Every Entitled White Rural Farm Kid Is Trained to Be a Mass Shooter

Human life doesn’t matter in the United States, and it never has

The author building a snowman

I remember playing “guns” with my cousins on sprawling farm land littered with dilapidated structures. We’d duck inside crumbling buildings to use them as cover as we switched between the roles of stalker and stalked.

Back then you could purchase realistic-looking guns at the dime store. Derrick had two Berettas that worked on a string of caps you fed through a Y-shaped clip. I had a replica .38 and the caps came in the form of a plastic circle. This added realism because we had to stop and reload, even if my .38 had 10 shots and the Beretta had 30.

Derrick lent me his rifle since it required two hands to operate. He preferred his dual pistols. The rifle was silver with a lever action. It had an air mechanism that made a loud popping sound, so there was no need for caps. All it lacked was the smell of smoke.

But I had that from my .38 which I considered my backup.

We carried military satchels for our caps, along with an assortment of knives and maybe a few candy bars in case all the killing made us hungry. The buildings smelled of wet hay and manure. Weathered boards hung from rusty nails and there was always the risk of snagging your clothing or skin on the ragged metal. Many times I looked at a torn finger and saw the stain of orange next to the blood which meant I was going to need a Tetanus shot.

Every time I go into the house of rich people and they proudly show me their antique furniture made of weathered boards, I recall indulging in a childhood murder fantasy.

“These are genuine boards from a genuine farm, do you know what that means?”

“I do. I grew up on a farm like that.”

“Then I bet these boards must bring back some memories.”

“Yes, but I’m guessing it’s not what you think.”

Moving on to paintball

The men of my extended family got into paintball early. We had primitive guns that you had to cock by pushing a lever with the palm of your hand. I was so small when we started to play that I could barely carry the guns. It took all my strength, and even then I could barely work the mechanism to prepare for the next shot.

I had to demonstrate I could do this to all the leering uncles before they let me in the game, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play.

“You don’t want to go out there and only have one shot.”

“One shot is all I need,” I said bravely. That got a chuckle, but fortunately I was able to work the mechanism so they couldn’t deny me.

These guns were so bad that half the time the paintball would blow up in the barrel. The balls also had a seam that made them fly randomly.

When you were hit, the impact delivered enough force to knock you down. Actually, I could have withstood it, but I found that falling absorbed the impact and lessened the sting. After playing paintball, I was covered with quarter sized welts.

After one weekend of paintball, I had a doctor appointment. The doctor looked at the bruises all over my body with concern. “What are these from?”

“My daddy beats me with a chain,” I said with a laugh. That was the kind of comment that passed as humor when I was growing up.

The doctor looked at my dad, my dad laughed nervously and explained that we had been playing paintball. All of this was duly noted in the report. On the drive home, I was lectured about making the kind of jokes that could lead to a police inquiry. I felt really bad about my mistake, but no police officer ever came to talk to us.

Then came deer hunting

When we got old enough to hunt, our uncles and cousins met up at the hunting shack. Hunting was sprinting through the woods following my dad. It was like dressing up to play guns. I had a military belt that went over my blaze orange windbreaker. I hung an extra clip and a Buck knife from this belt.

Derrick was the first to kill a buck, and I remember watching him gut the animal.

“You have to take off your coat.”

“But it’s cold.”

“The heat of the animal will warm you up, gutting a deer is hot work.”

“But, aren’t we supposed to wear blaze orange in the woods during hunting season?”

“It’s okay, you’re surrounded by blaze orange.”

It was true, all the uncles and cousins were there to watch like this was some primitive celebration of manhood.

Derrick straddled the deer and stabbed it with his hunting knife. When the body opened, you could see the heat rising out of the center. Soon Derrick was sweating and his hands were covered in sticky blood. He pulled a part out of the center of the animal, looked at it, and said, “That’s made weird.”

I didn’t feel sick. I don’t know what I felt.

I lost my interest in deer hunting in that moment. I didn’t want to do that to the body of an animal. It wasn’t so much the act itself, it was the congratulatory attitude. It didn’t seem an appropriate moment to be making jokes. I felt the need for some reverence. It seemed to me that we were in the presence of death and everyone could have shown a little respect.

Human sacrifice at church

The only place we ever showed anything approaching respect was at church. I remember walking in past a statue of a man being tormented to death, pain in his eyes, blood trickling down his body. I remember thinking the dead eyes of the statue looked a lot like the dead eyes of the deer.

I understood the statue better after going deer hunting, but not in the way that was intended.

The idea that human sacrifice is something to be revered turned my stomach. I looked at my uncles and cousins and knew that every one of them could shoot an animal and cut it up like a butcher leaving a neat little pile of entrails in the forest.

In my walks I often found gut piles in various stages of decay. It seemed like such a waste, all that complexity rendered useless. Animals would pick at it.

American society is built on the concept that human sacrifice is necessary, human sacrifice is noble, human sacrifice turns men into gods.

Mass shooters

We know that most mass shooters are most often white. They’re the type of person who is fascinated by the thought of owning a military grade weapon. I wonder if all of them played guns and paintball and killed deer and went to church.

These are the type of people who revere authority, they worship “the father,” they love the concept of military discipline, and they know exactly who they’re supposed to hate.

I began to divert from this path after the gutting. Something twisted inside me and I found myself facing a new direction. Still, I took more steps in the direction of madness than I’d care to admit.

The perception of others in distant places

Once, in Australia, some friends and I were touring an amusement park and there was a shooting game. A corner of the room was set up with targets in the form of various animals.

I was the only American. The Australians were city kids, and they couldn’t hit anything. I tried to show one of them how to use the sights, and he snapped at me. “Hey, if you think you can do better, then go ahead.”

He pushed the rifle at me.

I took it, aimed, and systematically shot every target in the game. It seemed to me it was absurdly easy. I turned to hand the gun back, “You see…” I began, but I noticed everyone was looking at me. They weren’t impressed. In fact, they seemed nervous at how easily I could pick up a random weapon and “kill” everything that was put in front of me.

“I gave up hunting a long time ago,” I said.

“But you still know how to do it,” said one of the two girls in our group.

At the time, I thought they were being silly. It was just targets. It was harmless. I was just harmlessly practicing going into a room and killing everything that I found. Didn’t they understand? Sacrifice is necessary in life. I was making gods of those things! Maybe one day they’d grow up and appreciate what I could do…

Frustrated, entitled, American men

Our country makes heroes out of murderers, rapists, liars, insurrectionists, and enslavers. We revere ignorance. We worship at the altar of obedience. We’re filled with promises of our own manifest destiny, and when those dreams fail to become reality, we learn a twisted reflection of accountability that comes in the form of self-loathing.

The United States of America is the only country in the world that has to deal with terrorist mass shooters. The murder of children is normalized, just like racism, just like misogyny, just like the exploitation of labor, just like a million other forms of uniquely American abuse.

What are these men thinking when they pick up a rifle and decide to murder innocent children? What do they think they will achieve? Is it an expression of desperate frustration? Are they trying to get the attention of the patriarchal deity they’ve been trained to revere?

They know they have no escape from their awful job.

They know they’ll never be able to retire.

They know they’ll never be able to afford a house.

They know that nobody will ever love them.

They know the price of healthcare will take everything from them.

These are the lurking fears that churn beneath the bland expressions of every American as they stand up reverently to pay their respects to the flag. We all live in a constant state of terror, everyone, that is, but the small percentage at the top that feels entitled to take everything from us.

Nobody’s ever cared about mass murder before…

Mass shootings represent the culmination of the fundamental American delusion, and it feels like it’s getting worse instead of better.

More and more people are succumbing to this, and it’s not working. We keep getting caught up in doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Stand for the anthem, pledge to the flag, work, drink, divorce, get sick, be miserable, and die.

Rather than lash out at the belief system that’s to blame for their existential torment, they attack the innocent just as they’ve been trained. Rather than reject the toxic mindset that brought them to ruin, they insist on stubbornly walking the path of futility right up to the inevitable, eternal, inescapable consequence.

In some depraved inversion of logic, these frustrated, entitled American men come to think that their only chance of hope can be found in murdering people. They never even consider embracing ideas like raising minimum wage, implementing universal healthcare, implementing universal education, or making any kind of progressive change in our society. All of these are concepts that they’ve been trained since childhood to denounce.

The way out of this is so painfully obvious, but neither our politicians nor our media nor our parents nor our pastors ever bother to speak this truth!

The elite don’t care if the innocent die, they never have!

Are these entitled shooters trying to gain the attention of the all-powerful patriarch by indulging in a display of mass cruelty? Are these acts of terrorism emblematic of all that America conditions us to revere? Do the murderers secretly hope that by performing these atrocities, they’ll bring about change?

Can’t they see it’s not working? Can’t they see that the billionaires who pull the strings and who orchestrate a destiny of inescapable misery until death do not so much as flinch at the loss of innocent lives? Haven’t there been enough mass shootings to prove that?

These events are just a more clear and obvious representation of everything America has always been.

Please, don’t shoot your neighbors

Can’t the frustrated, entitled men of this country yet see the futility of the lies they’ve been promised? The toxic path of mockery and murder is not the way.

The saddest part of all of this is that I feel we have a better chance in appealing to the psychotic shooters of tomorrow than we do in pleading with the all-powerful patriarchs to ease up on their commitment to cruelty.

This represents another case of repeating the same action and expecting a different result. Look at history! The powerful are not going to stop until they’ve squeezed the last drop of blood from the last stone.

I have an appeal for the future shooters, please, put aside your guns. That powerful people let you have them should indicate their possession is not in your best interest.

Those that share your struggle are your allies. You don’t make gods out of your neighbors through sacrifice. You’ve been deceived.

American mass shooters are a symptom of an underlying disease. We need to turn our attention to the complacent patriarchs who refuse to do anything about this mad, broken, exploitative system that brings them so much ease and profit at the expense of their fellow human beings.

They’ve never cared about human life before, why should mass shootings change their minds?

Our ability to endure daily mass murder proves our culture is irretrievably broken.