Guns Don't Kill People, Misogyny Kills People

Everyone is talking about Elliot Rodgers and the shooting at UCSB so I might as well throw in my 2 cents. It was a tragedy and my heart goes out to all the grieving families and those innocent lives lost. I don’t think Elliot Rodgers was an innocent life.

People are using this as a platform for gun control and mental illness but that’s not the core of this issue. From what I’ve seen, Elliot Rodgers was a sociopath who was the ultimate ‘Nice Guy.’ ‘Nice Guys’ are the guys who see women as NPC characters in the story of them. If they are decent to the woman they desire, she is supposed to be theirs. Her own agency as a person is not a concern

Elliot felt entitled to beautiful women. His father worked on The Hunger Games and Elliot drove a BMW so I doubt there was anything he was ever really denied in life. It never dawned on him that he might have a crappy personality, that women reserve the right to say no, or that he’s not entitled to another human being. Rather than face rejection like an adult or admit he might be part of the problem, he used it to fuel a disturbingly misogynistic ideology.

The part that is terrifying is that there are plenty of people who sympathize with this sociopath! They’re saying things like how women are stuck up sluts, how giving it up can save lives, and how this is the fault of blondes, not mental illness or guns. Men’s Rights movements and a plethora of on-line chat boards are backing this up.

This is sick, disturbing, and shows that feminism still has a lot of work left to do. How many of you would want your daughter, sister, or girlfriend spoken to like this? How many deserve to die for rejecting someone they don’t desire?

If someone had slapped Elliot Rodgers with a dose of reality, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Having money doesn’t entitle you to a woman. Being male doesn’t entitle you to a woman. Nothing entitles you to another human being. The more men learn this, the better our world will be.

Film at 11 3/3

In part three of my thoughts on the Sandy Hook massacre, I take on the media. It’s a popular scapegoat and fuel for the fire. 

‘Movies and video games made me violent’ is one of the most pathetic excuses for committing a crime I’ve ever heard. It’s like blaming McDonald’s for making you fat. Unless someone pulled a Se7en and made you stuff your face, it’s your own damn fault. No character from Grand Theft Auto jumped out of the game and made you shoot the owner of the 7-11 you robbed.

TV, movies, and video games are not directly responsible for violent crimes or violent people. The culture surrounding them, however, is questionable.

Did you know in order for a movie to have a PG-13 rating, it cannot show realistic depictions of gunshot wounds? If you want to show an accurate amount of blood, guts, and gore, it’s an automatic R rating. I think that is an astonishingly backwards system. It desensitizes kids to violence and its consequences. 

Another fun fact about the movies is that the number of thrusts in a sex scene in some sappy love story will contribute to the NC-17 versus R rating. And oral sex on a woman? No matter how romantic, it’s not appropriate for a wide audience. Seppuku in a murder for morality tale is less likely to get you an NC-17 than a realistic sex scene in a love story. That’s fucked up.

What is a more natural part of being human? Killing for sport or two people consummating their love? According to a board of censors, sex is more damaging to teenagers probably already having it than shooting ‘em up.

I’m not a gamer but if I picked the top 10 selling games of 2012, how many require violence to play? How many have more violence than story? How many parents ignore the ratings on the games? How many clerks selling them? Video games are an international pastime that consume hundreds of hours of people’s lives. If you see and do something often virtually, how long until it has an impact on you actually?

Violence is becoming a primary form of entertainment in this country. How many gun massacres happened in the age of musicals? Michael Moore said that in his movie Roger & Me he showed a man getting shot and a woman killing and skinning a rabbit. People reacted more strongly to the death of the rabbit. 

I watched this movie for a film class and realized he was absolutely right. No one, myself included, so much as blinked when the man got shot. It was nothing we hadn’t seen a hundred times over somewhere else. Watching the skinning of the rabbit, the whole class moaned, groaned, and flinched. It was not something we saw too much of. Again, what’s a more natural part of being human? Killing and skinning game or shooting another person?

The news media is no better. A quote erroneously attributed to Morgan Freeman says that people need to remember the names of the instead of the killer. If the media stopped treating these shooters as pseudo-celebrities, maybe we’d get luck and the next one will just off himself rather than taking a dozen people with him. I don’t know who said it originally, but it’s a great point.

Most people can name the Aurora movie theater shooter but how many people can name his victims? The shooter’s name was all over news broadcast for weeks but how many times in those stories did you actually hear the victim’s names? Without Google, how many victims from Aurora, Sandy Hook, and/or Virginia Tech can you name? I couldn’t get out of single digits.

How many of these sick bastards wanted their 15 minutes? What would happen if shooters like this stopped being household names? These men are not rock stars. They are mass murderers. Their names do not deserve public remembrance. The media and the people need to stop giving it to them. It may not solve everything but it will certainly stop a few people.

Creating a culture of violence happens when small things add up to big things. We can’t undo it all at once but small changes can hopefully lead to big changes. I’m starting be refusing to remember the name of the man who slaughtered children. Instead, I’m going to remember Victoria Soto. I wish more people were like her.

Current Jams: Dirty Laundry by Lisa Presley