The Angry White Male and Domestic Violence Gone Amuk

The Angry White Male and Domestic Violence Gone Amuk November 7, 2017

Our society idolizes the angry, white male. We heap praise on him, make TV shows and movies about him, turn him into a mega-star pastor celebrity, elect him to the highest offices in the land.


angry white male with assault weaponFound at the scene: “hundreds of shell casings and more than fifteen 30-round magazines (source: Wall Street Journal). Besides the bloodied and dead bodies, the white, angry, male shooter left that evidence behind.

After all, the gun rights people say, “We have every right to carry rapid-fire assault-style weapons to protect ourselves.”

I hear the thoughts of US Air Force clerk whose job it was to report Devin Patrick Kelley’s court-martial conviction to the FBI, “If I make this report, this poor white angry male won’t be able to purchase guns ever again. C’mon, he was only convicted of beating his wife and cracking his baby’s skull. Simple, forgivable domestic violence. And he didn’t use guns against them. Why should he be punished for the rest of his life?”

After all, the gun rights people say, “We have every right to carry rapid-fire assault-style weapons to protect ourselves.”

And why shouldn’t Steven Paddock have collected 23 guns, several modified to fire like automatic weapons? He’s a smart, successful high-stakes gambler, angry white guy. Yeah, a few people, just 54, were killed and only 500 injured. Just the cost of doing business. Besides, all our angry white men deserve their little hobbies.

Hey, you who protest that maybe he owned too many guns. The is essential second amendment stuff. Lots of men own too many cars. Lots of women own too many shoes. We’re not going after them, are we?

After all, the gun rights people say, “We have every right to carry rapid-fire assault-style weapons to protect ourselves.”

And then there is the sick, angry white man-child, Adam Lanza, who, though not of legal age, managed to stockpile just a few semi-automatic little playthings. Yeah, he took out 20 young school kids and a few adults, oh, and his mother, in his minor little break with reality. But let us indeed remove whatever few laws we did have about restricting gun sales to the severely mentally ill.

After all, the gun rights people say, “We have every right to carry rapid-fire assault-style weapons to protect ourselves.”

Now, that I have vented for a moment, let’s return to what happened on Sunday, Nov. 5, 2017, in the First Baptist Church, Sutherland, Texas. This angry white male, known to be an animal-torturer, wife-and-child-beater, goes to the church where his former wife’s parents occasionally attend.

One can only assume that Kelley was going to find another way to get back at his wife by slaughtering her parents. This is a case of domestic violence gone amuck.

This textbook case illustrates why those who convicted of domestic violence charge are never, ever supposed to be able to purchase a gun.

(Angry, white) men who hurt women and children have a real problem. Call them sick if you want, but that’s letting them off the hook. “Sick” means some sense of victimhood. Poor things. They can’t stop themselves.

That’s a pile of horse hockey. They can stop. But they get their jollies by beating up people weaker than they.

Do you know when women in violent marriages are most likely to be killed? When they decided to leave. Yep, when they finally say, “I will no longer put up with this. You will never again beat me up, rape me, torture me, isolate me, scream at and berate me, or hurt my child.”

That’s when the guns come out. That’s when the killings start.

After all, the gun rights people say, “We have every right to carry rapid-fire assault-style weapons to protect ourselves.”

(Angry, white) men like this are often, and I say this with deep grief and informed by personal experience, encouraged by their various (angry, white, male) pastors who say, “It’s your job to make her submit to you. Do what you have to do. Our (angry, white, male) God is on your side.”

Do we have a gun problem in the US? Of course, we do. But we’ve also got something deeper. We’ve got an anger problem here. And that anger problem is exacerbated by the overwhelming presence of firearms. It’s further exacerbated by an increasing lack of reasoning power and personal restraint by a proper exercise in holy self-control.

We are a free-wheeling society. When people from other, more restrained, countries visit here, they are often shocked by lack of constraints on what is considered proper public behavior. We are also a society that genuinely does tend to idolize the angry, white male. We heap praise on them, make TV shows and movies about them, elect them to the highest offices in the land, make gods of them.

We like them. We don’t care about the trail of destruction behind them.  And we continue to do as little as possible to restrict their access to weapons.

After all, the gun rights people say, “We have every right to carry rapid-fire assault-style weapons to protect ourselves.”

But maybe we’re protecting ourselves from the wrong people.


Photo credit: enigmabadger via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-SA



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