I realize that many of you are so tired of me right now that you'd rather I kept away from this folder for a while. Unfortunately, I feel the need to comment on the fact that yesterday there was a school massacre in Winnenden, Germany, and 8 out of the 9 students who were shot were girls.

Is this fact going to be discussed? Are Germany and others willing to see this attack as a product of misogyny? The first reports talked about how the young killer shot 'indiscriminately'. Well, he can hardly have done that, if 8 out of 9 of the students he shot were girls.

I think misogyny is as hidden in our society as it is pervasive. It is like the air we breathe. It is everywhere, but it is as normal and hard to see as the air that surrounds us.

If 8 out of 9 of the students who were killed had been immigrants, or if they had been, say, Arabs, Jews or Africans, there would have been no way that this fact wouldn't have been discussed. Racism would have become a hot topic in schools everywhere. What can be done to combat racism? How can we prevent racism to poison youngsters and turn them into killing machines?

But in this case, most of the victims were girls, even though the number of male and female students in the classrooms was about the same. Is that going to be seen as significant? Is it going to make people discuss the sexism of our societies and the violence against women? Is it going to prompt schools to talk about the responsibility of everybody, including males, to respect others, including females?

I doubt it. If previous cases like this one are any indication, the response from society will just be to shake its collective head, to pronounce the young man mentally ill, and to move on as if nothing has happened. Until the next time girls are massacred. And then, the next time, the response will be the same again.

Ann

EDIT: As some of you may have noted, I have edited this post. In my previous post I claimed that 14 out or 15 victims were female, but that claim has not been confirmed. It now seems clear that 8 out of 9 of the killed students were girls, which is shocking, but not quite as bad as if 14 out of 15 victims had been female. Because I have edited my post, some of the responses to it may seem exaggerated. But those responses made sense as responses to my original post.

Where exactly do you get your news from, Ann?

What I've read in the Dutch newspapers is that "shockinly, many victims were female" and "shooter possibly suffered from broken heart" and "police investigates involvement of love." So I do not believe the fact that it were mostly girls that were killed is being overseen. It's noticed, police investigates and media reports on it.

So besides my finding yet another post on this irritating, I also think your facts aren't all that up-to-date.

But I was shocked by yet another incident like this. Shootings at school are horrible, no matter which gender gets killed. Poor kids and family.

Saskia

As far as I read it, there were two men killed. Three, including the shooter. The German media so far didn't talk too much about the gender of the victims, but German internet pages do.

Considering the fact that the guy shot more than a hundred times, it might not have been his intention to kill mostly women.

Three of his female victims were teachers, at least one of them about my age. Thinking about how many teachers in Germany are female, especially the young teachers, I wouldn't overestimate the fact that the three killed teachers were female.

You may be right, Ann. This guy might have hated women and thus killed them. But first and foremost he killed people and that's what makes this act of violence and hate so unbelievable.

Well, we've had a lot of shootings in the States lately. As far as I can tell, it's about even between male and female victims. Does that make us better here? I don't think so. Blind rampage with guns is bad no matter what.

Artemis

Saskia, I may have been too quick here. The latest news I have found doesn't say that all but one of the killer's victim's were female. It may have been an unsubstantiated rumor. If the German police give us information to the contrary, I will of course change the heading of this thread.

Ann

Check this out, it's an English-language article in a German paper .

Fair warning, the link crashed my IE twice before I disabled my Flash player, so here's a quote:

That was in the first paragraph.

Interesting to me is that, further down the page, they mention that he's of Albanian origin. Whether this had anything to do with it or not, I do not know, but... it occurs to me that Albania is primarily a Muslim country. (I've got friends from church who are planning to go there as missionaries)

PJ

I should mention that the newspaper you mentioned, ChiefPam, is definitely not the "Daily Planet" kind of newspaper. More like Metropolis star, meaning that they're not known for always checking all the facts before writing an article.

Bakasi, I did kind of get that vibe from it, yeah But Ann said:

And I wanted to let her know that it had been.

PJ

It´s not the gunman who is of Albanian origin, but one of his victims. The name of the gunman is Tim Kretschmer, that´s actually very much a German name.

And the newspaper is definitely not the best source you can get. It´s pure tabloid, and contains, according to a German band mainly "fear, hate, tits and the weather report".

The BBC news has just reported that the gunman "apparently targeted women" as he went on his rampaage.

Ann, no need to apologise for posts of this sort, uncomforatbale as they may be. It does appear that more victims of these 'shooters' are female than male. But why that is appears complicated. Some times it's clear that that was the shooter's intent (the Montreal Ecole Polytechnique shootings). But not always by any means - sometimes it may have something to do with how women react in these situations compared to men.

The question, given the horror and the tragedy, is always worth asking. I think, too, we must bear witness rather than turn away from these killings, regardless of the gender of the viticms.

Maybe the day will come when there are no more incidents of this sort.

carol

Cornelia, yes I see now that I was misreading the Albanian part. I'm going to blame it on IE messing up -- there were a few parts where I couldn't read the words behind the big "please install flash player" boxes. Thanks for setting me straight!

PJ

More news on the German teenager from the LA Times:
This story doesn't note the gender of the victims but just calls them "people".

Artemis

As far as I know - and I've had to endure more reports on the shooting than I care to count - there were 16 or 17 people killed. (I once heard that, about 24 (or so) hours after the shooting, another critically injured victim succumbed to his or her injuries.)

One of the victims was the gunman himself. Early reports speculated whether he had been shot by the police or whether he committed suicide when he realized that he wouldn't be able to escape.

He killed three teachers, all of them female. As was pointed out before now, most teachers in Germany are female, so that fact alone doesn't necessarily mean anything. One newspaper I read claimed that one of the teachers was shot in the back while she tried to escape while ushering her class out in front of her.

Tim K. also killed 9 students, 8 of which were girls. Since his motive isn't clear yet, this discrepancy lead to speculation. Many of the victims were shot in the head, which does not look to me like he was shooting randomly. It seems he executioned them (mafia-style).

While on the run, he also killed someone working at the nearby psych hospital. One report I heard claimed said worker was a woman, too. Others weren't specific or hinted at a male gender.

Later, Tim hijacked a car. He did not kill the (male) driver, for whatever reason there was.

Later, when he traded shots with the police, two more innocents were killed. The reports I've heard/watched/read so far were rather obtuse about that. I don't know anything about these peoples' gender. Neither do I know whose bullets killed them. Tim's? The police's? Directly or as a ricochet?

Btw, Ann, I was wondering when you would start a topic about this. (I guess you are notorious.)

About the link: I agree with bakasi that you shouldn't put too much stock into that particular newspaper. Yellow press at its finest. (Some people here claim that "Bild knows everything" - no matter if it really happened or not.)

I also thought I read on...CNN? that one of the teachers stepped in front of her students to take a bullet. And I'm just speechless. We do have real live heroes out there, and I hope we can all be selfless when it really counts.

God bless
JD

And that is one of the things that drives me crazy - I mean the fact that when an overwhelming majority of females are killed in massacres like this one, the media will sometimes only report that a certain number of 'people' were killed. Last year - at least I think it was last year - a school massacre not unlike the one in Germany happened in Kauhajoki, Finland. For what felt like days and days, the media stubbornly refused to report the gender of the nine students and the one teacher that had been killed. The reason for the silence may have been that the police did not release any information about this, but of course there must have been people in Kauhajoki who knew the victims, but again no one said anything. It was quickly reported, however, that one of the victims was a young man who was regarded as the shooter's best friend. But what about the other eight students? I scoured the internet for facts about them, but this seemed to be one of those cases where the police were determined not to report the victims' gender. Then a few serious and probably reliable newspapers reported, in the briefest possible manner, that the victims had been one male teacher, one male student and eight female students. And then nothing more was said about it! Nothing! Newspapers kept speculating about what it meant that the shooter had killed his best friend, but no one - no one! - commented on the fact that all the other killed students were female.

Do you realize that the ratio of male and female student victims was the same in Kauhajoki and in Winnenden? In both cases, nine students were killed, and out of them eight were females. The big, huge difference is that in Germany the skewed gender ratio was acknowledged, and it was seen as really troubling. In Finland no one said a thing. Indeed, when a Swedish newspaper wrote about the shooting in Winnenden and compared it with Kauhajoki, it commented on the fact that so many of the victims in Winnenden were female. But it said nothing about the fact that the gender ratio of the student victims in Winnenden and Kauhajoki was the same! Because, no doubt, this Swedish newspaper didn't realize what the gender ratio of the victims in Kauhajoki had been! By refusing to discuss or comment on it, Finnish police and Finnish media succeeded in making the massacre of girls in Kauhajoki 'disappear'. Of course the girls themselves remain dead as doornails. But practically no one knows that all but one of the killed students in Kauhajoki were girls, so no one needs to give it a thought. Not only the girls themselves were killed, but the acknowledgement and realization of how these girls were victimized was killed, too.

In Germany the media have been upfront about the killer's targeting of girls. That means that Germany has been given a chance to mourn the victims as dead girls. I commend German media for acknowledging the loss of girls like this. Perhaps, if these things will be discussed more openly, societies will feel obliged to try to increase their efforts to curb men's violence against women.

Ann

Although I don't know statistics, I'm certainly aware that there have been several school shootings where female victims were specifically targeted. And I admit that I don't know of any similar instances for male victims. Although I have theories as to some of the possible reasons - and certainly some have been referred to in other threads on this same topic - I don't have any answers or solutions. It is definitely a problem.

However, Ann, in my opinion, your concern about female victims causes you to lose sight of the big picture. You just wrote:

But for me, the big picture is that children are dying. Innocent children who, simply by being in school, are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yes, I abhor violence against women. I also abhor violence perpetrated against men. I don't condone wife beatings OR husband beatings. And here, I think it's horrible that it's happened AT ALL. These are innocent children. This sort of thing should not be happening at all. I don't think it any worse - or better - to find out that most of the victims were girls. We are supposed to protect our children. When we send our children to school every day and let them out of our watchful eye, we expect them to be safe. There are way too many instances where a parent has done this everyday, normal activity - sending their child off to school - and not having their child come home.

For me, at least, this is a more worrisome issue. Thank God that my child hasn't been a victim, nor do I personally know anyone who has suffered such a grievous loss in this way. Percentage-wise, I don't know what the numbers are. And I don't know how to stop it. I can scream stronger gun control, but certainly that alone isn't enough. I can scream that we have to more quickly identify the possible warning signs that the shooters may exhibit before going on the rampage, but that is probably next to impossible.

Children are dying. Sometimes it's school-related violence, sometimes it's gangs. Often it's illness. More often it's hunger.

Children. Boys and girls. Girls and boys. That's what bothers me the most.

Kathy

These are three young men who were murdered in 1964:

[img]http://us.news2.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/net/20041221/capt.b229898aa066659dc0aa46d5c94866dc[/img]

You can describe them as three civil rights workers who were kidnapped and killed in 1964. Or you can say that it doesn't matter that they were civil rights workers, and all young murder victims are to be mourned whether they are civil rights workers or not.

This is a somewhat older man who was murdered:



You can describe him as a homosexual man who was murdered. Or you can say that it doesn't matter that he was homosexual, and all human beings who are murdered are to be mourned, and this man was a human being.



These people are Jews who are being marched from the Jewish ghetto in Warzaw to a concentration camp, where they will be killed. You can say, if you want to, that it doesn't matter that they were Jews, and the interesting thing is that eight million people were killed at the concentration camps.



These four girls were killed at the Jonesboro massacre. You can say that it doesn't matter that they were girls, and the important thing is that they were children.

You can say all these things. You can, if you want to, refuse to describe people as anything else than people or children. I agree that it is of the utmost importance to acknowledge - really acknowledge - that all people are, well, people.

But sometimes you just understand more if you are more specific. Because some people are killed because they are a certain kind of people.

Ann

Ann, I agree with you that sometimes people are killed for the sole reason that they are a certain kind of people. There's incontrovertible evidence that sometimes Jews are targeted, sometimes Christians, sometimes black people, sometimes Muslims, sometimes prostitutes, sometimes civil rights workers, sometimes boys, sometimes gay men - or gay boys. And, yes, sometimes women. And we must recognise that - you're right there too. If we turned a blind eye to the fact that particular groups get targeted, we'd be turning a blind eye to hate and prejudice and failing to put in place protections against hate crimes.

I don't think anyone here would disagree with you about that simple fact. I think the reason that you get a certain reaction to some of your posts is that you appear to - whether you mean to or not - give the impression that you think girls or women being killed is a worse crime than anyone else being killed.

Yes, there are parts of the world where the treatment of women is awful and inhumane. There are, and have been, parts of the world where treatments of other less-powerful groups is equally awful and inhumane. I think what most of us are saying is that discrimination against any group - whether that discrimination results in oppression, slavery or even murder - is equally bad. The targeted slaughter of women is no worse than the targeted slaughter of blacks or gays or Jews.

(And, as an aside, I remember having an ultimately fruitless email debate with an American academic, when I was still working in a British university, who staunchly argued that discrimination on grounds of race is morally worse than discrimination on grounds of gender. *headdesk*).

Recently, I've been made aware of one consequence of the focus of attention and resources on one group of - I hate to use the term 'victims', as it implies a helpless state, but let's use it just for this example - victims of sexual assault. The majority of resources for treatment, consciousness-raising, shelter and so on goes to women victims/survivors, and as a result little or nothing is available for male sexual abuse victims/survivors. One of the consequences of this concentration of resources has been that society as a whole, or the sexual abuse 'helping community' in particular, has almost been able to deny that there is even a problem affecting men. Male victims/survivors can find almost no-one to listen to them. They call helplines, only to find the phone slammed down the instant the person on the other end realises they're talking to a man. Women campaigners against sexual violence call all men abusers and refuse to acknowledge that men can also be abused. Sexual assault units are geared to deal with women, and men who are themselves victims can feel unwanted and that they're viewed with hostility and mistrust by the very people who should be trying to help them... because the overall focus is that those who fall victim to sexual abuse are women.

This is an exaggerated comparison, of course (though it's true and I've been told this by a male abuse survivor and activist), but I mention it only to make the point that if we focus on one group of victims we run the risk of diminishing the experience, or even existence, of other groups of victims. Of course it matters when women appear to be singled out to be murdered. The point is that it matters equally when some other group is singled out. No one of Neimoller's targeted groups in his famous quote matters less than any other, just as in my favourite Donne meditation he says any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.

I wish women as a group were never the targets of killers. I wish the same about gays, blacks, men, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Rastafarians and any distinctive group you could name - because any targeting of any specific group is appalling and hateful and deserves our attention.


Wendy

Wendy, thank you for your most eloquent post. You expressed very clearly at least some of what I was thinking - that violence or hate targeting any group, based on whatever reasons, is wrong.

I think part of my concern with things that you've written, Ann (or maybe it's just the way that I've interpreted them), echoes with what Wendy said.
Certainly whenever I hear first reports of a school shooting, I never wonder - was it boys who were shot at, or just girls? I wonder where it was, how did it happen, how many have been injured, how many have died. I wonder if there were warning signs about the shooters that people could/should have seen, I wonder whether it should have been harder for the shooter to get a weapon. For me, the sex of the victims in these cases doesn't matter. I am appalled at those who target females; I would be EQUALLY appalled if a shooting occurred tomorrow and only boys were killed because they had been targeted. Maybe this is why I can't understand why your sense of outrage seems to be greatest for girls.

From your reply to my post, I wanted to clarify a couple of things that I don't feel pertained to the point you were trying to make. I assume that you brought up each of those illustrations and examples as people/groups that have been discriminated against and therefore targeted for violence.

I can't argue with you about the Jews during WW2. I know nothing about the young men in the first picture, so I don't know if they prove your point or not. But as to the other two...

Harvey Milk was gay, and he was killed. But he wasn't killed BECAUSE he was gay. He was killed because a man suffering from depression who had lost his job as a City Supervisor went to San Francisco City Hall and shot both Milk and Mayor Mascone. Mascone was killed first when he was unwilling to give White his job back. White then reloaded and walked down the hall and killed Milk. The two of them had clashed earlier about various political issues. As far as I know, it was not motivated in any way because of Milk's homosexuality. Sad to say, very few seem to have heard of Mascone, yet people know about Milk precisely because he was gay and he was killed, even though his sexual preferences were not the cause of his death.

As far as the Jonesboro victims are concerned, this does not appear to be a case for females being targeted. Yes, the four students who died were female. Other students were injured; I don't know the genders. One of the two shooters pulled the fire alarm, then the two of them opened fire on the students coming out of the building. They shot indiscriminately - the claim is that they wanted to scare people. At the trial, one of the defendants said, "We were not going to shoot at anyone in particular."

Kathy

FWIW, I don't think Ann is necessarily saying that she only cares about the deaths of girls or women. My take is that she thinks that deaths of girls, while equally important (and tragic) as the deaths of boys, is less-noticed by the world in general, or by large swathes of it. To try to counter that (perceived) disparity, she puts *more* emphasis on the female side. For those of us who don't share that perception, it's redundant (and sometimes annoying ) but I think that's what's going on.

Ann, of course, is more than able to speak for herself, so she'll correct me if I'm wrong.

PJ

Wendy, I absolutely agree with you. Some groups of people are not seen as even potential victims, and I'm sure you are right that male victims of sexual assault may find it hopeless to find help anywhere. Because they are men, society 'assumes' that they can't be the victims of such things. Of course this is a horrible example of discrimination.

Kathy, I have to thank Pam for explaining what I mean. Pam is exactly right. I don't mean, believe me, that it isn't every bit as horrible for the mother and father of a son to lose their child at a school massacre as it is for the mother and father of a daughter to lose their child at a school massacre. And I don't mean, either, that it isn't every bit as bad for society to lose boys at school shootings as it is to lose girls at school shootings.

But the problem is, the way I see it, that society doesn't acknowledge that girls can be targets at school shootings because of their gender alone. I think it is extremely rare for boys to be victims at school shootings only because of their gender. There are definitely cases where the majority of victims at shool shootings are boys, but in those cases, I personally think that the the killer's choice of victims has more to do with his need to get back at other kids who have taunted him than it shows the killer's hatred of people of his own gender. If an aggressive girl attacks other girls, I definitely see it that way, at least until I get more evidence - I'm going to assume that she attacks the other girls because she perceives them as her rivals, and they have probably taunted her, or she thinks they have. It is a case of settling things with your peers.

Let's get back to Wendy's example. When it comes to victims of sexual assault, society is so sure that those victims are women that it has no resources left for the victims that don't fit that description. When it comes to this particular crime, society assumes that the victims are always female.

The situation is exactly the opposite when it comes to school shootings. No, I don't mean that society assumes that the victims of school shootings are male. Certainly not. No, but instead society assumes that victims of school shootings don't have a gender. And sometimes, I agree, they don't. Sometimes it seems obvious that the victims aren't targeted in the first place, and then gender doesn't play a role. In other cases, a male shooter seems to be getting back at other boys, who are probably his rivals or people that he knows and has a bone to pick with. It is a way for the shooter to of settle things with his peers.

But sometimes, as in the Jonesboro attack, the Amish school, the Kauhajoki shootings and the Winnenden shootings, girls have been particularly targeted. (There are other such cases too: a case in Japan caused the deaths of many girls and one boy, and at a school shooting in England or Scotland, eleven of the the sixteen dead children were girls, the most seriously injured of the survivors was a girl and the only uninjured child was a boy.)

What I find so absolutely frustrating about the denial of the targeting of girls in school shootings is that this denial goes hand in glove with the unsufficient recognition of the fact that women and girls are, sorry, more often specially targeted and victimized than boys and men. For example, when I grew up I knew that the special circumstances of girls were always seen as a bit less interesting than the special circumstances of boys. Unlike girls, boys were 'normal'. If there was going to be an illustration of the general concept of a child, the illustrator would draw a boy. When I was a child, the collection-box at the Pentecostalist church that my relatives belonged to was shaped like a little African boy, who bowed his head in thanks when you put a coin in the box. (I hasten to add that my relatives treated their daughters with exactly the same love as they treated their sons.)

When I grew up, however, I learned that the coins I put in that collection-box might have done more good if they had gone to girls instead of to the generic boy who bowed his head in thanks for them, and who might have got the lion's share of them, too. Often aid organisations in Africa have given most of their money to men, because they believed that the men would take the money home to their families. Later it has been found that many men use the money they receive this way to buy things for themselves, and the girls and women have been left wanting. I once read about a mysterious crippling disease that seemed to affect almost exclusively women an girls in a part of Africa. Researchers later found that the disease was caused by a combination of a lack of nutrition and a case of poisoning: when there was a shortage of food, the really edible food went to the males, and the females had to eat a kind of vegetables that were partly poisonous. And speaking about women's health: Now that HIV has become so dominant in Africa, girls succumb to aids far more often than boys. That is because girls are married off at a much younger age than boys, and their husbands are under no obligation to be faithful. Some help programs from the west have tried to stop the spreading of aids by teaching those who would listen - that is, the women - that they should stay faithful to their spouses. As if that would help, when it is a perfectly normal thing in this part of the world for married men to go to prostitutes. (Add to that the men will absolutely not use condoms, mostly because of their own dislike of it, partly because of various local superstitions about it and partly because a Catholic bishop in Africa teaches that condoms cause aids. Much better to have sex with an HIV-infected protstitue without a condom then, right?) Also, at many African schools, male teachers demand sex from their female students, otherwise the girls will not get their grades. Unsurprisingly, women have shorter life spans than men in men in most poor countries, and six out of ten children who don't go to school in the world are girls.

The plights of girls and women are not sufficiently recognized in relation to how much they do suffer. I don't mean to imply that the suffering of men isn't terrible. I'm just saying that there is a subconscious association between the English word 'man' as in 'a male person' and 'man' as in 'a human being'. A normal human being is a male person, just as the generic African child was a little boy in the Pentecostalist church of my childhood. Therefore, when society considers how to help people at home and abroad, women are often thought of as a 'special interest group', whereas men are so easily seen as the normal representatives of most people. And who do you want to help first, the normal people or the special interest groups? I'm not saying that society isn't helping girls and women, because it is. But I think that society's response is often inadequate. And I hate it when society won't admit that women are the special targets of a crime. The way I see it, school shootings that target girls are hate crimes, and the girls are targeted because they are girls.

Ann

I have to second Wendy's post. Over the years, the admins have heard many complaints about these threads of yours, Ann, and no one has ever disagreed with you on your main point.

What irritates many people here is the way that you present your pov.

For example - I've been greatly puzzled over the past few days as to why you've been so selective in your reporting of the German shooting. "8 out of 9 students killed were female." But the gunman didn't kill 9 people. He killed 15. You've airbrushed a chunk of his victims out of the tragedy as though they didn't exist. I have no idea why you've done that - except that, of course, 8 out of 9 sounds much more sensational than 8 out of 15. But I find it disrespectful to those victims you've chosen to ignore. It certainly gives the strong impression that you think they don't matter. You don't need to concentrate on them - but they deserve at least to be included in the total victim count.

Secondly, this:

In the past, the first time you used the case of Thomas Hamilton, here in Dunblane, Scotland, to prove your theory that gunman in such cases target female victims, I provided you with incontrovertible evidence that Hamilton did not. Eye witnesses in the classroom stated quite clearly in court under oath that he stepped into the room and immediately began firing indiscriminately. (I've since seen a documentary on the case in which one of the teachers who survived makes that point even more strongly.)

Yet, even though Hamilton doesn't fit into your target group and you know that, you have continued to use this example to prove your point in other threads and now this one. I find that deeply offensive. There are clearly enough examples of female victimisation in the world without having to invent any or distort cases which have no relevance to your theory.

Perhaps if you were more willing to accept corrections to your 'facts' when they are wrong and not trim or ignore data or victims to cram tragedies like this into your theory, rather than finding genuine examples of it, you might find more people willing to listen to your pov.

No one is arguing with you that such incidents exist. We're all as capable as you are of seeing what goes on in the world around us. But your habit of distortion to prove it weakens your case considerably in the eyes of many here and just irks rather than provokes empathy with your point.

Just a thought. This is an Off Topic folder and so long as you keep to the rules of the mbs - which you have as far as I know - then you're entitled to bring up any topic you like. Which is what we've always told those wanting you shut down. Your threads are always well-signposted in the headers, so those upset by them can ignore and read elsewhere.

But if, as you've stated recently, your intent isn't to upset, anger or rile other members up but to engage us in supporting you in your cause to highlight and protest such incidents, how you present your case and engage us and keeping a tight rein on your research are things you might want to consider when you present your next thread.

LabRat

To the point Wendy made about how violence against males tends to be ignored and swept under the rug or how so many help programs are dedicated towards women and ignoring men, here's a fairly old book that I read many years ago written by Warren Farrell, a former board member of the National Organization for Women (NOW). The book is titled, "The Myth of Male Power," documenting societal bias against helping men and for ignoring many crimes against men and how men are considered the disposable sex.

The Myth of Male Power

I'm just bringing this up because Wendy mentioned this topic and that the book had made quite an impression on me a few years back. I'm not in any way saying crimes against males are any worse than crimes against females, and they're not, but I'd thought I'd just interject something from a different perspective.

Well, Labby, out of the 15 victims of the shooter (not counting himself), I know the gender of 12 of them. I don't know anything specific about the 3 remaining victims, apart fromt he fact that they were not connected to the school, but I can tell you this about the gender of the remaining 12: 11 out of these 12 were female, three teachers and 8 students.

Actually, I think you have to give Ann credit for editing the teachers out since most teachers here are female. But the ratio of the students is near to fifty-fifty (although at the kind of school the shooting happened, there is a slight majority of girls). If you go for a random shooting of 9 students, getting a gender ratio of 8:1 (with equal distribution of both genders) has a probability of about 1:57 (actually, 9:512, if you want to know for sure). Since there are several cases like this one, not counting the one in Scotland for obvious reasons, I think it's unlikely enough to 'just happen', much less repeatedly.

A problem I do see, though, is within the classroom. In many German schools, the door is near to the front of the classroom. And guess what, most students sitting in the front row are girls.

Another difference between boys and girls I see (which might be a misconception) is in the way they react to danger. Girls usually scream, often in an annoyingly high voice. Boys are more likely to simply (re-)act in a way to preserve their lives. I know that, in many ways, I react more like the standard male, so let me tell you what I'd do if a shooter entered my classroom (if I were a student): I'd throw myself to the ground and try to be as inconspicuous as possible!

But what would I do as a teacher? Hope that my class and I get some warning (like shots ringing out) so I could do something. Like lock the door. Or, if the classroom is on the first floor, evacuate through the windows (unless they're facing the schoolyard). Otherwise, I'd have my students lie flat on their bellies directly beneath the windows (so they can't be seen through them, much less shot). Would I evacuate? I don't think so because it'd be too dangerous.