“Cultural change is hard,” President Trump said from the White House after a weekend of shooting rampages. “But each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life.”
This call for cultural change struck media critics as a dodge, a cop-out to avoid doing something about gun violence. But maybe cultural change, rather than a legislative limit on guns, is the only way to actually “do something.”
Video games also came in for some of Trump’s blame. While Trump’s specific argument, that violent video games beget real-world violence, is flawed, a sincere and thorough story of the cultural sickness behind mass shootings would brush up against video games.
Writing on mass shooters, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein noted, “Many of the killers are lone wolf losers indoctrinated to hate through the internet, just like Islamic terrorists.”
The media didn’t like this term. “There are no lone wolves,” the Washington Post headline declared. “No Terrorist is a ‘Lone Wolf’” FiveThirtyEight asserted. “El Paso shooter wasn’t a ‘lone wolf’” the headline at NBC News stated, “and his so-called online ‘manifesto’ proves why.”
The “no lone wolf” pieces all made the same point: Lone wolf terrorists tend to be plugged into some sort of “extremist community,” as FiveThirtyEight put it. For the most part, these “communities” are virtual rather than physically proximate. And that matters. Consistently, they are organized around ideology rather than spiritual bonds or day-to-day human needs. They are not real “communities” at all.
If we look at what most of us would consider “community,” these mass shooters tend to lack it. As FiveThirtyEight reports, 40% of domestic terrorists “were unemployed at the time of their attack; 50 percent were single and had never married; 54 percent were described as angry by family members and people who knew them in real life.”
Look at some of the recent cases, and this alienation shines through.
“No affiliation. No religion. No politics. He never cared about any of that stuff,” the brother of the Las Vegas shooter said just after the massacre. The brother thought he was ruling out potential explanations for the shooting. Maybe those facts are part of the explanation. The shooter didn’t belong to anything.
The Sandy Hook shooter wrote to a fellow video gamer once, “I incessantly have nothing other than scorn for humanity. I have been desperate to feel anything positive for someone for my entire life.”
It is not fitting for man to be alone. Man is a political animal. Humans are meant to be in tribes. Most of us belong to many things: a collegial workplace, a university, a neighborhood, a swim club, a parish, congregation, or mosque. We aren’t fully ourselves if we’re not immersed in such an institution along with other people. Such communities provide us with a human-level safety net and a purpose.
Those who don’t belong to something already seek something out. These days, they’re likely to seek it out through search engines and then message boards.
We’ve observed for decades that young men join gangs and organizations such as al Qaeda in search of belonging. Today’s alienated young men may be following an even grimmer path.
The San Bernardino shooter was a Muslim, but he was basically unknown to his local imam. He had apparently been radicalized by groups or individuals halfway around the world.
Growing social isolation and advancing technology means that flesh-and-blood, physically proximate communities are replaced by virtual communities for many people. Many of those communities are wonderful and harmless; others are 8chan, ISIS, or Stormfront.
Millennials are the loneliest generation, according to a new study, and 22% of them say they have no close friends. This brings us back to video games. No, violent video games probably don’t cause real violence. But more kids playing more video games is both a cause and effect of social isolation and alienation.
Of course, video games are only one such indicator. White nationalism or white supremacy is another. Young men who don’t go to church, don’t live in a tight-knit community, don’t go to college, and aren’t married seek out an identity. The easiest, most superficial thing to grab onto is one’s race, and there are enough fables out there telling them that white men are the real oppressed victim in society today.
A very small slice of those angry racists turn to mass violence.
One more indicator of alienation is the growing embrace of socialism among the young. People need a safety net. Parents need support. Community and extended family can provide this for people. When community and extended family are scarce, people are more likely to turn to government. When they feel deeply alienated, they are more likely to demand a total revolution to remake society.
The El Paso shooter was a white supremacist. The Dayton shooter was a leftist calling for a revolution.
How do we make fewer of these shooters? We reduce alienation. And that will take cultural change, which will not be easy, and which will not come from Washington.
