My apologies for this but Reddit will not let me post this as it contains more than the allowed number of characters and I don't feel like breaking it up into several comments or posts.

Here is the article I am commenting on, from CNN.com:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/19/living/men-guns-violence/index.html


Dear God, where to begin taking down Kimmel's bigoted, detached from reality article?

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Kimmel states:
"And yet we've already heard from experts who talk about mental illness, Asperger's syndrome, depression, and autism. The chorus of gun boosters has defensively chimed in about how gun control would not have prevented this. ... All the while, we continue to miss other crucial variables -- even though they are staring right back at us when we look at that photograph. Adam Lanza was a middle class white guy."
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I fail to see how the fact that this guy was middle class and white has ANYTHING to do with the fact that he killed his mother and then went on to murder more people before finally killing himself. There is nothing particularity (or innately) white, middle class or male about those actions.

Kimmel laments the fact that most of the experts are not mentioning "whiteness" but are instead talking about mental illness and depression. This is because quite a few of these shooters had mental illnesses and a few were even taking medications to treat mental illness (although as one of the articles I link to below mentions, *"Katherine S. Newman, a professor at Princeton University who has studied school killings, said just a small percentage appeared to have possibly involved psychiatric drugs. Of 27 such killings from 1974 to 2001, fewer than one-fifth of the suspects had been diagnosed with a mental health disorder before the shootings"* - however, just because they were not *diagnosed* as being mentally ill, does NOT mean they were sane, normal people. Plus I do not know if Dr. Newman's numbers are accurate). Making a big deal about the race of these shooters is pointless as not all mass shooters are, or have been, white:

**The Columbine killers (Harris was White, Klebold was Jewish)**
A personality profile of Eric Harris, based on journal entries and personal communication, suggested behavior patterns consistent with a "malignant narcissism ... (with) pathological narcissism, antisocial features, paranoid traits, and unconstrained aggression"... One official report suggested that Harris was a psychopath and Klebold was a depressive... the autopsy reports showed that he (Harris) had Fluvoxamine in his body at the time of death. Abrupt cessation of SSRI antidepressants has been found to interfere with normal social functioning in some patients.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Harris_and_Dylan_Klebold)

**Jeff Weise (Native American)**
Jeff Weise on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Weise
On Friday, as Tammy Lussier prepared to bury Mr. Weise, who was her nephew, and her father, who was among those he killed, she found herself looking back over the last year, she said, when Mr. Weise began taking the antidepressant Prozac after a suicide attempt that Ms. Lussier described as a "cry for help." "They kept upping the dose for him," she said, "and by the end, he was taking three of the 20 milligram pills a day. I can't help but think it was too much, that it must have set him off." ... The driver of a school bus, Lorene Gurneau, said she often saw Mr. Weise standing outside the middle school, wearing his long black clothes and strange hairdos, staring off into nothing, in a daze, even as children raced by or teachers passed him.(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/national/26shoot.html?ex=1269493200&en=3f84c15a8b8943c4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&_r=0)

**Seung-Hui Cho (Korean)**
A few members of Cho's family, those who remained in South Korea, had concerns about his behavior during his early childhood. Cho's relatives thought that he was selectively mute or mentally ill. According to Cho's uncle, Cho "didn’t say much and did not mix with other children." Cho's maternal great-aunt, Kim Yang-soon, described Cho as "cold" and a cause of family concern from as young as eight years old. According to Kim, who met him twice, Cho was extremely shy and "just would not talk at all." He was otherwise considered "well-behaved", readily obeying verbal commands and cues. The great-aunt said she knew something was wrong after the family's departure for the United States because she heard frequent updates about Cho's older sister but little news about Cho. During an ABC News Nightline interview on August 30, 2007, Cho's grandfather reported his concerns about Cho's behavior during childhood. According to Cho's grandfather, Cho never looked up to him to make eye contact, never called him grandfather, and never moved to embrace him.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seung-Hui_Cho)

**Kimveer Gill (Punjabi Indian)**
...the Canadian perpetrator of the Dawson College shooting at Dawson College in Westmount, Quebec, Canada on September 13, 2006. He killed one student and wounded nineteen others before he died by suicide.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimveer_Gill)

**Huan Yun Xiang (Chinese)**
The Monash University shooting refers to a shooting in which a student shot his classmates and teacher, killing two and injuring five. It took place at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia on 21 October 2002. The gunman, Huan Yun Xiang, was acquitted of crimes related to the shootings due to mental impairment, and is currently under psychiatric care.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_University_shooting)

**Black Axe Confraternity (Black Nigerians)**
The Obafemi Awolowo University massacre was a series of shootings and murders which took place against students of Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigeria on Saturday, July 10, 1999. It resulted in the deaths of eight people and injuring of 11, all of them students at OAU. It was perpetrated by an organized death squad of 40 members of the Black Axe Confraternity branch at the university. They invaded the Awolowo Hall of the university at around 4:30 A.M., clad in black trousers and black T-shirts, their faces hidden by masks; they carried and made use shotguns and hatchets against students.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obafemi_Awolowo_University_massacre)

**Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi AKA "Marc Lépine" (White Canadian and Algerian)**
murdered fourteen women and wounded ten women and four men at the École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the Université de Montréal, in the "École Polytechnique massacre", also known as the "Montreal Massacre"... Lépine's actions have been variously ascribed to psychiatric diagnoses such as personality disorder, psychosis, or attachment disorder, or societal factors such as poverty, isolation, powerlessness, and violence in the media. The massacre is regarded by criminologists as an example of a hate crime against women, and by feminists and government officials as misogynist attack and an example of the larger issue of violence against women.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine)

**Omar Thornton (Black)**
Thornton, a 34-year-old African American man, was called into his place of employment for disciplinary purposes. Thornton had been recorded on surveillance video in the Hartford Distributors warehouse stealing beer on a previous occasion. Hartford Distributors is a wholesale distributor of Budweiser beer products and wine. Given the options of being fired or resigning, Thornton signed the resignation papers and was being escorted out of the building. Instead of leaving, he took two Ruger SR9s from his lunchbox and opened fire. At the time Thornton started shooting, there were around 40 employees in the building. In just a few minutes, Thornton murdered eight coworkers, and seriously injured two others. Many employees made calls to 911, with some callers identifying Thornton. Police arrived on the scene just three minutes after the first 911 call. Police entered the building 10 minutes after the first 911 call. Thornton hid in a locked office. As more police entered the building, Thornton called his mother and explained to her what he had done. He told her he planned on turning the gun on himself. As police closed in, Thornton called 911, saying his motive for the massacre was racism he had experienced in the workplace. He told the 911 operator that he wished he had killed more people. Soon after hanging up on 911, he killed himself with a shot to the head.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Distributors_shooting)

**Friedrich Leibacher (White)**
Fourteen people were shot dead by Friedrich Leibacher, who killed himself shortly after the crime. In the years before the massacre, Leibacher drew attention to himself by an intense use of lawsuits. These were dismissed, so he assumed he was being persecuted by the state, thus he felt he had to resort to the crime.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_massacre)

**Eduardo Sencion (Latino)**
A man who stormed into a Carson City IHOP restaurant with an assault rifle was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager and feared demons were after him in the months before he killed four people before ending his own life, according to newly released police information.(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/03/eduardo-sencion-ihop-shooter_n_1073677.html)

**Baruch Goldstein (Jewish)**
The Cave of the Patriarchs massacre was a terrorist attack that occurred when Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler and member of the far-right Israeli Kach movement, opened fire on unarmed Palestinian Muslims praying inside the Ibrahim Mosque (or Mosque of Abraham) at the Cave of the Patriarchs site in Hebron in the West Bank. It took place on February 25, 1994, during the overlapping religious holidays of Purim and Ramadan. Twenty-nine worshippers were killed and 125 wounded. The attack ended after Goldstein had expended his ammunition, when he was overcome, then beaten to death by survivors. The attack set off riots and protests throughout the West Bank, and 19 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli Defense Forces within 48 hours of the massacre. Goldstein was denounced "with shocked horror" by Orthodox Judaism, and most in Israel denounced Goldstein as insane.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre)

**John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo (Black)**
John Allen Muhammad was a convicted murderer from the United States. He, along with his seventeen-year-old partner, Lee Boyd Malvo, carried out the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks, killing at least 10 people.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Allen_Muhammad)

**Nicholas Elliot (Black)**
On December 16, 1988, Nicholas Elliot, barely sixteen, walked into the Atlantic Shores Christian School, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, with a semi-automatic handgun hidden in his backpack. By midmorning a forty-one year-old teacher had been shot dead, and another teacher, struck by two nine-millimeter bullets, was extraordinarily lucky to be alive. Two other teachers narrowly escaped Nicholas Elliot's bullets. One found herself running a zigzag pattern through the school yard as Nicholas fired round after round at her back. The other, a man who tackled Nicholas and in the process saved the lives of a roomful of crying and praying teenagers, felt a bullet breeze past his head.(http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/01/the-story-of-a-gun/303531/)

And not all shooters have been male, either:

**Jillian Robbins (White Female)**
On the morning of Tuesday, September 17, 1996, Jillian Robbins, a 19-year-old native of State College, Pennsylvania, armed with a 7 mm Mauser rifle, hid herself in a large group of bushes outside Penn State's Hetzel Union Building (HUB). Shooting in the prone position, Robbins fired 5 shots at passers-by. Twenty-one-year-old journalism student Melanie Spalla was killed, and 20-year-old Nicholas Mensah was wounded in the abdomen. Two students, Kerry Butler and William Mocker, later reported finding damage to their backpacks where bullets had grazed them. Class of 1997 graduate Brendon Malovrh discovered Robbins and disarmed the woman as she attempted to reload the rifle. Robbins attempted to stab Malovrh, but missed and wounded herself in the thigh. Malovrh stayed with Robbins, treating her leg wound, until police arrived.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetzel_Union_Building_shooting)

**Jennifer San Marco (White Female)**
San Marco shot and killed her one-time neighbor, Beverly Graham, and then subsequently drove to the mail processing plant at which she previously worked in Goleta, California. San Marco entered the sprawling plant by driving through a gate behind another car. She gained entry to the building by taking an employee's identification badge at gunpoint. She then shot and killed six employees of the plant with a pistol before taking her own life. ... San Marco apparently believed that she was the target of a conspiracy centered at the Goleta postal facility, according to writings recovered from her house in New Mexico. A spokesman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department speculated that San Marco's paranoia and history of mental illness may have motivated her to commit the murders.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_San_Marco)

**Laurie Dann (Jewish Female)**
After several failed poisoning and arson attempts at numerous locations, she opened fire in an elementary school, killing eight-year-old Nicholas Corwin and injuring five other schoolchildren. Dann then broke into a random home, taking the occupants hostage and seriously wounding one of them. After a standoff with police, she committed suicide by shooting herself in the mouth. It is believed that had her poisoning and arson attempts succeeded, she would have become the most prolific female rampage killer in modern history, and possibly also one of the deadliest rampage killers.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Dann)

**Amy Bishop (White Female)**
Shot six colleagues, three of whom died, with a 9mm handgun February 13, 2010 shortly after learning that she had been denied tenure. She was arrested and indicted for the shooting and is currently in custody. The authorities also reopened the case of her fatally shooting her brother years earlier, an incident which previously was believed to have been an accident. In June 2010, she was charged with first-degree murder of her brother, nearly 24 years after the shooting occured. In 1993, Bishop and her husband were also suspects in a case in which a pair of pipe bombs were sent to a Harvard Medical School professor. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_University_of_Alabama_in_Huntsville_shooting)

**Brenda Ann Spencer (White Female)**
On January 29, 1979, Brenda, then 16, used a .22 rifle and fired at the staff and students of an elementary school across the street on which she lived, killing two and wounding nine. She is currently serving time in a San Diego prison and has been denied parole four times. When asked why she did it, she simply said that she doesn't like Mondays and that killing "livens up the day".(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brenda_Spencer)

**Sylvia Seegrist (White Female)**
An American woman who on October 30, 1985 opened fire at a Springfield, Pennsylvania shopping mall, killing three people and wounding seven others before being disarmed by a mall cop. The individuals killed included two men and a two-year-old boy. She was 25 years old and had been diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia 10 years earlier.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Seegrist)

I could go on and on but I think you get the point.

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Kimmel states:
"If the shooter were black and the school urban, we'd hear about the culture of poverty; about how inner-city life breeds crime and violence; perhaps even some theories about a purported tendency among blacks towards violence. As we've seen in the past week, it's not only those living on the fringes of society who express anger through gun violence."
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So other groups of people besides "white middle class guys" DO in fact commit acts of violence with guns. But I though Kimmel just said that the most crucial variables were "middle class white guy"?

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Kimmel states:
"Yet the obvious fact that Lanza -- and nearly all the recent mass murderers who targeted non-work settings -- were middle class white boys seems to barely register. Look again at the pictures of Jared Lee Loughner (Tucson), James Eagan Holmes (Aurora) and Wade Michael Page (Oak Creek) -- a few of the mass killers of the past couple of years. (Yes, the case of Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator at Virginia Tech, the worst school shooting in our history, stands out as the exception. And worth discussing.)"
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If you read my list above you'll note that Seung-Hui Cho is NOT merely an "exception". In fact, take a gander at this list of rampage killers. There's plenty of non-white people on this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

Also take a minute to peruse this list of serial killers. In addition to the non-white men, you'll also notice a few women on the list like Kristen Gilbert AKA "The Angel of Death"(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristen_Gilbert): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_number_of_victims

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Kimmel states:
"How does masculinity figure into this? From an early age, boys learn that violence is not only an acceptable form of conflict resolution, but one that is admired. ... Boys learn it. **They learn it from their fathers.** They learn it from a media that glorifies it, from sports heroes who commit felonies and get big contracts, from a culture saturated in images of heroic and redemptive violence. They learn it from each other."
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Huh? They learn it from their fathers? Did anyone's father teach them to use guns, knives, bombs or violence to resolve arguments at school or work? Anyone? ...crickets... That's what I thought.

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Kimmel states:
"However the belief that violence is an inherently male characteristic is a fallacy."
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True, yet I'm betting the only reason this is presented is so he can throw out the idea that men are in need of cultural and social "re-education" at the hands of ideologists such as himself. Made up problem, meet non-solution.

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Kimmel states:
"It's also worth discussing why so many of these young mass murderers are white. Surely boys of color have that same need to prove their masculinity, and a similar sense of entitlement to annihilate those who threaten it. **Perhaps** the only difference is that it seems to be nearly the exclusive province of white boys to so dramatically expand the range of their revenge and seek to destroy the entire world, not simply the person or group that committed the supposed offense. **Perhaps**. It's a conversation worth having."
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Translation: "I'm just talking out of my ass and have no clue what I'm saying but I DO have a new book coming out soon so please give what I have to say some thought."

Also, WTF @ him saying,

__________
Kimmel states:
"...the only difference is that it seems to be nearly the exclusive province of white boys to so dramatically expand the range of their revenge and seek to destroy the entire world, not simply the person or group that committed the supposed offense."
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Does this fool even go outside? Does he ever leave the house or read the news? Does he even do a simple Google search before writing his ill-informed screeds? Again, read any of the lists above an you'll note that many of the perpetrators of these types of crimes are NOT white. Being white has NOTHING to do with being a mass killer or spree killer.

I used to live in the worst part of Detroit and over the years I have known of black and Latino gangs killing entire groups of people "not associated with the offending party".

I wonder what Kimmel would have to say about the first gun attack to occur OVER A DISCUSSION ABOUT the recent Connecticut school shootings. This gun attack was committed by a black man named Lester Davis:

Barber shop conversation in Wentzville about Connecticut shootings ends with shots fired at customer

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/barber-shop-conversation-in-wentzville-about-connecticut-shootings-ends-with/article_fad31906-a801-5819-9566-4d3129bbc114.html

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From the article:
"According to police, Davis was at the All Cuts Barber Shop, 102 West Pearce Boulevard, about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday with five other people. One of the patrons was discussing last week's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, and commented that the incident "makes me want to murder the suspect," police said. For unknown reasons, Davis took the comment as a threat and asked, "You want to murder me?" Davis then walked out to his Volkswagen sedan, retrieved a loaded Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol and fired three times in the customer's direction, police said. Davis said "I'll let you slide," walked out of the barber shop and drove off in his car, police said. According to court records, Davis is a felon, convicted of second-degree homicide and unlawful possession of a weapon in Middlesex County, N.J., in 1975. Records further state he has been involved in numerous verbal altercations with neighbors, resulting in an order of protection being issued against him."
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Sounds like a case of fucking batshit crazy and NOT a case of blackness or maleness. I'm pretty sure the other patrons of this barbershop were more than likely black and male. You'll notice that none of them did any crazy shit like Lester Davis did. That's because Lester Davis is fucking crazy and the rest of them are not. His blackness and his maleness had nothing to do with his violent, irrational actions.

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Kimmel states:
"I am not for a moment suggesting we substitute race or gender for the other proximate causes of this tragedy: lax gun laws, mental illness. I am arguing only that we can never fully understand it, unless we also add these elements to our equation. **Without them, the story is entirely about him, the shooter**."
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Of course the story is entirely about the shooter. Why wouldn't it be? It's the shooter as an individual (and their mental state, actions, motivations and accountability) that is the subject of the inquiry, not their race or sex. As we have seen in the linked lists above, race and sex do not really matter - the main causes seem to be mental illness or mental/emotional issues (paranoia, etc). Whiteness and maleness do not seem to figure in to the equation at all.

In my opinion, the only reason people like Kimmel want to add race and sex to the mix is because he traffics in sex/race propaganda and he wants to exploit these tragedies for all he can (books, appearances, speaking engagements and fees, workshops, etc).

__________
Kimmel states:
"In the coming weeks, we'll learn more about Adam Lanza, his motives, his particular madness. We'll hear how he "snapped" or that he was seriously mentally ill. We'll try to explain it by setting him apart, by distancing him from the rest of us. And we'll continue to miss the point. Not only are those children at Sandy Hook Elementary School our children. Adam Lanza is our child also. Of course, he was mad -- as were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and Seung-Hui Cho, Jared Lee Loughner, James Eagan Holmes, and Wade Michael Page -- and the ever-longer list of boys and young men who have exploded in a paroxysm of vengeful violence in recent years. **In a sense, they weren't deviants, but over-conformists to norms of masculinity that prescribe violence as a solution. Like real men, they didn't just get mad, they got even. Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will continue to produce such horrific sums**."
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Sorry, but many of these shooters have already been proven to be mentally ill, paranoid, crazy, delusional, etc. Masculinity has fucking ZIP to do with any of their actions. Zero. Nada. Not to mention that not all of these shooters are, or have been, men.

The percentage of people (and the percentage of men, specifically) who commit these sort of killings is so small that by their sheer puny numbers alone we can dismiss them and label them as deviants, not "over-conformists" - whatever that means. Even if someone is somehow "over-conforming" (by taking something to an extreme that most people would consider unusual, bizarre or insane) then they are, by definition, deviants.

__________
Kimmel states:
"Until we transform that definition of manhood, this terrible equation of masculinity and violence will continue to produce such horrific sums."
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And I bet Kimmel has a solution ready for us: a book, a workshop or a class.

From the intro to the CNN article:

"Editor's note: Michael Kimmel is distinguished professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook. His new book **"Angry White Men"** will be published next year."

LOL! But of course!

Others have already jumped on the "white male as gun loving mass killer" bandwagon, or at least linking white men and guns together as a scapegoat for "mass killer culture":

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Dante Atkins states:
"A lot of children are dying so that white men can hold onto the fantasy of being able to shoot dead a minority home invader."
(https://twitter.com/DanteAtkins/status/279664565237727232)
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Yeah, genius. That's the ticket.

Does this fool know that it was Adam Lanza's mother who owned the guns he used to kill her, several others and himself? Does he know that it was Adam Lanza's mother who taught him how to shoot those guns, because she wanted to "teach him responsibility"?

Where I come from in Detroit there are a lot of blacks and Latinos who own guns. Whites own guns. Arabs own guns. Jews own guns. Asians own guns. Women own guns, too. Old people own guns and young people own guns. Native Americans and immigrants own guns. Gun ownership is not exclusive to whites or men.

But hey, we're starting to veer into the realm of reality and away from the media narrative - and Kimmel has books to sell. A guy with a degree in feminist-ology has to eat, you know.

TL;DR - Michel Kimmel opened his mouth and shat forth a flaming turd of an article for CNN.com