By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 17, 2025
The hunt for the political ideology driving each murder that makes the news obscures some key points.
One is that the shooter is almost always a man, even though women are equally capable of shooting, meaning that the ideology is one of masculinism.
Another is that the shooter, more often than not, shoots himself (and it may not make the news, but most often a shooter shoots only himself), which blows a rather large hole in the idea that he is working to advance some subgroup of people or some desired better world.
Another is that, to the extent that coherent thoughts are involved, every shooter shares the masculinist ideology that holds that anything good can come of shooting people — an ideology also shared with many non-shooters (including angry, violent individuals in places not saturated with guns and gun training and war veterans) and with many indirect shooters (including those ordering, funding, authorizing, and profiting from shooting or bombing Palestinian children or Venezuelan boaters, etc., and to at least a great degree those who create films glorifying shooting people and make speeches thanking each other and saying “peace”).
Gathering additional information about the thinking (or the training or conditioning or arming) of murderers is all to the good. Perhaps assassins of important people are very different from your typical suicide or murderer. But the ideology hunt is always fundamentally accomplished from the start. The shooter has, at the very least, the shooter ideology. It is an ideology as opposed to basic historical facts as climate denialism or trusting political candidates. It comes in many flavors. A shooter may believe that certain scapegoated types of people are a threat to his type of people. Or he may imagine that shooting hateful bigoted people is a brilliant way to bring us all together. He may suppose that obliterating neighborhoods in Gaza is “defensive,” or that it rids the world of lesser beings. He may fantasize that a wider war on Israel is the path to peace and harmony. He may claim to be teaching someone a lesson, or to be undoing a corrupt election. He may tell you he’s eliminating Hitler, or clearing the way for Hitler’s return. The important thing to become aware of is that, in any case, he is nuts.
The shooter is nuts. The shooter is Pharaoh, emperor of denial. Shooting a kind, loving soul harms any cause it seeks to advance. Shooting a hateful bigot or a healthcare CEO generates sympathy, real and feigned, for hateful bigots and healthcare CEOs. Attacking the “National Guard” occupiers of your city gives them an excuse to occupy your city. Sending armed troops into a city generates resentment toward those troops. Abusing Palestinians in a violent apartheid state fuels resistance. Launching rockets into Israel provides an excuse for accelerated genocide. Shooting people doesn’t actually help your ideological goals, no matter what your ideology may be. So, you may have an ideology, and it may be very clear and coherent and dear to you, but as long as you are shooting people, what matters is that you have a shooter ideology that overrides the rest of what you care about.
This analysis it not missing from the news because of its simplicity. The news loves nothing if not simplicity. It is missing from the news because the people telling you the news are required to themselves have a shooter ideology, to believe that weapons help Ukraine, to be conditioned to shout “but Hamas!” or “but Maduro!” on command. About a third of U.S. mass shooters must be praised for having trained to shoot well, must be thanked for the service of having shot at certain people, and then must be condemned for having shot at the wrong people — these are U.S. military veterans. That constraint makes it difficult to see the problem as belief in the positive effects of shooting people.
But that is the problem. The key ideological divide is between those who believe that nonviolent actions can accomplish all things better than violence, and those who believe that shooting people can be justified. Unfortunately, many of the loudest pundits on both sides of what they suppose to be the key ideological divides stand together on the wrong side of this one.
I got this short and powerful article yesterday via email, simple yet very convincing about an occurrence repeating itself very often, here in the US and the entire world, in individual forms or collective forms through wars and massacres, I believe reforwarding it through our blog could help us all better understand these phenomenon.
As always, my many thanks to all. Stay safe and well.
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