Twice, in the days since a gunman killed 19 children and their teachers at a Texas elementary school, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears (R) has spoken publicly about the shooting.
And twice, she has offered this as one of the reasons mass shootings occur: “We have emasculated our men.”
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Earle-Sears first said that on Friday during a keynote speech for a women’s lunch at the National Rifle Association’s annual conference in Houston.
Then she said it again on Sunday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend.”
“We have fathers who aren’t home,” she said during that appearance. “We have emasculated our men. Our children are at stake. You notice that these shooters, they have had family problems. The Parkland shooter — 37 times police were called to his home. It’s not the gun.”
Afterward, Fox News ran on its website the headline: “Winsome Sears on Texas school shooting: ‘It’s not the gun’.”
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It’s not surprising that Earle-Sears has spent the days since the Uvalde shooting defending guns. For her campaign, she appeared in an ad with an assault-style rifle strapped across her chest. Her decision to attend the NRA event even before the caskets for those fourth graders in Texas had been picked and personalized was disrespectful and disappointing, but it was not unexpected.
It might not have even gained much attention if it weren’t for her words about mass shootings at that event and in the days that followed. They have drawn her praise and criticism. They have made her a voice for people who are worried their guns will be snatched away in the next round of legislation, and they have made her a source of worry for those who fear their children will be snatched away in the next round of bullets.
Because there will be a next round of bullets, and another, and another. That, unfortunately, we can all agree on. Over the Memorial Day weekend alone, there were more than a dozen mass shootings, as reported by The Washington Post. And in the hours after the Uvalde, Tex., massacre, a child was shot on a sidewalk in Virginia, the state Earle-Sears represents. That 9-year-old girl was left screaming repeatedly, “I can’t feel my legs!”
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Reporters were not allowed to cover the NRA event, but a copy of her remarks provided by her office to my colleagues shows that Earle-Spears spoke about how the Uvalde shooting should “not have happened again” and then pointed to social factors — not guns — as the problem.
At NRA gathering in Texas, Winsome Sears says guns aren’t the problem
At one point, she said, “Our language has degenerated such that f-bombs and even the startling mf-bombs are spoken across our airways without so much as a gasp or even a clutch of the pearls, real or fake.”
At another point: “Why? Because we took prayer out of schools. We have so liberated our sexuality that we are now informed that men can have abortions.”
Then, after listing more reasons, as a punctuation point, she said: “We have emasculated our men.”
Words hold power, and no one knows that better than a high-ranking politician. If Earle-Sears had chosen to attend that NRA event and call on gun owners to protect their right to possess weapons by supporting reasonable measures that would keep an 18-year-old with a history of aggressive behavior from being able to easily buy two assault-style rifles and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition (as the Uvalde shooter did), she would have gained the respect of many. She would have shown the country that responsible gun owners can and should be part of the solution.
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But the words Earle-Sears chose to say when talking about Uvalde were not uniting. They were divisive and dangerous. They showed her unwillingness to take action toward making it more difficult for a potential mass shooter in Virginia to build an arsenal, and they echoed the woman-hating rhetoric of many of these gunmen.
“Emasculated” is a passive word. For a man to become “emasculated,” someone has to do that to him. That phrasing makes him the victim. It validates his destructiveness.
“The unifying trait of mass murderers is hatred for women,” Virginia resident Erika Crawford wrote in a tweet, tagging Earle-Sears. “Instead of stroking their fragile egos, we should be raising boys to become better men so this doesn’t happen. @WinsomeSears’ rhetoric about emasculated men is dangerous & perpetuates violence.”
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Before that gunman in Uvalde killed those children and their teachers, he threatened to rape and kill teenage girls. The girls who encountered him online saw him post images of dead cats, joke about sexual assault and say, “Everyone in the world deserves to get raped.”
He didn’t hide his misogyny from them. He put it on full display, just as other mass shooters before him have done. Those gunmen didn’t kill people because they weren’t made to feel manly enough.
Men who commit mass shootings haven’t lost their masculinity. They’ve lost their humanity.
The other danger in the lieutenant governor’s words is that they distract from the work that needs to be done to prevent future shootings.
I was a kid when a classmate was shot and killed. That trauma lasts.
I grew up in Texas, surrounded by legal and illegal gun owners. I lost a classmate in eighth grade to a mass shooting and know how that trauma stretches wide and lasts long. I also have friends and family members who have responsibly owned guns. I don’t view gun-control measures as a them-vs.-us issue. I see it as one we have to work on together because our children deserve that.
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I now live in Virginia and have two sons who attend elementary school. My older son is in the same grade as those children who died in Uvalde and I’d be lying if I said I haven’t mentally placed myself in those parent’s position. That shooting has forced me to worry about my own children and others in a way that has sat dormant in me and makes me want to do whatever I can to protect them before it’s too late.
Guns are now the leading cause of death among American children, according to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Car accidents used to hold that place, but not anymore.
Earle-Sears said, “It’s not the gun.” But it is guns, when they are too easily obtained.
One thing she said at that NRA talk that was insightful and worth keeping in mind is this: “If we fail to identify the real problem, we come away with the wrong solutions.”