Trump informed to the White House reporters that the violence was the result of a mental thing, that background checks wouldn’t do anything to decrease gun violence and that the shooter was merely another sick person. His statement came after the Odessa, Texas shooter’s killing spree that left 7 dead and at least 22 injured on Saturday. A toddler was also shot in the face in that incident. Trump added, “I paused momentarily to consider those comments.
Is it possible that Americans are suffering from a special form of mental illness, unique to this country that leads its sufferers to buy military-grade assault rifles and proceed to shoot as many people as possible everywhere from kindergartens to movie theatres to highways? Can we factually and scientifically attribute mass violence to mental illness or True Evil, whatever that maybe? Or is it something more unexceptional than either of those two options? Holocaust survivors know the answer”.
The mental health is a historical cop-out, so the president and his acolytes can’t plead insanity over the raging gun violence in America anymore. The Odessa killer and others before him had a toxic masculinity problem and easy access to guns. It is a situation unique to this country when compared to its counterparts in the developed world. The Good Men Project describes toxic masculinity as manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression, the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness.
It was also said the sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly feminine traits, which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual. The Project also says a well-known example of a man with toxic masculinity problems is the president of the United States. Trump’s history of misogynistic comments and his deliberately emasculating comments about men who oppose or disagree with him is a prime example of toxic masculinity.