ABSTRACT
Existing research on gender roles, stress and masculinity has demonstrated that men are more likely to act out violently when they feel their manhood or masculinity is being threatened. Popular discussion of the perpetration of school shootings by men and boys often seeks to assign total blame to violence in media. There is a renewed clamor of debate about guns and gun control after nearly every mass shooting. The men and boys who commit school shootings often view firearms as a powerful signifier of masculinity. Media coverage of school shootings routinely delivers to school shooters exactly the fame that they desire. Numerous school shooters have used the public spectacles of their violence to establish themselves as dominant, powerful, and in control in ways that they did not feel they were in their day-to-day lives – in essence, to lay claim to masculinity.
