Another week, another mass shooting. Time and time again, partisans wait to haul out another gun control argument or demographic blame. At this point, we know we have an epidemic, and as we’ve seen with the Parkland, Santa Fe, and Sutherland Springs shootings, there are almost always glaring, social red flags that indicated that the perpetrator was deeply troubled long before their massacres.
The Thousand Oaks shooting was no different. When the media first reported on the bloodbath, which killed 12 people, including a police officer, one of the first pieces of information publicized was that the killer — who I will not give the dignity or respect of naming — was an ex-Marine who suffered from PTSD. However, his problems clearly predated his service.
The shooter allegedly sexually assaulted his high school track coach, who told CBS Los Angeles that he was visibly disturbed in high school, and “the administration knew it.”
Mass shooters are almost always young to middle-aged men. While many aspects of their crime vary, from targets to style of weapon, one thing has emerged as a clear and consistent trend: mass shooters begin their violence on the women around them.
From the radical Islamist who shot up Pulse nightclub to the left-wing terrorist who attempted to kill a field of Republican congressmen, the overwhelming majority of mass shooters have a prior history of domestic violence or sexual assault and harassment. The issue of violence against women isn’t one of simple criminality, justice, or even basic human rights. It’s fueling our systemic epidemic of mass shootings.
Nearly half of all women killed in the United States are killed by an intimate partner. Domestic violence tends to escalate unless medical or legal authorities take over. Similarly, perpetrators of sexual assault tend to become repeat offenders, even if the specific data is hard to aggregate.
Tackling violent men before they graduate from abusing the women around them to killing strangers needs to become a social priority. In too many of these cases, bystanders and especially women have warned that these bad men are, in fact, bad. Until we being to take the symptoms of mass shooters seriously and realize that violence against women is one of political consequence with the cost of human life, we won’t stop the source of shootings.
