BY JACKSON KATZ | Amidst the outpouring of heartache, grief, and outrage about the latest gun massacre of innocent children, this time in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, why are so few voices in mainstream American media talking about the gender issues at the heart of this and so many other similar incidents?
What is so hard about saying — out loud — that the overwhelming majority of these killings are done by boys and young men, and then going a little deeper and asking why?
Instead, since the spring of 1998, when a string of school shootings riveted the country’s attention and inaugurated this grotesque Era of School Shootings, media coverage of these events — with just a few exceptions — has followed an embarrassingly predictable and superficial script that imposes gender neutrality on a highly gendered phenomenon.
It’s remarkable how many gender-neutral terms commentators come up with to describe the perpetrators of these heinous crimes: “shooter,” “18-year-old,” “loner” “killer,” “terrorist,” “student,” “teenager,” “young person,” “armed individual.”
The one gendered term people do often use is “gunman,” a word whose very constituent parts — gun/man — offer a clue as to why gender-neutral terms are so popular on this topic. People think it’s so obvious the shooters are young men that there’s literally no point in saying so. In that sense, “gunman” is internally redundant; everyone knows that “man” follows “gun.”
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