Violent boys have been all over the news lately. Kevin Madden sentenced for first-degree murder for stabbing his 12-year-old brother 71 times in a quiet Toronto suburb. A 19-year-old in North Carolina killed his father and then randomly shot at students at a nearby high school last month. Early in September, Kimveer Gill shot 20 people at Dawson College, killing one innocent girl. A 15-year-old Wisconsin boy shot his school principal in cold blood last week. Two days before that Duane Morrison, a 53-year-old drifter, held six high school girls hostage for hours, sexually assaulting them before killing one (and then himself).
And now milk truck driver Charles Carl Roberts has shot 10 Amish girls in a one-room school house in Pennsylvania. He did the exact same thing that Morrison did he sent all the boys out of the classroom and focused his malice solely on the girls. Just like the infamous misogynist Marc Lépine did at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. And its apparent, based on the lube he was carrying and from what he told his wife, that Roberts was planning on molesting the girls (anybody surprised?).
There have been a lot of school shootings over the years. I remember coming home from school when I was 16 to see footage from Columbine on CNN, and crying. There have been a lot of shootings since then but I cant remember one single incident where the shooter was a girl. Not one. Ive looked all over the internet trying to find an example, and Ive come up empty handed. If you can name just one, just one, let me know.
When youre faced with horrific incidents like these and when the killer shoots girls, and only girls its really hard not to spend an afternoon thinking that there is something deeply, darkly twisted in the male psyche.
In an effort to do away with racial and sexual prejudice, progressive thinking people nowadays like to believe that everybody is really the same, that its just society and culture that make us different. But on days like today, its really hard to buy that.
There is no good evidence that racial differences have any real biological influence on your personality or intelligence. But the same cannot be said of gender - men and women are not the same. We arent. Not just in the shape of our bodies, but in the actual way our brains work. It would take many blog entries to go through all the differences, but this article lists a few. Suffice to say, men and women are equal, but we are not the same.
When I talk with friends about the prevalence of misogyny in our culture, I like to bring out this famous statistic: one in four women will be sexually assaulted in their lives. All my girlfriends silently nod we know from the intimate conversations we have when boys arent around that this is true. But all the guys in the room scoff and say it must be an exaggeration.
So I bring out another famous statistic. In 1990 sex researchers Randy and Nancy Thornhill asked the following question of a large number of men: If you could rape a woman, knowing with certainty that there would be no chance you would get caught and no one would ever find out, would you commit the act? In one of those surveys, 35 per cent of the men said yes. And as they say, rape is not about sex its about power, the same kind of power people who shoot innocent children are seeking.
When school shootings happen the media likes to blame video games, goth metal music, poor gun laws, and parents who just dont raise their kids right. Of course culture and society have a massive influence on what we think, feel, and do. But if you took all the video games and movies away, boys would still be more prone to violent behaviour than girls. Its that simple. Im not saying men are evil not at all. Nor am I saying girls dont ever murder or rape women can be sadistic too.
All Im saying is that theres a reason why whenever you hear about a school shooting on the news, you dont even have to look at the TV to know what the sex of the gunman is. And most of the time, you can probably guess the sex of the victims too.
