‘Toxic masculinity’ may be a factor in mass shootings

As the toll from mass shootings this year already approaches the total for all of last year, more people are openly asking a question that has lurked mostly in the shadows: Why are the shooters so often white men?

“Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun,” declared President Donald Trump when he condemned shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which left at least 31 people dead and dozens wounded.

I wish it were that simple. The president was right about hatred, but as psychiatrists and social scientists look for factors that might help us to predict mass violence, they find it’s not mental illness as often as it’s just men, overwhelmingly white men.

Sure, there have been infamous exceptions, such as the 30-year-old woman who shot and killed one boy and wounded five other children in a Winnetka elementary school in 1988 before shooting a man and then killing herself.

Or there was the D.C. sniper case, in which two African American men, ages 41 and 17, terrorized the Washington metropolitan area in 2002, killing 17 people and wounding 10 others in a nationwide killing spree.

Well minds, in my nonmedical opinion, do not commit such horrible acts.

But a deeper dive into statistics finds serious mental illness to be conclusively present in only a small minority of mass shootings, according to various studies using different standards for what constitutes a mental health problem. But demographically, a database kept by the AP/USA Today/Northeastern University shows 51.1% of mass shootings are committed by young, white men. Blacks committed 28.4% and Hispanics 10.2%.

The median age of a public mass shooter is 28 — significantly lower than the median age of a person who commits a mass shooting of his or her family, according to the database.

Since 2006, 12 mass shootings have been committed by gunmen 21 or younger, including the 21-year-old suspected gunman in El Paso.

One reason may be “triple privilege,” as it is called in a 2014 paper that has attracted new interest after the recent mass attacks. Published by Eric Madfis of the University of Washington at Tacoma in the journal “Men and Masculinities,” Madfis concluded mass killers tend to share elements of white entitlement and heterosexual masculinity pressured by anxieties about middle-class instability and downward economic mobility.

“Women tend to internalize blame and frustration, while men tend to externalize it through acts of aggression,” Madfis, who is an associate professor at the university’s criminal justice department, told Politico.

Madfis describes symptoms that feminists have labeled “toxic masculinity.” Testosterone often catches the blame, but researchers have found that high testosterone might be more of a symptom than a cause of violent behavior.

Societal influences probably play a larger role, including messages from media, sports, the military, the workplace and our educational system that may link masculinity to expressions of aggression by men. But research and everyday experience also suggests societal influences play a larger role than biology; otherwise, there would be many more of us shooting innocent people.

In the end, contrary to Trump’s observation, whether it is hatred, mental illness or confused lessons about the meaning of manhood, we need to find ways to prevent that trigger from being pulled.