Last week there was another mass shooting in America, which is in no way unusual.
What is unusual is that this time the shooter, Nasim Aghdam, was female.
In general, shooters are male (only three cases of mass shooters in the past three decades have been female, reports Mother Jones).
There are already numerous jokes about how the fact that Aghdam didn’t kill more people proves that men are “better.” It’s true that the shooter, who wounded three before killing herself, did not kill as many people as in some shootings, thank God. But that may have had more to do with California’s sensible gun laws than her gender.
The fact that we’re becoming disconnected enough from murder to immediately joke about how it’s proof that women aren’t talented is very sad. Perhaps it will surprise people using this rhetoric to learn that this was, emphatically, not a gender gap we were trying to close.
NBC News spoke with Sherry Hamby, a professor of psychology, and noted that she found:
Research has pointed to a variety of reasons men are more likely to be violent, including a sense of entitlement. When women are violent, there tends to be a connection to a domestic dispute.
We’ve talked about issues of male entitlement and how they connect to shootings in the past. There are some people who think that the emergence of a female shooter means that men have been wrongly maligned (they have not been), and that we should never talk about toxic masculinity again because one shooter out of a great many was a woman.
It is odd, I think, to look at a shooting and think, Ha! The problem with our society is people not being deferential enough to white men (who carry out the majority of mass shootings).
This does not seem like a problem in the same way that living in a society where people keep getting shot is a problem.
You know, whether they’re male or female, I’m not sure I really want to spend much more time investigating the psychology of shooters. Are they sad? Are they mad? Are they frustrated? Okay, fine. Those are universal emotions.
However, in countries with gun control, emotional turmoil does not result in regular mass shootings.
This notion that if the would-be shooters were denied easy access to guns they would simply use something else, such as a knife?
Fine. Let them try to use knives. A Dutch man with a knife showed up to a school intending to harm kids recently, and the children fended him off by throwing their backpacks at him. That is not an effective tactic when you’re up against an AR-15. Or, as the Dutch Review declared, “School attack in the Netherlands—no one gets hurt because it isn’t the U.S.”
A certain amount of control over dangerous objects is really basic. Everyone who wants to buy a car has to take months of training—including watching, at least when I was applying for my license, a very graphic video called “Blood on the asphalt” and register for a license that has to be renewed periodically.
Instead, the America that Republicans want, where instead of regulating guns, everyone is armed and the most powerful person is whoever has the best aim, is something we do not talk enough about. I have no desire to live in a dystopia where everyone is armed to the teeth and shooting at each other constantly, especially when we do not have health care to cover our many inevitable bullet wounds.
We need universal gun control to cut down on this, and we need it now.
And, because there is now a woman who has shot people as well, the Right can exclaim, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
Yes.
In America, they do it with guns.
Jennifer Wright is BAZAAR.com's Political Editor at Large. She is also the author of 'Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes That Fought Them' and 'It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Break-Ups In History.'
