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1/ So, I went through the Washington Post's database of public mass murder shootings since 1966, and looked up details on each shooter/incident. The findings are very interesting and call for sociological inquiry, especially as to the racial makeup of the shooters...
2/ Looking only at the men (bc only 3 perps were women), of the 162 racially identifiable shooters, 101 were white (62%), 29 were black (18%), another 7% were Latino, 7% Asian, 5% "middle eastern", 1% American Indian/indigenous...here's why this is interesting...
3/ First, note, contrary to popular perception not all such shooters are white. Although whites make up nearly 80% of mass school shooters, when all such shootings are tallied, it's 62%...But this doesn't mean there isn't something interestingly white about the phenomenon...
4/ What is interesting to me is to contrast these kinds of homicides with just regular homicide data. THAT is when you begin to notice something interestingly racial going on. So, for instance, about half of all homicides in the U.S. are committed by black folks, mostly men...
5/ With whites committing around 40% in most years...and when it comes to these facts, criminologists have explanations/theories to explain the disproportionate "blackness" of homicide (correlation with economic conditions, concentrated poverty, crowded urbanicity, etc)...
6/ So far so good...hell, even racists have a theory to explain it, right? They blame black culture or black genetics. But here we have a serious disconnect when it comes to public mass murder...suddenly, the black share falls to 18% and the white share jumps to 62%...
7/ ...& yet, surely some of the same social stressors that correlate w/regular homicide also correlate w/mass public murder, which means to get a sense of whether mass public murder is significantly skewed towards white perps, we'd need 2 control 4 general homicide rates...
8/ Now, I'm not set up 2 run the regressions myself, but it stands 2 reason that if u control 4 the dispro "blackness" of overall homicide, the dispro whiteness of mass public homicide would become incredibly stark by comparison, even more so than the numbers themselves suggest..
9/ which would then beg the Q: WHY? If we have theories (some good, some bullshit) 4 why regular homicide rates are higher for black folks, isn't it interesting that no one even seems to want to ASK why when it comes to white men and mass murder? Surely there must be a reason...
10/ Is it the fact that mass public homicide is more of an attempt to assert domination/control and display grandiosity...and perhaps those are things more likely to manifest among members of more socially dominant groups? Perhaps...
11/ Is it bc members of socially dominant groups who bump up against frustrations in life are disproportionately ill-prepared to deal with setback, such that they lose their shit and have to "kill big" in order to assert some sense of power? Perhaps...
12/ Is it something about white genetics that leads to such over the top violence? Doubtful...but it's interesting, isn't it, that no one even suggests that, whereas books like the Bell Curve, which disses black genes/biology become best sellers...
13/ But my point is this: here we have an example of a disproportionately white social pathology/dysfunction -- relative to what we would expect given general homicide offending rates -- and no one seems to want to get to the bottom of it...
14/ We blame the guns or the video games or whatever, but that can't explain the racial skew. There is something going on with whiteness, that must be problematized...at the very least studied. For the sake not only of people of color, but or the safety of white folks ourselves
