In this op-ed, writer Sezin Koehler explains the mythology surrounding the phrase "lone wolf," which is sometimes used to describe white male mass shooters in the United States.
In Game of Thrones, Ned Stark once said, “The lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.” But not in America. Here, a lone wolf packs up an arsenal of automatic and semiautomatic weapons and opens fire on a crowd. This armed-to-the-teeth lone wolf often survives, and members of the pack die at his hands.
Almost every time there’s a new mass murder by guns, like clockwork men of color are pegged with the label “terrorist” or “thug” and white men are labeled “lone wolves,” magically detached from any social and cultural context. In spite of the fact that armed white men are the largest terrorist threat in America at the moment— having killed more Americans in domestic terrorism incidents since 9/11 than Muslim extremists— the media affords these men the benefit of the doubt, and mental illness often ends up taking the blame for their racist, misogynistic, and often xenophobic actions.
Indigenous historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz traces the history of the myth of the hunter to the foundational roots of America’s sacrosanct right to bear arms in her book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.
“The astronomical number of firearms owned by U.S. civilians, with the Second Amendment considered a sacred mandate, is also inextricably related to militaristic culture and white nationalism. The militias referred to in the Second Amendment were intended as a means for white people to eliminate Indigenous communities in order to take their land, and for slave patrols to control black people,” she writes.
Dunbar-Ortiz’s thesis is a close reading of the language of the Second Amendment in the historical context it is rarely placed in: She claims that the original purpose of militias was the extermination of indigenous populations and next the terrorizing and murder of freed black slaves. From civilian militias in guerrilla warfare to slave patrols, the Ku Klux Klan, and much later rifle clubs and associations like the NRA, the Second Amendment’s provision for Americans to bear arms has been one of the main driving forces of the bloody foundation of this country. And as gun culture became normalized, so were the stories of these early white male settler-colonists who braved hostile territories armed to the teeth ostensibly to cleanse the soil of native and black people, leading to the lone-wolf archetype we fear today.
Unpacking the history of the modern lone wolf, white, male shooter requires deconstructing the stories of many of America’s beloved Wild West figures, like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, whose gangs and lives of gun crime have now become the stuff of legend. From song to book to visual media, problematic and violent figures like these had their stories rewritten to embody the frontier spirit of American entrepreneurship and expansionism that created the country we find ourselves in today. Even liberal and progressive culture, such as antiwar activist singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, bought the misleading narrative, beginning the process of turning ex-Confederate soldiers and their cohorts into aspirational folk heroes.
In rewriting these men not just through song, but through books and later cinema — former Confederate soldiers who eventually became guerrilla fighters against the abolition of slavery — as heroes and beloved antiheroes, thus began the romanticization of some of America’s first white-supremacist terrorists. According to Dunbar-Ortiz, this myth of the hunter through popular culture began gaining traction around the 1820s, after the publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and has shaped many of the misconceptions of the roots of gun culture in America. From Young Guns to Godless and Westworld, we see these iterations over and over again.
Dunbar-Ortiz posits that the first side-effect of pop culture’s whitewashing of American history—mainly through book and song, but eventually films as well— was in codifying extreme gun violence against non-white populations and reframing it into a battle for the (white) soul of America corrupted by (brown and black) interlopers. Popular culture began the perpetuation of the lone white male with a gun as a hero figure here to save the day, an image that has persisted hundreds of years evidenced each time a white man opens fire on a crowd and is called a "lone wolf" instead of a "terrorist."
“In the mid-20th century, with real and fictional Western heroes in decline, fetishization of guns and the Second Amendment accelerated, along with mass shootings, nearly all carried out by white men. … The normalization of violence included the racial terrorism of the KKK and other armed groups, as well as the outlaw violence carried out by individuals and crime gangs. Not surprisingly, many of the gunfights of the late-nineteenth century in the West were between Union and Confederate veterans or supporters. Ghosts of those battle lines can be detected in contemporary divisions on gun rights and gun control.”
“Democracy, equality, and equal rights do not fit well with genocide, settler colonialism, slavery, and empire,” Dunbar-Ortiz writes. So, these negative narratives needed to be divorced from reality. Show business and other media production erased evidence of the white-supremacist violence that created the America as we know it and instead reconfigured it into epic hero narratives such as those that grew around figures like John Filson’s Daniel Boone and which James Fenimore Cooper detailed in his frontier novels. These stories “were surely instrumental in sanitizing accountability for the atrocities related to genocide, and set the narrative pattern for future U.S. writers, poets, and historians.”
The very notion of hunting for food and survival was co-opted by the elite governing classes as a sport and hobby, distancing themselves from one of the key and seemingly pragmatic reasons for a right to bear arms in today's context. President Theodore Roosevelt—himself a proponent of eugenics—popularized hunting as an aristocratic exercise and looked down on people who hunted out of necessity, according to Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation. There is a direct line between the "myth of the hunter" and Don Jr. and Eric Trump’s grotesque displays of death while on safaris in Africa.
Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The central role that the myth of the hunter continues to play in Americana is to perpetuate a contemporary romance with firearms and justification for the sacredness of the Second Amendment, eclipsing the fact that this was a capitalist enterprise carried out through atrocities of violence, territorial theft, and mass displacement, not an adventure.”
As the "myth of the hunter" grew in scope and power, becoming one of the bedrocks of Second Amendment promotion and protection, so did the notion fossilize into white American consciousness that the right to bear arms is in fact a sacred covenant granted by God, as Dunbar-Ortiz has argued. The United States is the only developed country in the world without sensible gun control, and it is this notion of a holy right to guns that distinguishes gun culture in America from that of other developed nations, none of which have entered into this deep and singular pact with a piece of legislation that, some have argued, has its roots in genocide and violent white nationalism.
It’s only “natural” then that this myth of the hunter would transmute into the idea that white male shooters are lone wolves, disconnected from American society in spite of the fact that they are its socio-cultural paradigm. We have also moved far from the noble hunter figure—as problematic as the characterization is—to the "lone wolves" we find today: There is nothing heroic about the white male, lone, gunmen who continue to terrorize America, except maybe to themselves.
Ultimately, we need to systematically dismantle these romanticized notions of the white-hunter, lone-wolf narrative, and part of the deconstruction is understanding that the history of guns is fundamentally one of white-supremacist violence. The first way to do this is calling on all media to abandon this dangerous characterization: Journalists need to start calling white terrorism by its proper name. There is no such thing as a lone-wolf, white-male shooter. The white-male shooter is an unfortunate but fundamental spoke in the wheel of American white nationalism and white supremacy. There is nothing lone about him.
Related: White Male Terrorists Are an Issue We Should Discuss
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