Instead of pointing fingers at permissive judges or poor mental health for the horrific mass shooting in Shreveport, a writer for New York Magazine has decided to blame … the patriarchy.
The outlet claimed that 31-year-old U.S. Army veteran Shamar Elkins, the man accused of killing eight children, including seven of his own, was the victim of a society that believes women belong to men.
“It is tempting to treat Elkins’s actions as the isolated incident of a madman. But poor mental health is never a reasonable explanation for attempting to execute one’s wife and children,” wrote Brittney Cooper, a Cut contributor who “writes about race and systems of power.”
“Patriarchy offers a better explanation for this violence,” she went on. “Patriarchy teaches men that women and children belong to them, that they are property that men get to have, as a male rite of passage. Men are taught, in what bell hooks famously called a ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,’ to measure their worth and value by the size of their bank account, the size of their genitals, and the size of their families. These are forms of toxic self-value, predicated as they are on women and children having no agency or dreams of their own.”
Cooper went on to lament “the rise of the manosphere” and “a nation being led by a group of right-wing extremists with Neanderthal ideas about gender and sexuality.”
“Men who kill their wives and children are not just bad apples who needed a free month of BetterHelp. These killings are the natural outcome of a country enamored with patriarchy and determined to make sure that men can freely dominate women,” she insists.
Readers on social media pushed back strongly on this theory.
“Well you couldn’t make it about racism, so I guess Patriarchy seemed like a good idea. Though I bet if you tried you could make it about racism and how mostly female mental health professionals won’t take on poor Black male clients. Of course then, no patriarchy. Tough,” one sarcastic commenter wrote.
“The race is inconvenient, so we switch to a gender motive. He was a criminal, a gun criminal no less. But instead of being locked up, the people that screech constantly about gun violence, went easy on him as they always do. It’s a story about leftist policies causing more death,” another person added.
Elkins, who appeared to be targeting his own “descendants,” opened fire in three different homes across Shreveport on April 19. He was shot and killed by police after he attempted to carjack a vehicle to escape.
Shreveport officials described the shooting as domestic violence, saying Elkins shot the mother of his children and another woman, as well as his seven children and one of their cousins, per USA Today.
The outlet noted that Elkins married Shaneiqua Pugh in April 2024. A woman named Christina Snow sued Elkins for child support and was granted joint custody of their child, Sariahh, in 2017. Sariahh was one of the victims of the shooting.