murderous rage. During the attack someone supposedly yelled at the shooter at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, “Why are you doing this?” He reportedly yelled back, “Because I am really angry!” Was he “angry” because he was a sexually starved nineteen year old virgin with almost no friends?
Maybe that is naive. Maybe these mass shooters are so psychologically and/or emotionally damaged they would be unable to conciliate a mutually satisfying sexual relationship even if one fell into their lap out of the sky. Or maybe they are stone cold psychopaths and uninterested.
But maybe some of these guys might have gone in another direction, if a few things in their lives had gone differently.
These angry loners are out there on the edge, but maybe positive human connection could bring them back from the precipice. Milan Kundera wrote, “Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.” Maybe a ticking time bomb could have been defused? Maybe they could have been brought back from the edge?
For a certain kind of man, it is easier to explode in violence than it is to woo and win a woman. They literally have no idea how to romance a lady. It is easier to study obsessively past mass murders on youtube and plot a copycat version. Assault rifles and body armor present less difficulty than navigating the confusing and forbidding shoals of romantic connection with the female sex. If there is a key to unlocking the heart of a woman and her affections, they have no idea what that key might be or how to use it. There is a reason they are alone.
And so they are pissed off and everyone will see just how much. If these sexually frustrated young male loners can’t have a woman, they will kill all the women who won’t have them — and all the men who are sexually successful with women, also. That is basically just about everyone — HUMANITY. It is misogyny primarily, and misanthropy a close second. Kill everyone, and put an end to your interior pain in a spectacular explosion that won’t soon be forgotten. Better to die that way than to live unhappily and unknown where nary a person knows your name or cares. After their big moment under the klieg lights of 24/7 mass media attention, people will know their names. They can dress up their violent nihilism in the political terrorist clothing of the white supremacist or Jihadi colors if they want, but for young and immature men dedicated to indiscriminate slaughter this is largely “sex gone sour,” as George Orwell put it so well.
The incel types are more honest with themselves. That lonely depressed guy in Thousand Oaks attacked a country western bar where hundreds of young people were flirting, dancing, and enjoying themselves. It was not a random target. The Isla Vista guy literally made youtube videos where he said he was going to kill these college girls and boys having fun at UC Santa Barbara. He filmed himself in his car explaining what he was going to do and for what reason right before the attacks. It was performative murder/suicide. He wanted me to know his pain. I watched his video and understood his pain. I was only a few dozen miles away from the attack when it happened, and I would have killed him with my bare hands if I could. But he knew he would be far beyond me and everyone else by the time we saw his face and heard his words on youtube.
I am sure there have always been young men and women who have no idea how to take step one to fulfill their emotional and physical needs with the opposite sex. (And not-so-young people, too.) But I suspect their numbers have grown. Last week I read that 20% of all Millenials report they have “no friends,” and 30% say they always or often feel lonely. (Compared supposedly to 16% of older Generation X, and 9% of even older Baby Boomers who say they have no friends.) I also recently read an article that claimed that “one third of American men aged 19 to 29 didn’t have sex once in all of 2018.” Wow! I would be willing to bet money that none of these mass shooters were part of the 66% of American young men who DID have sex in 2018.
Two months ago I was powerfully affected when I read the following words in the article “Why Millennials and Gen Z are having Less Sex” by Michael K. Spencer —
I was having a conversation in a bar with Ron Antopolski recently and the conversation casually drifted to “we’re becoming like Japan”. Japan, like other Asian countries, is known for a low-fertility rate and dating interactions so awkward that a significant number of adults are virgins. Pretty much a quarter of Japanese people in their 20s and 30s have never had sex.
In America you would have been laughed at had you thought that this would happen to us, say, in the 80s or 90s. Fast forward 30 years and that’s exactly what has happened to us.
We Are Following in Japan’s Footsteps
So it turns out smartphone addiction, ubiquitous access to porn, economic pressure, a decline in social skills and money grabbing Tinder apps mean our dating life sort of sucks, at least for young people.
Or perhaps they have become such enlightened pragmatists they are choosing to remain celibate on pace for not getting married and never living with a significant other. I actually just don’t think that’s the case. I don’t think it’s by choice.
— you can read the rest yourself here.
I have heard experts applaud that young people are getting pregnant by accident or acquiring sexually transmitted diseases less often than in the past, and that alcohol and illegal drug use are reported to be down. So far, so good. But anxiety and depression among college students is reported to be off the charts, and university mental health services are said to be overwhelmed by demand. They say a depression/anxiety crisis runs rampant among the young. I read one guy online in the comments section of an article about all this claim his own older generation had “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” — many younger people no longer do, he said, and maybe that is why anxiety and depression rates are so high? “But, hey, at least the young have their smartphones!” He was being glib and trying to sound witty, but it seems something is off today, especially in dating and romance. There is supposedly a “sex recession.” It seems a New Prudery is upon us — a New Victorianism — a sort of pulling back from sensual pleasure. Real life skin-to-skin contact seems to be in decline, “sexting” and online porn seem to be ascendant. I have read seemingly a thousand articles by American women bemoaning online dating. Marriage rates are at a historic low for Millenials, as is the birth rate. We are becoming more like Japan and Western Europe which for a long time have had birth rates which failed to replenish their populations. Their numbers are shrinking.
Abetted by technology and economics, these trends towards isolation and loneliness — decline and despair — coupled with serious personality disorders can produce a young man vulnerable to the Columbine cultural meme of performative mass media murder/suicide, in my opinion. This sort of terror act has an outsize footprint for the minuscule amount of people involved. That is the point of terrorism: a very few persons creating havoc and terror, and then having a resulting emotional effect on a much larger amount of people who feel terror. And if you throw out the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments in trying to fight terrorism, is the cure worse than the illness? Worth altering long established democratic norms?
The problem is clearly larger than these performative public shootings for the mass media. It goes straight to the heart of health concerns for the masses of Americans beyond this tiny number of mass shooters and their victims. For example, how much do these modern trends of hiding behind screens and alienation — technology and isolation — have to do with poor mental health and chemical addiction in American society? Anxiety? Depression? “Diseases of despair”? Alcoholism? Suicides? Opioid overdoses? How large is the butcher’s bill for all that?!?
What to do?
Assign D.H. Lawrence novels to all college students — if you could pry their smartphones out of their hands to read an actual book? Maybe.
It is a complex situation with no easy solution.
Some of the most intense, driven, and unhappy 30-ish year old women I know have unusually disordered romantic lives. (Or they don’t have one at all.) Would they be more stable and contented in their skins if they could get a boyfriend (or girlfriend) and find some peace in a lover’s arms? Emotional intimacy? An end to sexual privation? Physical release? Regular companionship? I don’t know. But it couldn’t hurt. And it isn’t really about “getting laid” which is easy enough. More difficult it is to develop, nurture, and sustain a loving and supportive romantic relationship over time.
One impulse I have when I read about these shootings and grow angry is to find out about their parents and family. “Who gave birth to and raised these wolves?” I say to myself. Let the shame fall on the family. Let me see the faces and hear their names. But it seems, from what I can tell, that many of these “wolves” had decent families that did not share their psychopathic tendencies — and were horrified by the actions of their sons. These shooters were on their computers secretly researching and planning, maybe giving a few hints at what they were up to, but mostly keeping cleverly quiet. It would be easier to understand if the whole family were monsters and had the mark of Cain on them. But they seem to be mostly normal families.
It would appear they had sons who had “few friends” and were “loners,” and then those boys came under the influence of the Columbine anti-hero meme in some strange corner of the Internet populated by extremists which they had sought out, found, and then — with their minds and hearts — embraced and joined. At long last a lonely soul had found his “tribe”! He now has a “mission” and sense of purpose — a reason to exist! They learn online from those select few who share their dark passions. They find peers they want to impress. They gain co-conspirators who share their secret blood-lust, and I have even heard some of these wannabe shooters post to extremist social media sites how they will best the kill count of past shooters in a boast meant to impress their online “friends.” Before his killing spree the 2015 Oregon murderer wrote online that shooters “are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day.” Journalists, indispensable to the mass murder performative media event, will produce headlines trumpeting their kill count after they are gone — just like journalists publish MLB baseball league scores or government economic statistics. It is entirely social. The press is the vector by which the mass shooter public health virus spreads throughout the body politic. Journalists give these loner psychopaths the mass attention they so crave. In that seminal shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, teenager Dylan Klebold was depressed and came under the influence of psychopath Eric Harris, a fellow student, and the rest is history (with some 240 school shootings since then). It would appear their parents were victims, too.
I can control none of this.
But I can control what happens in my house and with my daughters.
And as I stand here before God I promise you I will do everything I can to help my daughters grow up healthy and supported in their relationships. My wife and I will do our best to guide and help them to choose wisely as they grow up, instead allowing a smartphone and the Internet to do it by default. Not to end up like one of those porn watching man-boys who prefer video games to live women, or man-carping career ladies too busy at the office to be much interested in a husband or children, relying instead on pet cats and a nightstand vibrator.
Homo sapiens are not meant to be alone. Man and woman need each other. Humans need family, community, and affirmation. If we reject the examples of our ancestors and escape into technology and/or materialism, we do so at our own risk. Take heed.
I care about what happens in my country, and I also care about what happens overseas to a much lesser degree. But it is in my own family that I really care. I would do almost anything for my wife and two daughters. It is at home where I draw the line.
What does that mean in real life? It means to be present, loving, patient, and to pay attention. Just what I have tried to do — and mostly succeeded? — over the past two decades. Just like my father has done with me for over five decades. “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.”
And hope for the best.
God help me.
The entire family swam around the Ventura Pier with everyone else this summer on the final day of the junior lifeguards program.
