#2. You’ll Never See a Woman Get Her Brains Blown Out
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Some of the recent debates on gun control attempt to put a precise finger on the very imprecise assertion that there are deeply cultural roots for American gun violence — after all, violent films and video games, even widespread gun ownership itself, do not result in the same levels of gun violence in other industrial countries. While not positing any definitive answers, I believe that Jack’s recent article touches on an interesting point when noting that guns in America are shown to compensate for some kind of crisis in masculinity (or patriarchy generally). We might argue that if guns equal manliness, then a well-placed, well-timed shot to the head is an impressive display of one’s masculine command of the weapon. Shooting for the head takes rational calculation and physical control of the firearm. Emotional indecision (coded stereotypically as “feminine”) will lead to failure or misfire.
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But we’re talking about the victims, not the shooters. If shooting someone through the head makes you a badass, it suggests greater weakness, even shame, on the victim’s part. To be shot in the head is to be “owned” and reduced to nothing — as seen in action films, a hero can be shot virtually anywhere on his body and still stagger on to continue the fight. A shot to the head, however, ends things right there. And this, to my mind, is where gun violence most reveals its phallocentricity — wherein “fucking someone” and “fucking someone up” converge to produce this particular form of “fucked up” ultraviolence. Take a listen to the thunderous Nine Inch Nails song “Big Man With a Gun,” which explicitly links the power of firing a gun to hyper-masculine fantasies of sexual violation. Through this metaphor, the song clearly assumes that the combination of sexual power with firepower produces a total domination over another person. Interestingly, the victim’s gender in the song is not specified.

If NIN correctly likens the joys, entitled sense of power, and recklessness of using a gun with those of using a dick, then gun fighting between men really amounts to a dick-measuring contest. Being shot in the head, then, is a form of emasculation. Blood splatter invokes a kind of perverse “money shot” that underscores how thoroughly someone has been made the object of another person’s violence. Shooting someone in the head would seem to guarantee “making him his bitch” — it is, in essence, the use of a specifically masculine tool to make the other person wholly submissive.