The worst kind of tragedy is the African one, where inhumanity is so frequent it is legitimized as “culture” and largely ignored by the domestic and international community on a regular basis.

 The recent shooting in Santa Barbara is a red flag in a sea of red flags: gun violence is America’s version of the African tragedy. Since 2006, there has been one mass killing nearly every two weeks in the United States, with 75 percent being committed by the use of a firearm. Firearm sales have set records every single year since President Obama has been in office; there have been four times as many firearms purchased as babies have been born in the U.S. And since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last year, after which gun control support was at an ultimate high, every single piece of Congressional legislation to tighten gun laws has been denied and in the majority of states, gun restrictions have been loosened instead of tightened.

While statistics are difficult to officiate because of a lack of federal regulation and state oversight, it is a fact that the great majority of mass shootings in the U.S. have been perpetrated by men, and the majority of those men have been white. According to USA Today, 94 percent of all mass killings are committed by men.  Mother Jones magazine found 44 of 62 mass public shootings in the last 30 years have been at the hands of white men-- about 70 percent. Another study by The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime found white men responsible for 75 percent of all mass killings on record. And of those high-profile shootings on the tip of the layman’s tongue: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook-- all were perpetrated by white men, all with a similar story of emotional disturbance, a sense of vengeance, and access to legal firearms.

 Before Seung Hui-Cho went on a shooting spree killing 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, he mailed hours of photos, videos and letters to NBC. In them, he described his intentions - in past tense - called on his “children” to follow his path, and mentioned “martyrs like Eric and Dylan,” in reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999.

At that time, NBC had the privilege to edit and carefully decide which images and footage they were going to publish out of concern for public safety and copycat offenders. Today, anyone can access the entire 141-page life story/“manifesto” and multiple YouTube videos posted by Santa Barbara murderer Elliot Rodger because more information is available - for better or worse. It ends with an intimate description of his motivation: “Women are like a plague. They don’t deserve to have any rights... If I can’t have them, no one will.”

 What is most notable about Rodger’s autobiography, and about all of the murderers’ life stories, is how utterly usual they are. Yes, they were all on a spectrum of mental instability - some more than others, such as Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary - but there were no signs strong enough to call for involuntary intervention and all are obvious only in hindsight. Each of the boys were raised in middle to upper-class homes. Each of the boys played violent video games. Each of the boys struggled to socialize and find girlfriends.

 “My favorite childhood film was The Land Before Time,” Rodger writes on the third page of his ramblings. He goes on to detail every year of his life: he moved and struggled to make friends in a new school. He was angry that his mother made him share his Nintendo 64 with his sister. He spent hours playing World of Warcraft. He got drunk and went to parties. His mom bought him cars and apartments to “help him socialize.” 

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine murderers, bonded over video games and had dates to prom just weeks prior.  TJ Lane, a 17-year-old who shot up a high school in Ohio and then flipped off the victims’ parents and wore a T-shirt with the word “KILLER” on it in court, was described by all his acquaintances as a “very normal teenage boy.” When James Holmes, originally from San Diego, shot up a movie theater in Colorado, the headline in the UT San Diego read “Quiet, Unassuming San Diegan Accused of Mass Murder.”  These boys became frustrated at a lack of respect and social welcoming as if the comfort of inclusion was a strife only for them.

 How ironic it is that these boys’ very attempt at catapulting themselves to fame and societal justification is becoming less and less remarkable with each instance. They line up to join the collection, each less notorious than the last, who have had the same struggles as everyone else in the (privileged and Western) world. It is because of the easy access to guns and the mentality of American exceptionalism that these utterly normal boys whose anguish is banal and usual are enabled and prompted to seek vengeance.

TIME put it best, saying that “If there is any bitter satisfaction to take from that, it’s that in their very attempt to be remarkable in some way, mass killers instead achieve a sort of homicidal banality, the anonymity they dreaded in life following them into death.”

Author Bio:
Stephanie Stark, a contributing writer at Highbrow Magazine, is a freelance writer and web producer out of New York City. Her work focuses on social, religious and gender issues in the US. Follow her at @stephanie_stark.