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Monday, 31 August 2009 09:58

Written by Chad Hermann

(a practical response for improving discussion and saying what is true in reality)

BY NOW YOU KNOW THE STORY: a disturbed and bitter loner arms himself, leaves behind a collection of insane scribblings, and heads off to a local commercial establishment to exact some violent, twisted sense of payback for the pain and injustice of his sorry, aimless life. He targets one particular type of victim. He kills three. He wounds and terrifies many others. His story becomes, for a few days at least, a local media obsession.

But what you may not remember is that nine years before George Sodini played out this nightmare at an L.A. Fitness center in Collier, another well-armed, homicidal lunatic named Ronald Taylor played it out at a Burger King and a McDonald’s in Wilkinsburg. Like Sodini — and, for that matter, like most mass and spree and serial murderers — Taylor was a man and (this is not the clinical term, but it will do) a nutcase. Unlike Sodini, Taylor was black and targeted white men.  

Much has changed in the interim, not least of which is our post-9/11 proclivity for the pornography of public grief, but some striking differences in the aftermaths of the two shootings seem to me worth considering. And lamenting.

If ever there were clear-cut cases for hate crimes, Taylor’s and Sodini’s attacks surely make the grade. Taylor bypassed black men (This gun is for the crackers, he told one man), black women, and white women on his rampage through the streets of Wilkinsburg, stopping at three different locations to shoot five different white men; Sodini headed straight for an exercise room he knew would be filled with women, then turned out the lights and opened fire. And yet, despite the eerie and tragic similarities between both their intentions and their results, the public reactions to their sprees were dramatically different.

Taylor was viewed at the time, and rightly so, as an anomaly — a lone, violent, profoundly disturbed individual who did not represent any class or type or unseen, lurking  menace in our culture. He was not an Angry Black Man, nor was he a Violent Man; he did not carry the burdens of hundreds of years of racial bigotry or thousands of years of cultural and genetic evolution. He was not a symbol of the dangers that could befall poor, innocent white men who were just trying to grab a hamburger or a morning cup of coffee at their local fast food joint. He was just a guy who needed help, didn’t get it, and one day acted out on the fears and demons that plagued his deeply troubled mind.

There were memorial services for Taylor’s victims, and there may have been candlelight vigils for them as well, but I do not recall a group of white men holding a candlelight service on the steps of the City-County building so that they might underscore the problem of violence against white men. Nor do I recall a multi-cultural group of men holding a candlelight vigil on that or any other location to raise awareness of the ongoing problem of violence against men in America. Nor do I recall a series of blog posts and op-ed pieces filled with all the hue and outcry, all the rhetorical hand-wringing and philosophical garment-rending of writers so self-righteously certain that one lunatic with a gun could stand for a threat considerably larger, and far less real, than himself.

Perhaps the losses of a 55-year-old carpenter, a 71-year-old chaplain, and a 20-year-old physics major were not worthy of the same lamentations as those of a 37-year-old medical equipment saleswoman, a 49-year-old radiology tech, and a 46-year-old Kennywood employee. Perhaps three innocent men did not make as tragic, nor as ideologically convenient, a set of victims as three helpless women. Or perhaps, unlike the folks who’ve worked so mightily to make George Sodini both a symbol and a standard-bearer for the problem of violence against women in a hard, cold, patriarchal society, anyone who thought about turning Ronald Taylor into some sort of perverse poster boy for their cause realized the facts were not on their side, the argument would not hold, and the very thought of the effort would shame its makers as surely as it whored the memories of his victims.

A FEW WEEKS AGO, when I first began kicking around the uncomfortable ideas that would lead to this post, I noted that the reaction from some corners of the web, and at least from several sections of the city, seemed to me tantamount to suggesting that George Sodini’s rampage would have been more palatable, or at least somehow less objectionable, if he’d just stopped to shoot a couple of men too. That notion is as perverse as it is disgusting, as spiritually bankrupt as it is morally reprehensible. It is also, to be fair, something of a rhetorical stretch — but one all-too-easily made when blog post after op-ed piece after candlelight vigil suggests that the most truly scary and heinous part of the tragedy, and so the great lesson we must glean from it, is that only women were victimized.

Heather Arnet, Executive Director of The Women and Girls Foundation, certainly seemed to frame it that way in her remarks at the City-County Building vigil:

This tragedy should be a wake up call to this community – and to our nation - that we need to engage in a robust and courageous conversation about how women are treated and portrayed in our communities, in the media, online, and in our homes.

From the limited information we know about the shooter, we know that this was not a random act — this was an intentional premeditated act of violence, a hate crime whose perpetrator targeted his victims for the sole fact that they were women.

Tonight, we are heartbroken, we are angry, we are terrified, we are desperately sad, and we are committed to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

So, just to recap: because of this one, random, isolated incident, women (and, presumably, men) should draw conclusions about the treatment and portrayal of women in all aspects of American culture. And because one man, one loner, loser wacko nutjob with a gun, an internet connection, and an unstable axe to grind, shot at one group of women in one room for one unconscionable reason, all women (but not, presumably, men) everywhere — or at least here in Allegheny County — should be terrified.

I wonder if Ms. Arnet would have thought that, in the wake of the Ronald Taylor shooting, all white men would have been justified to be terrified of all black men. Or that men should have been terrified of all other men. Or that we needed to engage in a robust and courageous conversation — what, exactly, makes a conversation courageous; the number of liberties it takes with the truth? — about how white men are portrayed in our communities, in the media, online, and in our homes.

I suspect not.

I imagine she would have thought those notions silly, not even worthy of the time or energy it took to conceive of them.

And she would have been right.

Yet still we suffer argument after assertion after essay that suggests George Sodini’s mayhem was somehow symptomatic of a culture of violence against women. Or that violence against women is somehow a rampant, unspoken problem finally and thankfully highlighted by this most recent and egregious example. The disappointing, if not especially surprising, ubiquity of this narrative theme is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in a post on Mike Madison’s wonderful Pittsblog. Mike is one of the smartest and most thoughtful guys in the region — hell, in the country — and yet even he, a lawyer and a professor who damned well ought to know better, could not resist the contention that there are larger, and more ominous, macro lessons to be learned from this most micro of examples:

For [women], the world just got a little scarier.

All of us need to change that.

Well, yes we do, Mike. But not just for women. For everyone.

Because this is no more a teachable moment about violence against women than the Virginia Tech shooting was about violence on college campuses, or than the Columbine shooting was about violence on high school campuses, or than the Ronald Taylor shooting was about violence against (white) men. It’s just another extreme and sensational outlier in the data — one that might, if we allow it, become a teachable moment about not allowing our agendas or our assumptions to crowd out our facts.

The numbers have gotten a lot better in the last thirty-five years, but there is still, by any reasonable measure, an epidemic of violence in this country.  Not against Women, or even against Men — though, as you will see in a moment, that may be debatable — but against People.  If we really want to do something about it, a first step might be to stop segregating — or worse, ranking — its victims based on whether or not they have a penis.

But if we must obsess over the relationship of our sex organs to our violent crime victimization, then we must also acknowledge one more critical fact: the George Sodinis among us not withstanding, the world will have to get a whole lot scarier for women before it gets anywhere near as scary as it is for men.

DON'T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. Just take a look at the numbers compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics. Here, according to its most recent 30-year comprehensive study on homicide trends by gender, are some numbers to prove that there are a hell of lot more Ronald Taylors than George Sodinis out there: 

From 1976-2005...

76.5% of all homicide victims were men;
23.5% were women.

63.3% of all victims in multiple homicides were men;
36.7% were women.

Or, if you want to expand the scariness outside the realm of just murder and consider victimization rates for all violent crimes (homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, simple assault) taken together, consider the numbers from the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Statistics’ most recent comprehensive study on that subject:

From 1973-2005...

63% of all victims of violent crime were men;
37% were women.

What George Sodini did was, like what Ronald Taylor did, an aberration. The solitary detonation of a singular menace. If either of these crazies’ choice of victims fits into a larger, more troublesome pattern — as these DOJ statistics abundantly prove — it is Ronald Taylor’s; he, after all, went after the far more likely and popular gender target. If anyone has reason to fear a violent incident or a murderous end in America, it’s men. And by a wide margin.   

BUT INSTEAD OF OBSESSING OVER male-initiated violence against female victims, or black-male-initiated violence against white male victims, perhaps we should worry a little more about all-initiated violence against all victims. Let’s worry about the bad guys — more on that in a moment — attacking the innocents.

We can tackle subsets individually, of course, and we should. But when we pretend that one demographic group is the greater locus of victimhood, and especially when we direct an inordinate amount of attention on a demographic group that we pretend is the greater locus of victimhood even though crime stats clearly show it is not, we direct energy and resources and even our not-so-scarce but still precious rhetorical bandwidth away from the greater worries. And the real solutions to the real problems.

Heather Arnet, for all of her melodramatic, misplaced angst elsewhere in her candlelight vigil speech, comes a lot closer to the truth — while still, unfortunately, hitting a bit wide of the mark — later in her remarks: This gender motivated crime, should inspire all of us to speak courageously about how we as a society respond to violence against women, how we can invest in more preventative efforts, early intervention strategies, and how we can develop strong sensitive men out of our boys and how we can create a world where none of our daughters need to feel afraid.

How about a world where none of our sons need to feel afraid? Could we strive for that as well, Ms. Arnet? Or, better still, how about a world where none of us feels afraid? Wouldn’t that be best of all?

What does resonate in Ms. Arnet’s remarks, however, is the call, the need, the absolute imperative to develop strong, sensitive men of our boys. As the father of two sons, as someone who obsesses often to the point of insomnia over the work he’s doing (and the mistakes he’s making) in rearing two young men, this hits especially close to home. And it seems all the more urgent when you remember that, while men are doing most of the dying, they’re doing even more of the killing.

Consider the darker side of those already sobering U.S. DOJ statistics:
  
88.8% of murders are committed by men;
11.2% are committed by women. 

Or these:

86% of violent offenders are men;
14% are women.

Men are more competitive, more aggressive, more violent, and, yes, far more murderous than women. Whether you want to blame that on testosterone, the patriarchy, the long tradition of violence in western civilization, the problem of absentee fathers, or the popularity of football, video games, and professional wrestling, I do not care. But I do care that — and, indeed, I insist that — we be honest about the problems, so that we can be honest about the solutions.

The problem with the George Sodinis and the Ronald Taylors of the world isn’t who they’re killing; it’s that they’re killing at all. And, while I wish I knew where the best solutions can be found, I’m fairly certain they will not come from overstating the threat, nor from sensationalizing the impact, of violence against one particular group. And I'm damned sure they will never come from responding to one man’s insanity with a well-meaning, but ultimately misguided, assault on reality.

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