I think in general TV is way ahead of movies on making women badass. Agree on The 100 (awesome, awesome show). Also, Walking Dead, Z Nation, Alias (someone already mentioned this) all the way back to Xena, Warrior Princess.

One of the things I really enjoy about some of the higher-level women's MMA matches is that their flexibility makes the jiu-jitsu sequences really interesting. Felice Herrig specifically comes to mind. She has had some ground sequences that were a thing of beauty.

Agreed on jiu-jitsu being the great equalizer in a fight with rules or when a trained female practitioner is attacked by an untrained male.

Two movies come to mind (okay, technically it's three):

- Kill Bill 1 & 2
- Atomic Blonde

In the Kill Bill movies she avoided the strength queetion by being a badass with a sword. But I never thought of it as a woman fighting well. I just thought of it as a great action movie. Basically, the made me forget her gender was even a factor.

Atomic Blonde's fight scenes are seriously some of the best I have ever seen and I am an action movie junkie (thank you 1980s). These are different because they are filmed in a way that shows she is the superior fighter but sometimes a guy will get a hold of her and his strength advantage will allow him to temporarily get the upper hand. She eventually gets the advantage back with more technique or pure rage. The fight scrnes tell this unspoken story that were it not for temporary biological advantage of her male opponents, she would never even have a tough fight. It essentially makes you hate Bad Guy #2 even more because you feel like he is cheating. Brilliant.

I agree with all of this.

The Los Angeles Times had a really interesting piece the other day which covered much of this (bold emphasis mine):

First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying. The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, thought disorders or suicidality.

Second, practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. They often had become angry and despondent because of a specific grievance. For workplace shooters, a change in job status was frequently the trigger. For shooters in other contexts, relationship rejection or loss often played a role. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.

Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives. People in crisis have always existed. But in the age of 24-hour rolling news and social media, there are scripts to follow that promise notoriety in death. Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them. Hence, as we have seen in the last week, mass shootings tend to come in clusters. They are socially contagious. Perpetrators study other perpetrators and model their acts after previous shootings. Many are radicalized online in their search for validation from others that their will to murder is justified.

Fourth, the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans. Once someone decides life is no longer worth living and that murdering others would be a proper revenge, only means and opportunity stand in the way of another mass shooting. Is an appropriate shooting site accessible? Can the would-be shooter obtain firearms? In 80% of school shootings, perpetrators got their weapons from family members, according to our data. Workplace shooters tended to use handguns they legally owned. Other public shooters were more likely to acquire them illegally

I think the story here is that a mass shooter is almost always years (decades) in the making. It's a perfect storm of childhood trauma, a triggering event and a final push from society's fascination with mass shootings. Is alt-right radicalization and/or misogyny sometimes a factor? Sure, insomuch is that a man might be sexist and lose a promotion to a woman or a teen might get a final nudge from a certain website...but. You and Phillip are so intent on blaming mass shootings on those final two things. It's like blaming the Challenger explosion on going 'throttle up'. That was just the final thing that happened in a long chain of events. Again, I think it says more about you wanting to add more confirmation onto your theories as to what is wrong with America broadly and this is a convenient example.

Agreed on all of the above.

I absolutely understand the impulse people have to make sense of things, I just think that ascribing it to anything other than abuse, sociopathy, bullying, ideation, ideology, and lots of ignored warning signs is more about advancing their own political interests than actually looking honestly at the problem.

Well I could not disagree with my friend Phillip more on this topic. Perhaps he has some kind of psychic insight that I do not possess but in 44 years of spending most of my time with white men, I just don't see any of that. But...I also haven't had the training to detect it that one gets on the Left. In much the same way that I see liberal paternalism and elitism, I guess we all have our biases.

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

If the GOP ran a credible challenger to Trump I would have a tough decision to make. I want to weigh in on the Democratic nominee, but I love the idea of denying him the nomination. Of course, I also like the idea of discovering bigfoot, so yeah, I dream big.

Terminology matter. I have no problem saying, "Middle class white men have poor coping mechanisms and a very, very, very tiny % of them engage in mass killings in fits of impotent rage."

What I don't subscribe to is saying, "White men are angry over losing their supremacy in the world which and they are expressing this in mass shootings."

These are subtle differences that mean a lot.

Someone watched Death Wish too many times...

Chip - you were starting to actually make sense - but here we are again (and granted, Oscar tee'd you up so it's not entirely your fault).

Here's the deal...lots of white supremacists never engage in mass shootings. Lots of mass shooters aren't white supremacists. But yet, you're trying to correlate the two. The reason mass shootings are increasing is because we have a lot of American males that have no identity, no sense of self, no ability to cope with a changing society or life's disappointments, etc and they decide to kill themselves, some of them in very spectacular ways. It's really that simple.

Per Mother Jones, these were the number of mass shootings under our last three presidents. These numbers are growing exponentially, not because of resurgence white supremacy but because the flaws of our youngest generations are starting to surface.

Bush.......15
Obama....37
Trump......30

"People do underestimate how many suicide attempts are rash actions, not highly planned or even thought through situations."

You're exactly right - so maybe it is more like a crime of passion than a pre-mediated terrorist attack.

Well yeah, in general we don't want junior to be a white supremacist or join the He-Man Woman Hater's Club. But my point is that if these ideologies aren't actually telling people to martyr themselves for the cause, and we know suicide is the ultimate goal for most mass shooters, then why are we so sure that white supremacy and misogyny are the reasons for these shootings?

What's the old saying about the last thought that goes through a suicide jumper's head before they hit the pavement? My dad's suicide was an impulsive act, fueled by alcohol. I have no doubt that if he had slept it off he would have felt different in the morning.

That is kind of my analysis. They promote violence but not martyrdom (or even killing?) I mean, Antifa is pretty violent, but I don't think they actually want to kill people. I mean, even the Klan sort of gave that up a long time ago.

So if killing and/or martyrdom is not actually part of the ideology but someone who is already troubled warps it into a justification...it still feels a bit like barking up the wrong tree to put so much focus on white supremacy and misogyny. I still come back to trying to figure out how to re-integrate these people into society and wrap our arms around them.

I guess my question is whether those sites/ideologies are pushing suicide attacks as a methodology to achieving their goals. I mean, we know parts of Islam does. We know that Japan did during WWII. Are we seeing that with white supremacist groups or do they find themselves scratching their heads as much as we are when someone decides to die for the cause?

But I have friends that would probably at least make the initial invite list and some of them drink too much. It seems like it would have come up around the campfire at some point.

Exactly - that is ridiculous. We should probably be keeping a close eye on McCracken County HS.

So then what factors play a role in someone being more like 90%? And how do we mitigate them?

That's actually really good to hear.

I know I have told this story here before but it is worth repeating. The prep school I went to had just under 2,000 kids when I was there in the early 90s. I was just an average guy. I had friends, dabbled in sports, got okay grades, mostly just kept my head down. It was SO EASY to get lost in the crowd and I kind of preferred that because I was never going to be the cool kid, so the only direction that would have gained me attention was down the social ladder. For the kids at the bottom, bullying could be pretty bad, at least for the first couple of years (kids mostly outgrew that by Junior year).

A few years after I left they started a house system which breaks up the student population into 10 houses, all named for Catholic thinkers and theologians. The houses all send reps to the student government so it grew in size from about 10 kids to over 70 now. They do intramural activities, mentoring, etc. It's awesome. One story I heard was of a meek little freshman kid who had his books knocked out of his hands by a senior. Another senior, captain of the football team, saw the incident and slammed the senior into a wall and told him to pick the books up, apologize and never mess with him again. You see, the little freshman was in his house and they take care of each other. The person telling us this story, also an alumni, said, "That freshman's experience here will be radically different than it was for us because he knows someone has his back." There are other stories I could tell about my introverted nephew becoming an extrovert because of the house system. It truly changes lives.

Anyway, all of that is to say your point is 100% valid.

"...the ideology is often why they chose that path to suicide."

Is it though? I don't know that I agree with that. I suspect most of these shooters were already heading down that path, or at least the path to something bad happening, long before. Or the two things might happen in parallel and then they converge due to some kind of trigger.

I basically agree with your second paragraph.

I've already explained that Chip. Minorities probably have much better coping mechanisms. It's really that simple.

I think that a lot of mass shootings could rightly be considered crimes of passion, even if there was pre-meditation. The impulse to assume it is part of an ideology is (I think) a coping mechanism people use to deal with their inability to explain what happened. Just look how frustrated people have been about the Las Vegas shooter because still no one really knows his motivations.

Another thing I was thinking about with regards to ideologically-motivated attacks... The US doesn't really have any history of suicide attacks to advance ideologies. Even Timothy McVeigh left the scene before the OKC bomb went off. It's just not what we do. But most of these mass shootings are planned as suicides. That, again, should demonstrate that their ideology is a secondary motivation at best or it isn't even a factor. We really need to start thinking of these in those terms if we're going to start coming up with solutions. Otherwise, yeah, we'll always be talking about ancillary issues like guns.