I feel like we’ve been here before. We are now facing yet another shooting that is now renewing the debate over gun control and treatment of mental illness. But this most recent shooting in Isla Vista, California by Elliot Rodgers, in which he killed 7 people and wounded many others during his rampage, is the result of more than Rodger’s ability to get a gun and his mental instability.

It is the result of our culture: a culture of entitlement, stigma over gender roles, and misogyny.

Before he began his rampage, Rodgers had written a journal documenting his hatred of popular kids with better lives than him (because girls were attracted to them and not him), couples, and the women who were never interested in him. He outlined his plan to kill the people that he hated. Then immediately before he went on his rampage, he uploaded a video to YouTube called “Retribution,” in which he expressed his hatred for those people yet again and how he would take “take great pleasure in slaughtering” all of them.

All of this because he was 22 years old and never kissed a girl. He believed he was the nice guy and that girls were the problem and deserved to die because they turned him down. He believed that women were simply objects of affection and desire, not actual people that, you know, can make their own choices about who they date and what they do with their bodies and their life.

But this mindset isn’t anything new. No, it doesn’t usually lead to violence of this caliber, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. This can be seen in the fact that, after his deadly rampage rooted in these twisted beliefs, he was being called a hero on Facebook pages and websites dedicated to hatred of women who won’t give the members of said websites what they want. It can be seen in the backlash to the #YesAllWomen hashtag that began trending on Twitter (to show how all women have feared and/or experienced some sort of sexual harassment, even if “not all men are like that”) as a reaction to the shooting.

Yes, this new addition to the list of shootings is about more than the usual issues. The root of the reason this happened lies in the still widespread culture of misogynist entitlement. No, not all men have this mindset, and of those who do, not all of them would resort to a “day of retribution” as Rodgers did, but this problem still needs attention because even though it isn’t all men, just one man willing to go to such lengths should be enough.

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/26/opinion/powell-manhood-rodgers-shooting/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/24/us/elliot-rodger-video-transcript/index.html?iid=article_sidebar

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/26/us/yesallwomen-tweets/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/living/california-killer-hashtag-yesallwomen/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/opinion/lindin-misogyny-rodger-killings/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7